Calling all geeks. Get 'yer red-hot news from CERN right here!

[Surya Gayatri]

"Today, CERN’s heart beats once more to the rhythm of the LHC.”

Proton beams are back in the LHC

After two years of intense maintenance and consolidation, and several months of preparation for restart, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is back in operation. Today at 10.41am, a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12.27pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction. These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams.

"Operating accelerators for the benefit of the physics community is what CERN1’s here for,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. "Today, CERN’s heart beats once more to the rhythm of the LHC.”

"The return of beams to the LHC rewards a lot of intense, hard work from many teams of people," said Head of CERN’s Beam Department, Paul Collier. "It’s very satisfying for our operators to be back in the driver’s seat, with what’s effectively a new accelerator to bring on-stream, carefully, step by step.”

The technical stop of the LHC was a Herculean task. Some 10,000 electrical interconnections between the magnets were consolidated. Magnet protection systems were added, while cryogenic, vacuum and electronics were improved and strengthened. Furthermore, the beams will be set up in such a way that they will produce more collisions by bunching protons closer together, with the time separating bunches being reduced from 50 nanoseconds to 25 nanoseconds.

Check out all the day's action on the Live blog
http://run2firstbeam.web.cern.ch/

See you for first physics collisions in May!

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/04/proton-beams-are-back-lhc

[RKP5637]

1. K&R! n/t

[Surya Gayatri]

2. Hey there, fellow geek! I know nothing about mathematics or

theoretical physics, but this stuff blows me away! LOVE IT!

[RKP5637]

7. It's fascinating! At the university I worked as an undergrad in a high energy physics group that was

involved with accelerators. It's just incredible! Often I think about while many are involved with the LHC, how mundane and often trait all of these political arguments, wars, hostilities are in the big picture of what the universe is about.

[Surya Gayatri]

9. If only we could see the proverbial forest for the trees...

How can we go scrabbling our way through existence, without looking up at the stars from time to time?

[RKP5637]

10. Exactly! The perpetual conflicts some love to dwell in are such an energy draining force

on humanity.

[Cirque du So-What]

3. Thanks, CERN!

Opened that portal to hell yet?

[Surya Gayatri]

4. As Schrödinger's cat might say...

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. conCERNed

Is it a coincidence that the Large Hadron Collider started back up on the day after Easter/Passover/Blood moon/Eclipse? ............... I think not

Is it a coincidence that a statue of Shiva is in front of CERN?


?w=640&h=480


the Hindu god Shiva as the cosmic dancer who performs his divine dance to destroy a weary universe and make preparations for god Brahma to start the process of creation.


Again, is there reason to be conCERNed?


conCERNed..... conCERNed....?

[NuclearDem]

6. ...

[Ichingcarpenter]

12. ......

[NuclearDem]

13. The LHC is not going to kill us all.

Get a grip.

[Ichingcarpenter]

14. Get a grip.

its humor but conservatives never get humor.

[NuclearDem]

15. ...

[Surya Gayatri]

8. I SAW that statue of Shiva...wonderful symbolism.

Just what is this dance of creation and destruction that we seem to be caught up in?

Somewhere, someday, the 'brain/blood' barrier between science and philosophy will come down, and the 'Great Thought' that Einstein spoke of will be revealed.

[Avalux]

16. Consciousness.....

Science has historically avoided delving into the deep end of that pool, but as time goes on and our experimentation advances, science and that which cannot be proven by quantitative means (WHO AM I...WHY AM I HERE?) are converging. I think there's a tie between dark matter and consciousness...but then again, I believe anything is possible.

Shiva, the great destroyer, represents a clearing out of the old...leaving an emptiness and stillness which must occur if new creations are able to emerge. Not just on a vast galactic scale, but in our own minds.

[Surya Gayatri]

19. '...that which cannot be proven by quantitative means (WHO AM I...WHY AM I HERE?) are converging.'

'stillness...must occur...in our own minds.'

[snooper2]

11. it depends on if it was raining or not there...any idea on the weather?

