LHC sees first record-breaking high-energy particle collisions | Hacker News Reader

LHC sees first record-breaking high-energy particle collisions

news.bbc.co.uk

143 pointspetercooper31 comments

The awesome thing about the LHC is that they expose loads of its operational details live on the web, so you can see what's happening right now in confusingly large amounts of detail.

"Page 1", which is the main accelerator status screen: http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...

Operational status of the experiments: http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...

Cycling status screens for the CMS experiment: http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cmscc/cmstv/cmstv.jsp?channel=4

Status for the LHCb detector: http://frankm.web.cern.ch/frankm/test/Online/Stomp/web

You can also find loads more links at http://lhcportal.com

> This marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics... Many of them have described Tuesday's event as the beginning of a "new era in science".

We don't often hear things like that in hard sciences like physics. For thousands of years, humans have been "discovering" nature and trying to piece together a puzzle.

> "If you want to discover new particles, you have to produce them; and these new particles are massive..."

We're no longer sitting by idly, waiting to find the next piece so we can fit it somewhere. Humans are making the next piece, whatever it may be. Not to use the oft abused phrase lightly, I think this is a paradigm shift in our study of sciences where we've taken serendipity out of the equation and replaced it with engineering. LHC isn't a science project. It is the industrialization of discovery, for at the scale they are operating, it has to be.

Personally, I highly doubt we'll find Higgs anytime soon or ever. However, I'm pretty certain LHC will push the limits of our knowledge further.

"we've taken serendipity out of the equation"

Unfortunately, serendipity is exactly what is at the heart of scientific and technological progress.

Look at CERN, we fund particle physics, what do we get: the Web.

Agree

And actually CERN is also hoping for unknown, unknowns as have been pointed out by one of the project leaders in the live cast.

wait a minute... that sounds remarkably like one cuil.

If you asked me for a hamburger and I gave you a raccoon.

If you asked me for particle physics and I gave you the World Wide Web.

Not to downplay the LHC, but scientists and physicists have been creating the material ("making the next piece") for fundamental new physics for a while now. The quantum hall effect, Bose-Einstein condensates, nuclear explosions, etc...

LHC certainly is a big step in particle physics, but I'd be hesitant to label it a paradigm shift. Nature is nature; it's there and waiting to be figured out... but sometimes it doesn't naturally create what it's capable of creating.

To be pedantic regarding your last sentence, these sorts of collisions do happen in nature. It's just that they're pretty much impossible to observe given that we have to look really, really close and they're so spread out.

Think of telescopes.

You can advance the theory of astronomy all you want, but unless you build a bigger mirror to better see the stuff actually going on up in the skies, you won't get very far.

Physics experiments in the 18th/19th century were hard to setup as well, given the capabilities of the time.

A historic tweet:

Experiments are collecting their first physics data - historic moment here! Watch the webcast, look at the photos - all live! http://twitter.com/CERN

Direct link to the webcast: http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/

webcams inside the collider itself http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Very good.

My first thought was: "That's not what it would look like."

I'm too much of a geek.

Or not enough of one...

Please elaborate. What I meant was that if they did make a black hole, and it for some reason would stay on earth (instead of being flung out of the solar system at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light), all the matter on earth would form a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of less than 1 cm.

Thus, a black hole created at rest at CERN devouring the earth would never be seen -- it would just fall down and let the pressure of earth push matter into it. Done properly, the webcam feed should show a pretty major earthquake that just keeps getting worse.

Wrong. Any black hole produced at CERN Would evaporate instantly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole If it were possible to create an earth eating black hole, cosmic rays would have done the job long ago. They are way more powerful than the LHC.

I am aware of Hawking radiation, but it does not properly explain how a black hole would evaporate after reaching Planck mass, only that it would reduce in mass until it was unable to attract anything. (There is a very reasonable proposal that black holes thus reduced would actually be stable weakly interacting massive particles, and would form much, if not all, of dark matter.) Also, if a black hole would be created at CERN, it would be fed by a very energetic proton beam, potentially much faster than it could possibly evaporate by hawking radiation.

That cosmic rays also potentially produce black holes is also not a good argument against their production, but only against the danger they pose. A black hole with the mass of a few grams has a very tiny cross-section, and since momentum is conserved, would probably be moving very close to the speed of light. Should a cosmic ray hit earth and produce one, it would likely pass right trough earth without hitting any significant amount of matter or slowing down. This is of course also true for any black hole created at CERN -- The protons traversing the rings are doing so at roughly 0.99999999c. Should a black hole be created, it would leave the solar system in a rather short time, at least from it's perspective.

Sorry, I didn't actually click the link to the joke webcast, I assumed it was just a normal webcast, and that you expected more blinken' lights or something. Your comment makes much more sense when I bother to find out the full context.

FWIW, the reason I replied was to attract attention to the joke, rather than praise, per se. But I also didn't want to give the joke away.

I don't understand the video, its like the LHC got eaten by a worm hole or black hole or some kind of other hole. Can anyone please tell me what exactly this means?

Tis a joke. Some people speculated that there's a chance the LHC could cause a black hole.

All incredibly old jokes aside, you can see the actual live webcams from the CMS experiment here:

http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/Media/CMSeye/index.html

This is cool. 15 years ago I did my Master's thesis at ATLAS, but that's the last I had to do with particle physics. I'm glad I didn't wait around for data to actually show up... (Back in 1995, 2004 was the planned start date.)

I'm wondering what kind of computation engine and database they use to process and store the torrents of data. I bet its a no-no-no-SQL

There've been a few articles on that topic over time, though I don't have any links handy. Databases don't even enter the basic processing infrastructure, as they're dealing with on the order of terabytes of new data per second! I thing they even had to connect their cluster together with fiberoptics just to be able to handle all the data traffic!

Typically a cluster is connected with fiberoptics or similar media anyways. That they are doing the same is not surprising.

Back in the ATLAS days it was a drinking from the fire hose system. It couldn't handle all the data so it sampled what you hoped was a random sample of it. So if you looked at 1% of the output and found N particles you could assume that there were 100N produced.

There was some cool hardware being built back then, transputer arrays and a lot of hopefully experiments with FPGAs. One difficulty was that you needed to get the computers close enough to the detector to keep the interconnects short, but not so close that the chips got fried.

Dear LHC, usher in a "new era" in collaboration too -- open source all collected data.

Are you ready to process 15 petabytes of data that LHC is expected to produce annually?

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Computing-en.html

I personally am not, but if someone else CAN then I don't think they should be stopped. I also don't think that's a good reason to not open source data.

It would be especially hot if this was one of those free datasets on AWS.

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