I love you really.
CERN Page 18
That's the trouble with particle physics,no one knows the whole of the argument.
Quote: Griff @ September 11 2008, 8:34 PM BSTDude it's not happening. I generally love your work but that joke is not happening. Was that a (black) hole pun in there too?
Sometimes, despite what the scientists tell you, less is more.
Nah sometimes more is more, and if you are not trying to make money out of it, amusing yourself is just... you know worth it, my partner really hates my ability to be genuinely, usually alcohol assisted, amused at the lame shit I come out with. 
Oh and of course not, I never do puns 
Quote: Griff @ September 11 2008, 7:48 PM BSTNah, if you were face-to-face with Hawking, you'd bully him into trying out all the comedy voices on his voice synthesiser. That's what I'd do, anyway.
Mean, but so true.
Despite my ignorance: In response to one of the posts before: Subatomic particles may very well collide all the time in space, but how do you detect them? For example, neutrinos have almost no mass, and basically pass through the Earth barely interacting with it, so to detect them all the background noise and radiation (supposedly left over from the original Big Bang) has to be removed. Hence why such detectors are deep underground.
As for the particle accelerators at CERN, it's a controlled environment where particles can be accelerated to near light-speed and smashed together, and the results detected and analysed.
Anyway, I just think it's pretty amazing that thousands of people from round the world have got together and built such a complex machine, and that this can possibly prove or disprove whole theories put forward for the universe and all matter in it, the laws of physics, etc. If they find anything, it could open up a whole new understanding of how things work, and why.
Plus, it's like loads of eminent scientists finally getting their papers marked to see if they got the answer right
Science book publishers must be loving it
Some people have far too much time and money.
Yep.
As long as nobody thinks it was me who made that.
They've set up live webcams at CERN to watch the LHC in action:
Quote: Afinkawan @ September 12 2008, 2:20 PM BSTAs long as nobody thinks it was me who made that.
They've set up live webcams at CERN to watch the LHC in action:
Nice one.
Quote: Afinkawan @ September 12 2008, 11:39 AM BSTwww.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com
Has the Large Hadron Collider been operated in anywhere near its designed purpose yet?
Quote: Rob0 @ September 11 2008, 8:49 PM BSTAs for the particle accelerators at CERN, it's a controlled environment.
I can understand the need for a controlled environment but that wasn't my question or the point I was querying.
No, my point was why do they need to create the conditions that existed a billionth of a second after the Big Bang (ostensibly to observe these collisions) when those conditions simply aren't required. Because as Hawking said, these collisions occur anywhere at anytime. If they occur now, then they are independent of the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
The conditions that the LHC is intended to replicate aren't even a requirement to create said collisions.
Actually Griff that was very informative. Good link.
The LHC isn't a requirement for those collisions to happen but it is a requirement if they want to observe them. <insert brilliant analogy here>
Those sorts of collisions do occur naturally but we have no way of telling when or where and no way of predicting it either. You've seen the size of the detector chambers in the photos from CERN, you'd need to lug that piece of equipment to wherever the collision was going to occur and then you might only have one collision at a time, not the millions they are going to cause in the LHC.
The collisions are partly to investigate what happens when you smash things together at such high energies but also the breakdown of the particles recreates the conditions just after the Big Bang when stuff hadn't all coalesced into normal matter yet.
Hawking said the collisions happen at other times, not that the conditions were the same.
Quote: Griff @ September 12 2008, 4:20 PM BSTNB this doesn't help, it's just fun
Excellent vid!
Anyone seen a copy of CERN's Risk Assessment and Method Statement for this project?