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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branna

September 10 2008, 01:38:40 UTC 8 years ago

Actually, I'm betting Oct 21 is just 450 GeV on 450 GeV; it'll be a while longer to get each of the individual beams up to 5 GeV and get 10 TeV center-of-mass-energy collisions. My guess is a fair while longer---going from 450 GeV to 5 TeV for even one beam is not a trivial process, especially since they have to make sure nothing fries when they dump the beam at those energies. And then when they go for collisions they will probably have fun and entertaining beam-beam interactions disrupting the beams that they will have to sort out. That's usually the way it goes.

Anyway, less than 1 TeV cms (center of mass) energy isn't anything new, so Oct. 21 isn't the real date of interest either.


keristor

September 10 2008, 05:19:24 UTC 8 years ago

Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

(Ghostbusters, which should be required instruction material for all nuclear physicists...)

keristor

September 10 2008, 08:37:39 UTC 8 years ago

They said this morning (yes, I've been watching BBC News24 live from CERN, they've just completed sending a beam right round the ring) that they won't get up to the really high levels until probably February, after the winter break (they will be closing down for the winter because of the energy usage, apparently, otherwise it might cause blackouts in Europe or something like that).

So we still have to wait...