Sunday, August 24, 2008

Nerds Gone Wild

Hat tip Simply Jews

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator.[1] It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight-thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.
The synchronization of the LHC's clockwise beam transfer system and the rest of CERN's accelerator chain was successfully achieved last weekend. Tests began on Friday 8 August when a single bunch of a few particles was taken down the transfer line from the SPS accelerator to the LHC.
The men and women at CERN have much to sing about.





I just hope that they are better at physics than at rap.

2 comments:

Roy Lofquist said...

Dear FINDALIS,

The CERN machine is very interesting but more importantly it may result in a stupendous change in the internet.

Each event (collision) yields terabytes of data. There's not enough electricity in the region to power the computers to analyze the data. To solve this problem they designed and built a new network, based on optical fibers, to transmit it to England and France for processing. The network is so fast that you can download a full length HD movie in less than two seconds.

Regards,
Roy

MathewK said...

lol
That's funny.