MSD

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Protons, Sets Record
I mentioned at the end of my post about the importance of science that as much as we're able to see and as vast as it is, we only know what about 4% of it is.

Of the 4 fundamental forces, three have been worked out and connected under a single unified theory, and each is said to be mediated by a gauge boson, a particle that is fundamentally connected with the force, but the hypothetical particle that mediates gravity has been elusive. The theoretical Higgs Boson, which bears the unfortunate nickname of the God Particle, [correction]is thought to be the source of the mass of particles. Unfortunately, it is thought to be neutrally charged and doesn't interact with anything in a way that allows it to be directly observed. This is why we can't see most of the mass in the universe, and the only way to prove the existence of a Higgs Boson is to collide particles in a way that is thought to produce it, and observe the decay products of that collision. The reason for needing high energy is complex, but in simple terms, the higher the energy of the collision the more confident we can be that an observed event was the decay of a Higgs Boson and not something else. Once enough of these events are observed that it is almost impossible that the results came about due to chance, we can say we found it.

The top minds in many fields have come together and built the most complex machine ever to, among other things, find that missing 96% and give us an insight into what the universe is made of. As there is only one and there will only ever be one, it is its own prototype and has not been without some setbacks. The Large Hadron Collider is such a precise, sensitive piece of equipment that it has to be constantly calibrated to account for radio and gravitational interference from many sources. These include an expansion and contraction of the diameter of the 27km ring by roughly 1 millimeter just due to global tides. After this was accounted for, they discovered that the level of nearby Lake Geneva was interfering and calibrated for that.

Of course, such a project has it detractors. I referred to the nickname of "God Particle" as unfortunate because it implies that science is treading on the ground of religion, which is far from the case, but fundamentalists oppose research because of this misunderstanding. A quote by a scientist at CERN was taken out of context and we got a lot of hype about the possibility that the LHC could create a devastating black hole; the truth is that cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere so frequently at higher energies than are produced in the LHC that if a stable black hole could be produced at this energy, we wouldn't be around to build something so awesome. There was also an article earlier this year that took the unproven concept of retrocausality to an absurd extent and proposed that the Higgs Boson is so fundamentally unnatural that the LHC was sabotaging itself from the future. Opponents of the LHC are unfortunately misinformed or ignorant, often through no fault of their own since these are very abstract concepts that don't translate easily into layman's terms.

After years of tuning, a supermagnet quench that set it back months due to a flaw in wiring, and a brief loss of power when a seagull dropped a baguette on the power lines (such is the way of ultra precise instruments,) it all came together. This morning, a second calibration beam had to be injected after someone forgot to turn the detectors on for the first one, but everything turned out exactly as expected. At 1:06PM local time, two beams with a total energy of 7TeV were collided and produced usable data. Although the LHC has been setting records multiple times a day for the past few weeks, 7TeV (tera-electron-volts) is the highest energy produced by a particle accelerator and is the full operational voltage for the first two years of operation. In comparison, neutrons produced by fission in an atomic bomb peak at roughly 2MeV, 3,500,000 times less energy than was produced in this collision. This is important for reasons mentioned above and means that it's all revved up and ready to produce data.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Science has been turned up to 11. We're going to learn a lot from this. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them. If I can't, I'll pass them on to someone I know who's working at the LHCb detector and see what he says.

BadNick

Besides detractors who got tired of the Y2K panic and are looking for the next fantasy panic attack, I think a lot of people admire the science in something like this but might question the priorities as far as spending money/resources for this vs spending more for fighting hunger, disease, poverty, etc.

I hope the LHC will have enough practical spin-offs to justify all the effort. I like leading edge science so the LHC gives me a Large Hardon...relatively speaking.

Jove

I have been following the LHC progress for the last year and thank you for the details provided in this thread.

GreyWolf

I can't wait until they can miniaturize it to the point I can carry one in my pocket and zap everyone with my Flash Gordon ray-gun.

Until then, I'll have to be content with learning that dull old stuff that tells us how the universe is put together, came together, and which way it's going to Hell.

__________________
The secret to great marksmanship is deciding what the target was AFTER you've shot.

Martian

Note: This is not the LHC's full power. The LHC is capable of an energy of 7 TeV per particle, giving a full collision energy of 14 TeV. It's scheduled to reach that level some time in 2012, from what I last read.

And I enjoyed the retrocausality article. Thought it was hilarious.

That was a joke, right?

__________________
I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame

Baraka_Guru

I have a question!

What does this all mean?

I mean, is this a secrets of the universe sort of thing with a wide variety of applications?

Will we see new cancer treatments, more efficient energy production, and 2.5 terahertz microprocessors in our cell phones?

Will I get to see Mars?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Boggy

Did anyone else watch the live webcast last night?

I watched it for like 3 hours, and they kept having problems. Then I stood up to go get some cereal and they freakin succeeded in the collision!! I wasn't impressed.

I found it pretty funny how the place was full of brilliant physicists yet none of them could work simple recording equipment (earbud and mic) to save their lives. The host lady was pretty annoying too, she seemed like she knew nothing.

Martian

An excellent question.

The LHC is going to allow us to experiment with energies that were previously unheard of; in doing so, it's going to allow us to fill in a number of gaps in our knowledge of the physical Universe and how (and why) it works. It's way too early to predict what sort of practical applications will result from this, but it has the potential to change the face of human technology.

Understanding of our Universe eventually begets applications based on the principles learned. This is the basis for all modern technology

To answer your other questions: no, maybe, yes but not in the near future and only if you eat all your vegetables.

EDIT - Further Reading:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/arti...dron_collider/

__________________
I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame

MSD

I got the fundamental forces part wrong in the OP and rewrote it.
This isn't about making money, nobody is going to commercialize the Higgs Boson or weaponize quantum electrodynamics, it's all about knowledge and understanding, humankind at its most pure of intentions.

The Grid, the processing supercomputer farms, and the detectors will contribute to advancement of technology in the way that the Hubble Telescope was the point at which CCD sensors could be made profitably en masse for nonmilitary use, but nobody expects to see a return on investment. We might see something come out of it, but don't hold your breath.
It's at max power for the first year and a half, after which it will be shut down and upgraded to the new full power. This is the part where it's its own prototype, we need to do stuff first before we go all the way. It's at full power until they upgrade.
Look at my old post linked in the OP for the significance of this. We don't know what 96% of the universe is, we've unified three of the four fundamental forces and the best we've done so far is doing math while being all "What the fuck is the difference between W and Z bosons, which mediate the electroweak force, and the masless photon?" We have a pretty good idea of this mass-giving gauge boson and how it will behave, but it's come full circle to where we were as early cavemen, and our best method of observing the world is by swinging things around, smashing them into each other, and seeing what happens.

Basically, we don't know what causes mass to exist. We won't see a cure for cancer, and we will not produce any cancer because there are safety measure in place to prevent radiation from hurting people or someone being dumb like Anatoli Bugorski and sticking his head in the particle beam. Although if you managed to sneak in and get in the way of the beam, it's high enough energy that it would literally blow a smoking hole through you. They have a huge slab of carbon 8 or 12 feet deep to absorbed dumped beams.