[Ichingcarpenter]

17. LHC@home.... use your home computer to help CERN

LHC@home is a platform for volunteers to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and to compare theory with experiment in the search for new fundamental particles.

By contributing spare processing capacity on their home and laptop computers, volunteers may run simulations of beam dynamics and particle collisions in the LHC's giant detectors


Igor Zacharov has revived the LHC@Home program. By installing simple software running under Windows, MacOS or Linux, anyone may contribute spare processing capacity on their computer. Entitled SixTrack, this project will serve to prevent protons smashing into the walls of the LHC over the next decade.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-10-protons-cern.html#jCp



http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/

[Surya Gayatri]

21. Great find, Ichingcarpenter! hope some of the geeks reading this will sign on!

[jeff47]

22. There's also SETI@Home and Folding@Home if you'd like to help some other projects

SETI@Home is looking for radio signals, obviously. Folding@Home is trying to predict how proteins fold in order to do their job, which could be very helpful in fighting diseases.

But keep in mind any of these projects will keep your computer running full power when you are not using it. That's going to burn significantly more electricity than having the computer go into "idle" mode.

[Ichingcarpenter]

23. SETI is a waste of time and money

When I was younger and teaching I thought this was a great program and was very enthusiastic about the prospect of finding signals from Alien worlds. I even set up all the computers in the 4th 5th and 6 grade classrooms running the program.

But the more I thought about it and after doing a lot of research on and off over the years on the subject, I came to realize it’s a total waste of time and resources that could be better utilized in other endeavors vs looking for radio or TV signals

With the advancements we have made over the past 100 years or so “WE “the human race or Earth will be going silent. With the development of direct digital satellite signals, fiber optics, and cable TV etc. We have been and will continue to send less and less over the airwaves out into space. So the timeline for an alien civilization using this technology from our early 1900's would be short

I tend to think that some kind of quantum electron entanglement might be used by an alien civilization so that messages would be instantaneous over those great distances and we don't have the technology yet to detect or send that on the cosmic scale yet let alone on a local scale.


Folding at home is a more promising program

but this thread is about CERN which I think is a worthy program. Physicists must sift through the 30 petabytes or so of data produced
A petabyte (PB) is 10 to the 15th bytes of data, 1,000 terabytes (TB) or 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB).

[Surya Gayatri]

26. 30 petabytes...Is that like as many stars as in the universe? Or something?

[Takket]

18. now that they have found the "God particle"

maybe they can smash together some GOP neurons and see if there are any signs of compassion or empathy for anyone other than themselves.

[Surya Gayatri]

20. Time to propose just such a study to the 'experimental physics'

team at CERN.

We already hypothesize that Republicans are raving, selfish lunatics. That's the 'theoretical physics' of it.

Now, we need an applied experiment to 'prove' it.

[MineralMan]

24. Breaking: CERN finds anti-God particle.

At higher energies, a new particle, affectionately called the Satan Particle by those in the know, demonstrates the essential symmetry of all Large Hadron particles. This new anti-God particle is said to come direct from Hades at extraordinarily large energy levels in the LHC. As William Bendix, a chief researcher said, "The Satan Particle is as exciting as Hell to us."

[Surya Gayatri]

25. Oh, you! 'as exciting as Hell to us...'

[hifiguy]

27. Woohoo!

Can't wait to see what new particles and theories come from the newly turbocharged LHC.

[Surya Gayatri]

28. Somebody gave me a heads up yesterday on the most

well-made and informative documentary on CERN--entitled 'Particle Fever' .

It's from the BBC and you can find it on line. Really clear and easy to follow for math-challenged folks like me.

[hifiguy]

29. Will definitely look that up.

I highly recommend Brian Greene's books, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality. He's a top level theoretical physicist who has the Carl Sagan knack for writing about incredibly complex and abstract science in a way that the non-math person can get a handle on.

DU science geeks unite!

[Surya Gayatri]

30. To do common battle against the new Dark Ages

that the RW lunatics would bring down!

[Panich52]

31. Read nice little book on 'god particle.' Made it all a bit more understandable to us wannabe geeks

who have trouble with the quantum if physics.

(I'll edit this when I find it to post title & author)