The Big bang !!

weloveliam@space

Active Member
Taken from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7604293.stm

What do peeps think of this ?? 5 Billion seem like alot (esp if it goes wrong) !!

Three decades after it was conceived, the world's most powerful physics experiment has sent the first beam around its 27km-long tunnel.
Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash particles together with cataclysmic force.
This will re-create conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.
But it has not been plain sailing; the project has been hit by cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems. The switch-on itself is two years late.
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The collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern.
The vast circular tunnel - the "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end.
The magnets are there to steer the beam - made up of particles called protons - around this 27km-long ring.
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Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.
At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events. Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.

:eek: A bit beyond me tbh :eek:
 
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you people may scoff

but today at 08:30 was merely the intial testing period
firing the protons in one direction around the ring

its estimated that Oct 21st is the date for the actual full collision to take place

then it may be doom time

the black hole theory is just one possibility
 
Cern have been creating black holes for a while, albeit minuscule ones. We live very close by and are still here - in fact, closest I have come to a black hole was after a DC10 / Cocoon / Cocoon after party session...!

5 billion does seem like an awful lot of cash considering the other things going on in the world today, but various of my eminently more intelligent friends have said it may provide answers to all kinds of issues including medical problems, such as cancer, etc, so who am I to judge...
 
its estimated that Oct 21st is the date for the actual full collision to take place

then it may be doom time

Phew, as long as its after my Ibiza closings trip :lol:

in fact, closest I have come to a black hole was after a DC10 / Cocoon / Cocoon after party session...!

:lol: see comment above :lol:

Seriously though 5 billion pounds. If it doesnt work then that could have gone along way in assisting other problems. And who's paying for it ??
 
Britain apparently contributed 3/4 of a billion...I appreciate it will have some long term benefits for science and apparently will lead to new discoveries that will probably come about in the next 20-30 yrs so that's good but it seems an awful lot of money. Yes I heard that today they were just switching the thing on but the actual collision isn't for a few weeks..I'll have been on my hol to Lanzarote by then, but if I knew the end really was nigh I'd get myself out to the closing parties!
 
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