09-09-2008, 06:45 PM
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#1 (permalink) |
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The Big bang
Any thoughts on this? Is it right or wrong?
stories Big bang machine Last updated: 9 Sep 2008  This is Alice, just one of several gigantic experiments arrayed along the 27km track of the Large Hadron Collider A gigantic atom smasher built deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border will be switched on at 8.30am tomorrow. What's the big deal? Useful Links... It's taken 10 years to build, cost almost £3 billion and involved thousands of scientists from all over the world. Now the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is about to be turned on. But what will happen next? Email us what you think using the form below. Well we've compiled an idiot's guide to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), so you won't be stumped if you're asked for a quick explanation. What is it, in a nutshell? It's a 27km circular tube that whizzes atomic particles around in opposite directions until they almost reach the speed of light. Then they bang them together and take lots of pictures. Boffins from all around the world then look at the pictures, scratch their heads and see if anything interesting happened. What are they looking for? A lot of things, but The Higgs Boson is top of their hit list. A brainy Brit, Professor Higgs, has long predicted the existence of a missing component in what physicists call the Standard Model. Let's not get too bogged down in the details, but basically if this sub-atomic thing is found it will help solve the Theory of Everything. So it's quite a big deal. (By the way, that doesn't mean everything as in, why do buses always come in threes? Or why do grown men need to use those tiny wheeled suitcase thingies? No, the Theory of Everything is a physicist's way of saying that out there somewhere is an elegant formula for how all existing matter works). Everyone's talking about a big bang. Isn't that dangerous? No. The use of the term big bang is misleading and shouldn't be used to describe what's happening in the LHC. The scientists are trying to recreate conditions that happened immediately after the big bang, and on a micro scale. So is the end nigh? Almost definitely not. Scientists being scientists they never rule anything out. So when asked whether there is any chance of the LHC spewing out a black hole which will immediately chomp its way through our solar system, then they are obliged to say yes, even if the probability is a teeny weeny one. You may as well ask them whether there's a probability of the LHC producing an army of Welsh close-harmony singers - they would have to agree that that, too, is a distinct, if tiny, possibility. What's this about mini black holes then? Having said that, the scientists are admitting that micro black holes may be created by their atom-smashing antics. Thankfully another brainy Brit, Professor Stephen Hawking, has already predicted "black hole radiation". This posits that any black hole formation will immediately fizzle out in a nanosecond. If this theory is proved (let's hope it is) then the Prof will bag the biggest prize of all: a Nobel. Why have they built it underground? Are those crazy scientists hiding something? No, it's cheaper to tunnel than to buy land. How fast can it go at top speed? A particle accelerated to near-light speed will travel 11,000 circuits of the LHC every second. Tell me something else amazing All this time and effort building the biggest and fastest machine on the planet would be mean nothing if there was no way of storing and analysing all the data being churned out of the LHC every second. So those brainiacs have come up with another amazing invention: the Grid. The Grid is the world's largest supercomputer and works by harnessing the power of a huge network of isolated computers, called a distributed computing network. This means that scientists from all over the world can tap into the LHC and see what's going on.
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09-09-2008, 06:52 PM
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#2 (permalink) |
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The experiment starts in 9 hours from NOW. Apparently when the atoms smash together at the speed of light in the Hedron Collider black holes will be created and the planet Earth and possibly our whole universe may be sucked into the black hole and thatthatthatthat that's all folks. cya in Heaven or Hell where we'll start another board. |
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09-09-2008, 07:11 PM
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#4 (permalink) | |
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Quote:
I know what direction I'm going, see you there...
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09-09-2008, 07:12 PM
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#5 (permalink) | |
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Quote:
I've spent the evening making copies of programs for someone, wasted my time by the looks of it...
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09-09-2008, 07:35 PM
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Quote:
The world is gonna end...and you get arsey with me NOW!!! |
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09-09-2008, 07:46 PM
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Quote:
Was it something I said?
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