Not impossible. I used to bulls-eye whomp rats in my T-16 back home.

While it’s not about to be mistaken for a moon any time soon, the Large Hadron Collider probably is the closest thing we’ve got to the Death Star. With miles of passages, the capability to destroy a planet, and a bunch of people dressed in white scooting around inside, it’s actually a pretty good fit. So it’s no surprise that it has the same weakness. Concerned only with interference from cosmic radiation and nearby townspeople, the structure was built underground — but they didn’t count on the possibility of a small one-man fighter armed with the Force a clumsy bird with a bit of baguette making the trench run and hitting it where the least expected it.

The absurdity of this failure (though it apparently won’t affect the re-activation) makes me think that maybe the LHC really is so abhorrent to nature that the universe is contriving to snuff it out.

[via PopSci]

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Tom Hanks to turn on Large Hadron Collider – yes, that Tom Hanks

I can’t think of a reason to do this. It’s symbolic. The thinkers of the world have been overshadowed by the glitterati for as long as we can remember, and now when they have something big, something with the budget of twenty Hollywood movies, they do this. They don’t need the press, they don’t need the celebrity. They should have said “Sorry Mr. Hanks, but this isn’t like the movies. This is a serious scientific endeavor, and we can’t have any non-essential personnel in the control room. I’m sure you understand.”

We at CG haven’t really followed the “big” science, focusing instead on stuff you and I can buy right now in stores or overseas. But it is fun to take a look at the man behind the curtain, as it were, and posit future uses of this powerful technology.

What technology – or technology development – rocked your world this year? I’m thinking about the destruction of the large hadron collider (I so much wanted to type “hard-on”) which points out that even in huge devices blowing crazy quarks around a loop and explode in a shower of sparks.

CLIC
ML Smith

Perhaps I have become obsessed with the subject, but ever since I learned of the Hadron Particle Accelerator, a 16.8 mile underground proton racetrack that will collide these particles at near light speed, I have worried. The scientists say the experiment may reveal a miniature replica of the universe as it appeared a trillionth of a second after the “Big Bang.” I am all for it, but what, I ask you, happens if there is a mistake?

I began to do some research on the Web. I found this.

Read more…

Sigh… Above, please reference what girls between the ages of 10 and 30 think is cool. Also, as it happens, the same reason MTV will be blocked from every TV in the Aamoth household if I ever have a daughter.

Transcription to follow for those of you who can’t access YouTube at work…

Girl A: Do you know the world’s supposed to end? They just started this, like, in Geneva, this particle accelerator that’s, like, buried 300 feet under ground and then they start smashing particles into each other.

Girl B: What?!

Girl A: Trying to create black holes.

Girl B: Why are they doing that?

Girl A: ‘Cause they wanna figure out how we’re here. They wanna prove the Big Bang and that matter can come out of nothing.

Girl B: (Looks like she’s about to cry) Isn’t this crazy how all this is happening while Lauren’s gone?

[Infopirate.org via Digg]

When it comes to running a gigantic machine capable of ripping a hole in the space-time continuum that could suck the entire earth (and more) into oblivion, it’s probably safe to assume that you can never be too careful. This week was supposed to be the week that the Large Hadron Collider sent two proton beams careening at almost the speed of light in opposite directions on a literal crash course of scientific achievement.

However it seems that on Wednesday of this week, testing was “interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system, which chills the LHC’s superconducting magnets to 1.9C above absolute zero,” according to the Times. Everything’s now working again and the first protons should collide next week at 6% of the machine’s maximum power, followed by a 70% collision next month.

Obviously the world didn’t end on Wednesday when the Large Hadron Collider fired its first particle beam. The geeks at the LHC aren’t going to make anything that will kill us. They even have a couple of webcams so wannabe’s like you and I can see what’s going on. So far, there are only two of ‘em but I’m sure more will come later on. Just screenshots above, the live ones are here. Enjoy!

According to InternetNews.com, the Large Hadron Collider project that we’ve been hearing so much about runs a customized version of Linux called CernVM. Apparently it ran Vista at first, but the Aero interface kept slowing down the proton acceleration. Try as they might, scientists just couldn’t get the Windows Experience Index above a 4.2.

I kid, I kid. There was also an interesting comment left on the original article that appeared to be sent from a CERN IP address:

“While VMware is in use, the primary configuration for machines in the LHC computing grid is based on Scientific Linux distribution running directly on the hardware. This grid is used to receive and distribute the 15PB of data across the 100,000s of CPUs across the world.”

Cool. Nice work, Tux.

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Large Hadron Collider Picture Set
If you’re reading this, the world didn’t end last night

The eight billion dollar LHC didn’t destroy the world last night – that’s good – so here is a great photo set that shows off the fantastic 17-mile long collider.

Well it looks like a world-ending black hole wasn’t formed at the site of the Large Hadron Collider and that we will, in fact, be putting in a full day of work today, tomorrow, and almost every remaining day of our lives. Hooray for science!

In the middle of the night (for those of us in the US) last night, scientists at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland started a convoy of protons around an almost 17 mile-long tunnel at just shy of the speed of light. One of the obstacles that needed to be overcome was how to steer the particles around corners, which was accomplished by using magnets spaced out along the track. According to New Scientist:

“The machine worked better than anyone expected. It took only 55 minutes for physicists to steer beams around the full 27km, and the LHC worked on its first go, far better than anyone dared to hope.”

The big experiment will come later this year, when the scientists start two proton beams in opposite directions and watch what happens when those two beams collide.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will be activated this Wednesday. The LHC is a 17-mile long underground tunnel near Geneva that houses the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Scientists use all this doohickery to smash protons together in order to recreate what they think happened during the initial stages of the Big Bang, specifically “the singularity” — the moment just before the Big Band occurred.

While many in the worldwide scientific community seem to be on board with the experiments, “a small group of maverick scientists” are attempting to prevent the LHC from being fired up this Wednesday, fearing that the experiment “could create a devastating black hole” if things don’t go as planned according to the Daily Mail. Thanks to the massive amount of energy created by the LHC’s atom-smashing, if not controlled properly, things could apparently get ugly.

I’m not here to say whether or not the particle acceleration train is going to run off the track and rip a hole in time and space, killing us all. For one thing, who knows if we’d actually die if sucked into a black hole that emanated from just underneath the border between France and Switzerland. Maybe we’d just get sucked gingerly into another dimension where everything is exactly the same except that pants zip from the back.

Whatever the case, maybe take a half day today to get your affairs in order. Then, if nothing happens on Wednesday, it’s not like you just blew off work altogether. Besides, you want to save up your vacation days for the real end of the world, which we all know is coming on December 21, 2012.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider experiment will be shown live this Wednesday on http://webcast.cern.ch/ at the following times:

7:00 AM UTC
3:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
2:00 AM Central Daylight Time
1:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time
12:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time