Hey, we are alive! In the end we didn’t need any escape pods: The Large Hadron Collider has smashed two particle beams together for the first time. However, the unknown is still ahead of us, as they ramp things up:
Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.
Very interesting indeedy!
Well that’s definitely not a bad thing!
awww no end of the world disaster i feel let down by that
and if it did, it wouldn’t really matter!
I am glad that I am alive. I am also glad that this collider cost so much money in the same way that I am glad that I went to Waterstones Book Store today to buy a book by Gramsci only to find Katie Price’s literary offerings offending my eyes.
To any scientific experiment like this that has no bearing, point or reason I say this : “Boooooooo.”
There are flooding problems all around the bloody country. The banks and the government are ripping us off left, right and centre,Jedward are now about to earn millions for being as talented as corduroy and umpteen people with too much time on their hands are given billions to build a massive tunnel to smash things into each other (things that are invisible to the naked eye). Give me the billions and I will build a spaceship out of Haddows, threshers and Victoria Wines shop signs and take off.
But how many parallel worlds were destroyed? We could have just lost doughnut rain universe!
Are you mad son! Let down by not being dead. Great blog entry Darren.
very interstinng
Anth,
We all know it’s going to end through Swine Flu evolving into a Zombie Outbreak. Sucked into a mid-European Black Hole doesn’t have the same ’survival of the fittest’ element to it.
That might explain why all the clocks in my house have started running backwards.
Like your comment “Alan” – “We could have just lost doughnut rain universe!”
.ɥbnoɥʇ ‘ɯɐ ı ǝɹǝɥʍ pǝpuǝ p1ɹoʍ ǝɥʇ
In response to John McDade’s post…….as humorous as you tried to make it…it was also complete tosh.
Your argument being that because the experiment cannot be witnessed by the ‘naked eye’ it shouldn’t be sanctioned is ridiculous.
Diseased cells cannot be seen by the naked eye…maybe we should just abandon our search for cures!?
The very fact that as a species, we have the curiosity and intelligence to firstly ask the questions and to then build machines dedicated to finding the answers to the existence of life should be celebrated and not “Booooooo”ed by the unimaginative.
Scary, but nice.
(strokes cat)
Ah, I hef been expectink you.
Zo, you haf all been fooled by my eleborate cover. My svisss unterground lair in ze mountains is perfekt for my plens for vorld domination.
Start ze countdown seqvence and open ze krreter!
if the world did end, i wouldnt have known =]
Stuart Jones – agree with you. If we’re not curious about the universe and trying to find out as much about it as possible then what’s the point of being here. We may as well just sit around and graze like animals.
John McDade – you are an idiot.
Hooray for the unbounded quest for understanding. Surely it is what our brains our for. Otherwise we would still be living like monkeys!
I think John McDade needs to be corrected on a couple of ponits. Firstly, although the LHC did cost billions to build, it was an internationally funded project that cost each tax payer in this country the minisule sum of 50p each. Bearing in mind how much each of us pays in taxes each year, 50p is an insignificant sum to pay for gaining a greater understanding of the universe and everything in it.
It’s hardly been a pointless endeavour either and if you’d like to maintain that opinion, I’d advise you to express it on a format other than the internet seeing as the World Wide Web, was created at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Calliau in a protype form know as ENQUIRE. We have already seen some fruits of this fantastic experiment and I for one cannot wait to see how our knowledge will be massively expanded by this highly vital work.
How do we know the universe didn’t end, just very slowly and everything we are experiencing is actually unfolding in a single moment in time like the bit at the end of The Third Policeman? How would we know? Or perhaps time is hurtling ahead so that the heat death of the Universe happens in about three weeks
this is not something we should be messing with, quantum physicis is something we do not understand and messing with sub muleculer structures is never wise on earth. but to do this on another dead planet or in the mids of space is entirly different. my thery is space is streched and not srunk to a finite point in a black hole, if things go wrong then u will notice objects moving towords the hidron colider, one of the most safest places could be in a sub power station.
Thank you to the haters. I was being lighthearted about the whole thing. So here lies the problem with the world. Perhaps the collider will find a solution as to why when someone posts a comment about a blog – a comment which held no serious opinion – and then is slated by over zealous sycophants. Fingers crossed.
Thats amazing! Last night I blacked out at about 8:35 and I saw myself observing the glittering remnants of a gamma ray burst in the constellation of Leo. When I awoke I had a splitting headache and a feeling of nausea…… and I’d spilled what was left of the vodka bottle over my lap.
I like Salt . Does this make me a bad person?
Actually the TEVatron, so called because it collides protons at up to 1 TEV, has been doing this for years. We will have to wait until the LHC really gets going before those nuts will be satisfied. Worth every penny!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Does-mc2-Should-Care/dp/0306817586/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron