CERN Large Hadron Collider restarts with redoubled energy

Deutsche Welle ^ | 3/12/2015 | Tatiana Ivanova

[jonatron]

At the end of March, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be up and running after a remodeling break of over two years. Physicists said on Thursday they hoped it would open the door to an even deeper understanding of our universe, now that the accelerator has twice the energy as before.

"We are all very excited," CERN director Rolf-Dieter Heuer said at the opening of a press conference on Thursday, adding that the accelator would be reactivated during the final week of March, pending final tests.

Since its initial launch in 2008, CERN researchers in Geneva have been using the 27-kilometer-long particle accelerator to smash protons together at just under the speed of light. Directly after the collision, the particles break up into their smallest building blocks, like Hadrons and Bosons. One of them is the Higgs-Boson, a particle that was previously only known as a theoretical quantity, but its existence was physically proven just before the LHC was shut down three years ago. The particles are recorded with huge sensors that have a similar function to light-detecting chips in digital cameras.

[bobby.223]

“Don’t be to proud of this technological terror you’ve created. The ability to collide particles and smash protons is insignificant next to the power of the Force”.

[dr_lew]

Yeah, maybe everybody should read Sirens of Titan. BTW, I learned in a Q&A in some lecture that it would take some millions of years for a quantum black hole to reach macroscopic runaway. “The first 100 thousand tons are the hardest.” or whatever the number was.

[Peter ODonnell]

Nothing can possibly go wronggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

[Jimmy Valentine]

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, is this research truly productive or are these guys just screwing around

[SunkenCiv]

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