The Genesis 2.0 Project: L.H.C.

December 29, 2009 3:28 PM

The Genesis 2.0 Project The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.
posted by srboisvert (52 comments total)

in the time it took the writer to write this article, 4 more things have gone wrong with the collider, delaying its actual use for another 100 years.
posted by shmegegge at 3:31 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

...thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

Aside from Dick Cheney's heart, you mean.
posted by Ratio at 3:32 PM on December 29, 2009 [29 favorites]

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

Somebody had to do it.
posted by DecemberBoy at 3:42 PM on December 29, 2009 [10 favorites]

The scope and scale of the LHC impressed me from day one. I was amazed they even managed to build the thing. That it has so many problems doesn't surprise me - the larger the project, the more things to go wrong. And with so many new or at least up-scaled technologies in play, there will be bugs. Oh yes. There will be bugs.
posted by strixus at 3:42 PM on December 29, 2009

Meh Massive bosons blew my unit
posted by Damienmce at 3:44 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

The Genesis 2.0 Project

I don't know if they watch too much or too little science fiction.
posted by The Whelk at 3:46 PM on December 29, 2009 [3 favorites]

a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s
something seems wrong here but I don't have time now to check, darnit. (hivemind, activate!)
posted by uni verse at 3:53 PM on December 29, 2009

"...making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe."

Are you sure about that?
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 3:54 PM on December 29, 2009

OK, the max strength of the most powerful of the superconducting magnets in the LHC is 8.3 teslas. The normal operating strength of these magnets is 0.54 teslas.

The strength of Earth's magnetic field ranges from 30 microteslas to 60 microteslas depending on the geographic location.

A microtesla is x10^-6 telsas.
posted by strixus at 4:00 PM on December 29, 2009

They're gonna crack the earth in two.
posted by marxchivist at 4:03 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

Who needs the LHC when you can get a Higgs cheap on eBay.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:04 PM on December 29, 2009 [5 favorites]

Who needs the LHC when you can get a Higgs cheap on eBay.

Call that cheap? Order now and I'll throw in another one - free!
shipping to AK and HI is extra
posted by anigbrowl at 4:12 PM on December 29, 2009

They're gonna crack the earth in two.

Then we all need hugs, boatswain.
posted by pracowity at 4:14 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

Chris Morris, infamous British satirist and lapsed scientist visits CERN in 2008.
posted by artaxerxes at 4:14 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

Anyone know what language strixus is speaking?
posted by cjorgensen at 4:34 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

They're gonna crack the earth in two.

IN THE YEAR 2012
posted by nola at 4:35 PM on December 29, 2009 [3 favorites]

And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

I'm not so sure about it being the coldest place in the universe. Being 1 kelvin puts it in the same ballpark as the Boomerang nebula, but we've achieved much lower temperatures in physics labs devoted to studying ultra-low temperatures. For example, the first Bose-Einstein condensate proven in a laboratory was achieved at 170 nanokelvins, and I'm pretty sure we've achieved colder.

Basically, I'd guess that the supercooled parts of the LHC are probably colder than any natural place known, but the coldest place in the universe known is probably in a different physics lab somewhere on Earth.
posted by Mitrovarr at 4:38 PM on December 29, 2009 [4 favorites]

This reminds me of the recent post about physicists who believe the LHC is jinxed by Higgs returning from the future, possibly to prevent the earth from being split in two?
posted by bfoster at 4:38 PM on December 29, 2009

god, you guys, come on...

you people won't let them have anything.

can't be coldest.
can't be earth cracking-est.
not higgs boson possession-est.

what's next?
"oh, that LHC over there? not so big..."
posted by artof.mulata at 4:42 PM on December 29, 2009 [3 favorites]

The scope and scale of the LHC impressed me from day one.

Outside of "the internet" or maybe "Google" it's the most complex object on the planet. Above and beyond size - when I see pictures of that thing I start thinking about how many thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles of wires, pipes, tubes, cables, and so many massively complicated arrays of faceted detectors at just this angle of just this specific metal and treatment - a sort of "How long is the LHC coastline?"...

...and my brain just shuts down and gets overwhelmed. It's like looking at the fantasy big science experiments in the movies like Akira Appleseed, or Ghost in the Shell. But it's bigger, more complicated and with way more wires than any obsessed manga artist can put down with a Rapidograph or Koh-I-Noor, and real.

The only thing it's missing is headcrabs. Thankfully someone already sent them a crowbar.
posted by loquacious at 5:04 PM on December 29, 2009 [4 favorites]

crowbar? what?

when did birds start dropping crowbars?
posted by artof.mulata at 5:16 PM on December 29, 2009

The coldest place in the universe probably is in a physics lab somewhere, just not here.
posted by lucidium at 5:22 PM on December 29, 2009

crowbar? what?

Background.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:35 PM on December 29, 2009

I totally identify with the writer, re: particle physics. I've been reading a LOT about it recently, and I'm still utterly and completely baffled by the concepts.

I get the dual slit experiment, i get relativity (basically), but once you start getting to gluons, gravitons, higgs bosons, and quarks, I'm completely at sea. I just can't wrap my head around it.

