Large Hadron Collider

I wrote the one post containing geeky humor on the LHC, but really the whole thing deserves a real post. This is a big @#$-ing deal. Here is a good and amusing article about it. It has some great quotes, which I will steal, starting from the very first sentence:

It is the biggest machine ever built.

That isn’t hyperbole. This project is grander than anything ever done. This is a 17 mile tunnel super-cooled to temperatures below deep space to send particles flying at almost the speed of light. It would be science fiction stuff if it weren’t actually happening.

Wednesday, they fired this sucker up

The article talks about how they hope to find particles that have never been detected before.

Oh, and they might find some extra dimensions. But this is the delicious part. They. Don’t. Exactly. Know.

The article gets into some of the details. Including some facts about the magnets surrounding the tunnel.

The magnets are superconducting because they are supercooled by superfluid helium, which is superstrange.

There is a great line about what happens if you ask one of the engineers a question:

They may go to a blackboard and begin with the math. You do not want them to do this.

This thing is sending trillions of protons screaming around the underground track at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. They get around the 17 mile track 11,245 times a second. At that speed you get to Neptune and back in 10 hours.

This is all mind-boggling stuff. And very, very cool.