Posted on 09/12/2008 10:07:14 PM PDT by neverdem
THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.
The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.
After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the “on” switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect?
The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.
The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (“E”) and matter or mass (“m”) are convertible currencies (with “c” — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles.
It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And to think, we used to worry about military people blowing up the Earth.
This is awful. I assumed that only a newspaper editor could write it.
btt
“OK, thanks Egon. Guys, important safety tip: Don’t cross the beams.”
"In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram."
There. Done....
Well met.
In theory, it would sink radially toward the center of mass of the earth. What it would do once it arrived there is subject to debate, but by deduction, it would simply isolate itself there in a small void.
How large does a black hole have to be to exist? Isn't that part of the question that this device is designed to answer?
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My pleasure.
If we force them to use, and destroy CO2 protons, "Global Warming" will be cured!
/S
"In 1989 Ellis County was chosen as the site for the Superconducting Supercollider, a planned fifty-four-mile tunnel in which electrically charged protons would be accelerated for collision experiments. Ellis County residents exulted at the prospect of a burst of prosperity. The Texas National Research Laboratory Commissionqv oversaw the purchase of almost 17,000 acres of land and began to construct facilities west of Waxahachie. But opposition to the project in Congress, resulting from charges that it was "pork" for Texas and from uncertainty about the value to be derived from a supercollider, resulted in the defunding of "Super Clyde" in 1993. At that point some 20 percent of the project had been completed, including fourteen miles of tunnel, a magnet-development complex, the supercollider central facility, and the linear accelerator. At its peak the project had employed some 2,100 people at the Ellis County site. In 2005 the Ellis County government owned the site, and was actively looking for a buyer to develop it."
Actually, though, they were already having problems with Super Clyde. Our beloved fire ants had developed an appetite for the insulation being used for Clyde, and were eating away on it. It would have been a never ending problem for them, because you can't really kill fire ants, you can only make them move a few feet over.
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