It seems to me that something is very wrong with the usual way that the Standard Model is explained to lay-people, because when I start to do digging beyond the basic 'protons are made of quarks', etc, the explanations start getting slipperier and slipperier and make less and less sense.

I'm at the point now where I'm starting to gather that none of the particles seem to actually exist, and that everything is just waves in various fields that are all superimposed on each other, and that what appear to be particles are only the intersections of various fields.

But I could be completely wrong.
posted by empath at 5:43 PM on December 29, 2009 [2 favorites]

The detector for the C.M.S. experiment weighs 28 million pounds, the heaviest instrument ever constructed,...

This, and the references to "three inch tubes", made me laugh. I can't quite explain it, but writing about the LHC with old fashioned measurements sounds as ridiculous as "my car gets 40 rods to the hogshead". I guess when the Higgs boson is proven, will he describe its size in fractions of a thou or its mass in BTU/c2?
posted by Sova at 5:47 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

thank you stavros...

so let me get this straight.
we attack them with birds.
we abuse them about their lack of profundity.
we make them wear stupid hats and treat life like it's a video game.

is there any reason to expect that the youth of today will find a boson particle?
any reason at all?
posted by artof.mulata at 6:08 PM on December 29, 2009

I totally identify with the writer, re: particle physics. I've been reading a LOT about it recently, and I'm still utterly and completely baffled by the concepts.

I get the dual slit experiment, i get relativity (basically), but once you start getting to gluons, gravitons, higgs bosons, and quarks, I'm completely at sea. I just can't wrap my head around it.

It seems to me that something is very wrong with the usual way that the Standard Model is explained to lay-people, because when I start to do digging beyond the basic 'protons are made of quarks', etc, the explanations start getting slipperier and slipperier and make less and less sense.

I'm at the point now where I'm starting to gather that none of the particles seem to actually exist, and that everything is just waves in various fields that are all superimposed on each other, and that what appear to be particles are only the intersections of various fields.

But I could be completely wrong.


Hang loose empath. I'm sure the main stream media will only need a ten second sound byte to explain it to us.
posted by notreally at 6:46 PM on December 29, 2009

OK, the max strength of the most powerful of the superconducting magnets in the LHC is 8.3 teslas.

Which, IIRC, is less than the Tevatron's magnets. The advantage the LHC has is that the diameter is so much larger, so the magnets don't need to be as strong to focus a beam of the same energy -- indeed, the low level ramp energy is 480MeV, which is over half the acceleration that the TeV achieves at full ramp (980MeV).

Of course, there are real questions about the LHC ever making the design energy -- the beam energy is staggering, IIRC, 480MJ, and it's proving to be quite intractable. Run I will start, they hope, at 3GeV, and slowly increase to 5GeV. The LHC, in its current form, will almost certainly not see 7GeV without major modifications.

Still, 3GeV gets you much higher energies than 1GeV, and by trying, we'll learn how to do it. It took 20 years for the TeV to reach the luminosity it hits now. The LHC is just starting that curve.

Still, I wish CERN would suck it up and make antiprotons.
posted by eriko at 7:01 PM on December 29, 2009

Not only that, but for another couple of billion dollars they can hire more scientists to set the record for the world's largest circle jerk.
posted by digsrus at 7:14 PM on December 29, 2009

*sigh* I still weep sometimes when I think of what could have been.
posted by kmz at 8:02 PM on December 29, 2009

Wow. Looking at these pictures gives me a large hadron.
posted by Ratio at 8:28 PM on December 29, 2009

OK, first of all, we can actually make anti-matter? Anti-matter exists? WTF?? Are there photon torpedos out there somewhere too? I am so behind the times.

Next, I know it's anti-sciencey or whatever, but that Big Hardon Collider actually scares the crap out of me. I know it's not supposed to crack the earth in half or whatever, but what if?!

Lastly, the coolest part of that article was the bit about their system of governance. Very sane.
posted by serazin at 8:53 PM on December 29, 2009

That explains it, Ratio. And here I thought it was my bozons you were staring at...
posted by tigrrrlily at 10:06 PM on December 29, 2009

empath, this TED video is memorable as being a gentle sort of primer on particle physics. You might dig it.
posted by mhjb at 10:16 PM on December 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

OK, first of all, we can actually make anti-matter? Anti-matter exists?

Oh hell yeah. In a lot of hospitals we can make it infact. Ever heard of a PET scans? Positron Emission Tomography. Positrons are the anti-particles of Electrons.
posted by Jimbob at 10:24 PM on December 29, 2009

Really?! Crap, I've got some reading to do.
posted by serazin at 10:38 PM on December 29, 2009

Next, I know it's anti-sciencey or whatever, but that Big Hardon Collider actually scares the crap out of me. I know it's not supposed to crack the earth in half or whatever, but what if?!

When I was very young, I saw a PBS show about the atom bomb. At one point, they described the explosion as the result of splitting the atom. I got the part about the huge, destructive blast. And I got the part about splitting the atom. For a while, I wondered why cutting a piece of paper with scissors didn't kill us all.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:43 PM on December 29, 2009

huh huh huh large hardon collider...
posted by fuq at 11:00 PM on December 29, 2009

But I could be completely wrong.

