Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: quixotic
  • Music: Jekyll and Hyde, 'Presentation to the Board of Governors.'

I regret nothing!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva will be firing for the first time on September 10th, at 9:00 AM (or thereabouts). Since I am not actually in Geneva, this means the Large Hadron Collider will be firing for the first time...tonight. At around 11:00 PM. After I've gone to bed.

So, y'know, I may wake up to discover that a black hole has been accidentally unleashed and will now begin cheerfully devouring the planet. Or I may not wake up at all, since the really paranoid people inform me that there's a decent chance the Large Hadron Collider will recreate the Big Bang and, in so doing, unmake all creation. (Amanda, before you hit me with your amazingly large physics brain, I know this isn't going to happen. But a girl can dream.)

So if tomorrow we're all reduced to component atoms, stardust, and the sound of voices screaming "I told you so!" into the void, well...

I regret nothing.

Do you?
Tags: mad science
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  • 61 comments
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Re: Cheerfully devouring the planet

branna

September 10 2008, 01:05:12 UTC 8 years ago

Yup. I was being good and not spoiling Seanan's fun with hard facts, but now that a bunch of other people have posted:

Judging by the CERN website (http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/News/FinalLHCsyncTest.html)
it looks like this is just the first attempt to circulate a single beam (450 GeV) at well below design energy. Final design is two colliding beams, each one at 5 TeV (5000 GeV). I don't think they expect to get there before the end of the year.

450 GeV in one beam is way below the CMS energy of the Tevatron, which has been running for ages. I don't think anything particularly interesting is gonna happen tonight.

Re: Cheerfully devouring the planet

branna

September 10 2008, 01:13:43 UTC 8 years ago

Argh, actually, re-reading this, it's not clear what the energy of the circulating beam will be. 450GeV is the energy the beam is injected at; the actual LHC kicks this up to the final design energy. I assumed from the language used that they are just circulating the beam at injection energy this time around, but I could be wrong about that.

Re: Cheerfully devouring the planet

branna

September 10 2008, 01:23:16 UTC 8 years ago

No, I think I was reading it right the first time. Actual beam commissioning schedule is nicely detailed in

http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning

Re: Cheerfully devouring the planet

branna

September 10 2008, 01:26:05 UTC 8 years ago

But final design energy is 14TeV, the 10TeV collision energy is just an intermediate phase.