An update… Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC. Every time we have a post about the LHC the crazy comes out of the woodwork proclaiming the world is going to end if the machine is operational, it didn’t, so let’s call a bonkers truce, ok? :)
Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the look out for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb.
There’s more here too…
18 thoughts on “Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC”
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No fun! I come for the hadrons, but I stay for the crazies.
The crazy should just give up trying to be scientific, and leave the science to the scientists.
It’s always best to stfu when you don’t know what you’re doing or talking about.
Grangoire, I appreciate your sentiments and I fully understand the frustration both you (and PT) expressed in accommodating crazies, but part of your statement rubbed me the wrong way and I felt the need to respond.
In my opinion, “Leaving the science to the scientists,” is the antithesis of the ideals that Make magazine and the Make Blog espouse. The whole point is to make science and technology accessible to as many people as possible and to encourage people to question how things work and to educate themselves about whatever piques their interest. One should never leave the science to the scientists; rather they should (and should be encouraged to) use the scientific method to prove their assertion. Asking someone to “stfu” because they’re not a scientist is exactly the kind of attitude that turns so many bright people away from science and engineering.
For example, recently a student had an idea for a “perpetual motion machine” (though they didn’t realize that’s what they were proposing) and, instead of simply dismissing the idea and the person, I entertained their idea and offered to help them build a model. The result was that the person learned both why the idea wouldn’t work, but also a whole lot about the physics involved and how to test such an idea *scientifically*. That person might not be a scientist now, but hopefully they keep asking questions (no matter how crazy) and keep looking for, and finding, answers.
Oh, and a big congratulations to all the scientists and engineers who have worked for many long years to get the LHC up and running; may your data be fruitful!
These colliders do not do anything to advance usable science and will eventually be funding depleted. The “God Particle” is easily explained and they first have to understand what a black hole is before they can create one,or understand universe science and what happens when just certain things go bang and they totally mis-construe someones tid bits they gleaned. Wake up boys,Wake up.
So what are your results? Do you have any real data to back up your thoughts or did your backyard collider run out of beer? I’m sure Einstein knew that a future telescope would prove his models also. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
They actually collided something and the world DIDN’T END????
See, everyone (meaning people who weren’t paying attention) thought the LHC would start off at maximum energy output. Of course not; they have to make sure it works before they turn up the power.
I’m waiting with great anticipation for when they do pump it up all the way. We’ll either get great science or great enlightenment, I am sure.
Yes a lot of cuckoo quantum physicist at the LHC.
A DAMOCLES MACHINE THAT IS HALTING THE ADVANCE OF TRUE SCIENCE
CERN misinforms mankind.
The Large Hadron Collider is a quark factory that will deconfine millions of quarks, the strongest, most attractive particles of the Universe. They carry the Atom’s mass, caged inside their nuclei. 99% of LHC’s production will consist on superfluid Quark condensates, a new state of matter, defined by Einstein, in which Quarks fusion together, creating hyper-dense, attractive tornado-like vortices with properties similar to black holes. Astro-physicists fear that if enough quarks are pegged together in one of those condensates, they can trigger a mass-reaction that would attract all the other quarks of the Earth, transforming our planet into a dense pulsar or black hole. Because in Nature all what is possible happens (Totalitarian principle), Quark stars should happen at LHC, making prohibitive for Public Policy the risks for Earth of a quark factory in this planet.
This is a clear case of industrial corruption. But the Company voices out ‘ad hominem’ campaigns against those who denounced the crime, voices out false statements (CERN portrays the quark factory as a cosmic ray factory, when we never found quarks in cosmic rays), and makes marketing campaigns on fringe theories pumped up as the ‘meaning of it all’ (the god’ s particle, which Nambu, last year nobel prize proved to be self-similar to the already discovered top quark, hence non-existent, as the Universe is NOT redundant – and that is why we haven’t found it in 40 years; the big-bang hype, a discredited theory, which today serious ‘avant-garde’ scientists have discharged for the experimentally proved by the Hubble ‘fractal Universe’, of infinite hierarchical scales).