Then you pretty much do understand it.
posted by Sparx at 11:39 PM on December 29, 2009

mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey: Are you sure about that?

From that link: Temperatures there were measured at minus 238 Celsius below zero. That’s just 2 Celsius higher than the lowest temperature possible.

-238 °C below 0 °C = 511.15 K
-238 °C below 0 K = 238 K
+238 °C below 0 °C = 35.15 K
+238 °C below 0 K = not possible

I don't know what they're trying to say here. But whatever it is, they're wrong.
posted by ryanrs at 2:20 AM on December 30, 2009

My favorite quote from the article:
I was reduced to monosyllabic Keanu Reevesian awe, repeatedly saying “Whoa”...

Made me giggle.
posted by rbellon at 3:42 AM on December 30, 2009

I think we're all bosons on this bus.

(My mother was a bosonette in high school...)
posted by hippybear at 7:13 AM on December 30, 2009

A magnetic field of 8.4 T over a large volume is impressive, but it's nowhere near the best we humans can do. I mean, GE Healthcare makes an MRI magnet with a field of 9.4 T that you could fit inside. If you've got EUR 12 million lying around, Bruker BioSpin will sell you a 23.5 T magnet for the corner of your den (photo). And the folks at Los Alamos can provide you with 1000 T, if you don't mind that the magnet explodes when you turn it on.
posted by drdanger at 7:23 AM on December 30, 2009

I'm at the point now where I'm starting to gather that none of the particles seem to actually exist, and that everything is just waves in various fields that are all superimposed on each other, and that what appear to be particles are only the intersections of various fields.

Yeah, I feel the same way. Its like the particles waaay down there aren't proper 'things' at all, just relationships between nested relationships.

-
posted by General Tonic at 8:32 AM on December 30, 2009

I don't understand how there can be other dimensions, outside of some vague cartoonish notion of a wizard waving a sceptre and causing a glowing blue rift to open up out of thin air.
posted by codacorolla at 8:35 AM on December 30, 2009

The 1.0 version was never the same without Peter Gabriel.
posted by Babblesort at 8:41 AM on December 30, 2009

I don't understand how there can be other dimensions, outside of some vague cartoonish notion of a wizard waving a sceptre and causing a glowing blue rift to open up out of thin air.

Don't think of other dimensions as other 'universes' or 'worlds' or even places. The three dimensions you're already familiar with are exactly the kind of dimensions physicists talk about: length, width, depth. Time can also be treated--mathmatically--as another dimension.

Read the old, good, Flatland for an illustration of this kind of thing. Basically, if our unverse had only 2 dimensions of space, so that everything in it was a flat shape (circles and squares, rather than spheres and cubes), we would have an extremely difficult time believing in this so-called third dimension that all the theoretical physicists are calling 'depth.' However, a 2 dimensional universe could be curved in a third dimension so that it resembles the surface of a sphere. It would seem perfectly 'flat' from inside, but would have no edges and no center.

-
posted by General Tonic at 9:17 AM on December 30, 2009

Read the old, good, Flatland for an illustration of this kind of thing. Basically, if our unverse had only 2 dimensions of space, so that everything in it was a flat shape (circles and squares, rather than spheres and cubes), we would have an extremely difficult time believing in this so-called third dimension that all the theoretical physicists are calling 'depth.' However, a 2 dimensional universe could be curved in a third dimension so that it resembles the surface of a sphere. It would seem perfectly 'flat' from inside, but would have no edges and no center.

I was mostly joking about the portal, but still...

Is there a guess at what these dimensions could be? A layman's explanation for that guess? Is it just part of the concept that they're fundamentally not understandable?
posted by codacorolla at 9:26 AM on December 30, 2009

Is there a guess at what these dimensions could be? A layman's explanation for that guess? Is it just part of the concept that they're fundamentally not understandable?

I'd recommend Michio Kaku's Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension for what seems to this layperson to be a decent attempt to explain why 10 dimensions seems likely and what those other dimensions might be like. On any other day, I'd actually have the book to hand and could type in a few useful snippets, but I don't want to guess at my memory of it just now.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 10:46 AM on December 30, 2009

Is there a guess at what these dimensions could be? A layman's explanation for that guess? Is it just part of the concept that they're fundamentally not understandable?

Whatever they are like, they are likely to be very tightly wound up so that they don't really take up any space, which is why we can't experience them.
posted by empath at 12:06 PM on December 30, 2009

srboisvert

Ignor the small minded.
I know exactly where you are coming from.

Not only do we see matter for what it is . to deconstruct is to own and thus we do...
we get side benefits like confirming special
relativity.
And a machine more complex than a nimitz carrier is built for all mankind.
[Next.. is an O'Neill orbital construct]

Keep up the good work
posted by Joachim at 4:27 AM on December 31, 2009

To all that wish to argue
I fear nothing..
My days are numbered
posted by Joachim at 4:29 AM on December 31, 2009