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, 01:13:43 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.