LHC produces first collisions | Hacker News Reader

LHC produces first collisions

nytimes.com

32 pointsandres21 comments

For the ones that are relieved to know that the LHC didn't cause the armagedon, I must tell you that we are in the parallel universe that survived. At most one of our parallel universe was obliterated.

Don't beleive the no parallel universes were damaged during the LHC's collisions sticker you can see at CERN laboratories.

Hilarious, thank you!

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That goes away if you clear your cookies

I understand that the LHC will help answer some physics questions, but is all this expense and effort going to contribute to any practical technology gains? Will it help us find new energy sources? What will we actually get out of it??

Back in 1989 a proposal was written about organising information within CERN for the "LHC era". (http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html)

There's some irony that twenty years later you're able to use the very technology spawned by that proposal to write a comment asking whether all the expense and effort of the LHC and CERN will have any practical technological gains.

We are where we are now by trying to "answer some physics questions". Imagine if humans had not done a single thing that didn't seem to them to have a practical application at that point.

Quite so. Blue sky research has a much longer payback cycle (and sometimes doesn't pay back at all), but often has an astronomically high rate of return.

For many years the laser was considered to be a "solution looking for a problem", yet today they are absolutely ubiquitous in numerous applications and have contributed to the well-being of human-kind in innumerable ways (surgery, communication, safety, etc.)

When Maxwell studied the theory of electromagnetism it was absolutely blue sky research with questionable practicality. Yet the fruit of that research served as the foundation of innumerable inventions in the 19th and 20th centuries, easily responsible for hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of goods and services to be produced and delivered to people.

Einstein too. Relativistic effects are pretty significant in GPS technology.

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps....

then there's the invention of wifi, originally designed to clean up fuzzy intergalactic radio waves.. http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/csir...

Yep that's great I'm all for that. Just wondering if there are any practical applications that they hope to one day achieve, or is it more like sending a satellite into space without any idea what's out there, just hoping to find some cool stuff.

  Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in
  physics, questions concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and
  forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time,
  especially regarding the intersection of quantum mechanics and general
  relativity, where current theories and knowledge are unclear or break down
  altogether.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC#Purpose

... or at the very least discover that what we call 'elementary objects' aren't really that elementary. It's turtles all the way down. :)

"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." ~A. Einstein

To address your question, I am sorry, I don't really know if they have any practical applications in mind. But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.

But I am certain (=believe) that practical applications will come out of this.

As any deeper understanding of the universe inevitably leads to practical applications, I should think.

The understanding of the atom world lead us to nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, a better understanding of the quantum world might lead us to similar discoveries (for example, quantum computers or anti-gravity). The bottom line is the more we know the cooler things we can build :)

What if we don’t get any practical benefits from the LHC? I would think that building it was nevertheless worth it.

This is it. The whole game. And finding out how stuff works is quite noble enough without any benefits.

warp drives.

Gah! They're going to run it for a year at 3.5TEV and then shut it down, why? if they've fixed the magnet problem from last year why can't they go full force now?

The LHC is a complicated one-off piece of machinery. If you build something this complicated and this powerful then it is prudent to ramp up the power bit by bit and check it out after the runs to see if there are unexpected issues before going full power. At successively higher power levels you can expect small but hopefully not fatal problems to come up.

By your reasoning they should have just flipped the switch to 'full on' at the first run, and that would have probably caused a lot more damage than it did at the time.

Think of it as a brand new engine design, before putting your pedal to the metal you'd run it at low revs for a while and check out the vibration modes, the wear patterns and so on before taking it all the way to the redline.

Failing to do so will most likely result in catastrophic failure. Don't forget that there is only one LHC and if you mess it up too much you may not get another one for several decades, if ever.

They're prudent, they did this before (in the smaller ring and in a bunch of other accelerators all over the globe) and I hope they will maintain that attitude all the way to the finish line.

It's the end of the world as we know it

and I feel fine

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