So humanity doesn’t understand this ‘Quark Cannon’ is just a relic of the Cold War industry of Nuclear Devices, ‘reconverted’ to spureous civil use; a weapon that menaces for the first time in history the survival of our species and is halting the true evolution of Cosmology, by limiting resources for telescopes, by lobbying against the spread of the more advanced fractal theory of the Universe and Einstein’s work, which contradicts the outdated musings of Mr. Higgs and Mr. Hawking.
Indeed, Fractal Relativity has proved that Einstein’s relativity not quantum theorists have properly defined Mass as a whirl of space-time, a ‘frequency’ of rotation that attarcts more like a huricane, when it turns faster. Just substitute in E=Mc2 and ExT=K (einstein’s formulae) and you get M=k/T=k v (frequency) – Mass is therefore the frequency of a cyclical vortex, a clock of time that carries the information of the Universe, as Nobel Prize Wilczek has proved ad nauseam. Those are the true models that are advancing cosmology with pen and paper, all of them based in Einstein’s work, which defined mass, according to the Principle of Equivalence as a cyclical, accelerated vortex of spacetime, whose mechanism of attraction is obvious: the faster the vortex rotates the more it attracts. On the other side quantum fantaphysics, proposes the absurd Higgs Mechanism according to which an invisible ‘particle’ is ‘foreseen’ by other particles who ‘come to meet Higgs’ as if ‘it were a celebrity’ (sic), attracting them. This is truly nonsense, and so Nobel prize weinbgerg justly calls Higgs the ‘toilet particle’, to be flushed down into one of Einstein’s spacetime vortex as the Earth might be next year.
Since all this means there is no Higgs and no Hawking’s radiation; and the Universe is eternal, infinite, as the informative implosion of vacuum energy into gallactic mass balances its energetic expansion. People do not understand that CERN’s quantum entropy physicists deny Einstein’s work, despite being the foundation of modern cosmology because in Einstein’s models upgraded today by fractal Relativity the risks of extinction are close to 100%.
As today because of those ‘ad hominem’ campaigns, serious scientists trying to alert mankind can no longer explain those risks in mainstream magazines and the right to Freedom of Speech has been impeded. Still in http://www.lhcdefence.org you can see a documentary with the other side of CERN. Many lives are at risk, real lives of real people, as never before.
Today mankind has no defense because the judiciary, politicians and the press who should check and denounce the excesses of companies and governments are not doing their job of warning the population and so private individuals have to step forward, obviously with far less efficiency as our suits against this company which judges have refused to accept, have shown. Time is running out to take seriously the biggest danger for Global Safety of the year 2010. This machine-weapon MUST be halted till the theoretical dispute between quantum theorists and relativity theorists is solved, as all seems to indicate in favor of Einstein; which will mean the quark factory will have to be closed if we want to survive and advance further our knowledge of the cosmos, on the path the true master of physics, NOT a machine but a HUMAN MIND showed us.
20th of November was indeed a key date in the history of mankind, which for the first time in our short self-destructive existence has managed to built a Damocles sword that menaces its very own survival. Politicians do not want to deal with this nightmare, but the quark cannon will deal with them one way or another.
Particles collided and the world didn’t end? That does resolve it, doesn’t it?
Either the OP or the brain-dead commentators here don’t know a single thing about the LHC, what actually happened, or super conducting colliders or you are deliberately misleading people.
Colliders have been used for decades without incident. It’s not the fact that it’s a collider that has scientists scared, it’s the amount of energy that will be focused in this collider, the speed at which the particles will move, and what the theoretical results could be.
We don’t know what creating a black hole will do. Will it stay infinitely small, or will it grow exponentially? There are models for both. When the “nuclear bomb” simulation is run, will it also be infinitely small, or will it grow exponentially? Dark matter … what happens if they manage to create that? There are plenty of good scientific models for several good and several bad results.
I’m just glad it’s in France. I believe the worst-case scenario will be close to a medium-size nuclear explosion. That will most of the scientists involved, and may crack a fault line, but probably not. The world will not end, but the lives of those near the blast zone, and downwind will certainly end.
At least we were successful in stopping it from being built in Dallas. I thank the man responsible for it every time it comes up.