Results tagged “cern” from 60 Second Science

So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.

At the top of my list of things that frighten me (followed shortly by a super-flu that turns people into zombies) is the sort-of-fact that the Large Hadron Collider could spew out strangelets and turn the Earth into a black hole, summon aggressive time travelers from the future, or plop us into a mediocre sci-fi movie.

Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.

[Google News]

Continue reading 'Hawaiians sue to stop Large Hadron Collider / save the world' >

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The entire particle physics community is counting down to May like it was their birthday, Christmas and the Second Coming of the Lord all wrapped up in a clutch of Superbowls. It's when the Large Hadron Collider comes online, but while most are hoping for data and praying for the bashful Higgs boson to finally show it's tiny little face, some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travelers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.

The idea dates back to Einstein's explanation that spacetime can be deformed by large energies or masses. Since the Large Hadron Collider is a twenty-six kilometer ring of superconducting magnets designed to do nothing but give a particle as large an energy as possible, that sounds like it could be an issue. Small deformations in spacetime (like Earth) give us the force of gravity, severe deformations give the cosmological trash compacting black holes, and an extreme case could cause a wormhole - a link between two points as spacetime folds over to touch itself (no sniggering).

Continue reading 'Time Travelers: Futurenauts Using Ultra-duper Atomsmasher' >

CERN, which stands for "place where war-losing Frogs and neutral, chocolate-loving Swiss accelerate particles" is currently the largest particle accelerating physics lab. They should revel in their grandiosity while they can, because the title will soon go to the Large Hadron Collider in May 2008, just up the street in Geneva.

But before everyone ditches the tired-ass CERN for the hotter, younger Large Hadron Collider, we should all remember why we fell in love with CERN in the first place. She gave us W and Z bosons, the determination of the number of neutrino families and the creation of antihydrogen atoms. The World Wide Web (now called Innernets) was also created in her superfine computer center in 1990, by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (sit down, Al).

But times have changed, baby, and we gots to move on. LHC is tighter, younger and may give us a Higgs boson — It's just the way the world works, right? Try to remember the good times, baby.

One more pic after the jump.

Continue reading 'Impressive pics of CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator...for now' >