

LHC sees first record-breaking high-energy particle collisions - petercooper
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8593780.stm

======
russss
The awesome thing about the LHC is that they expose loads of its operational
details live on the web, so you can see what's happening right now in
confusingly large amounts of detail.

"Page 1", which is the main accelerator status screen: [http://op-
webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...](http://op-
webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC1)

Operational status of the experiments: [http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-
webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...](http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-
webtools/vistar/vistars.php?usr=LHC3)

Cycling status screens for the CMS experiment:
<http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cmscc/cmstv/cmstv.jsp?channel=4>

Status for the LHCb detector:
<http://frankm.web.cern.ch/frankm/test/Online/Stomp/web>

You can also find loads more links at <http://lhcportal.com>

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chime
> This marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of
> fundamental new physics... Many of them have described Tuesday's event as
> the beginning of a "new era in science".

We don't often hear things like that in hard sciences like physics. For
thousands of years, humans have been "discovering" nature and trying to piece
together a puzzle.

> "If you want to discover new particles, you have to produce them; and these
> new particles are massive..."

We're no longer sitting by idly, waiting to find the next piece so we can fit
it somewhere. Humans are making the next piece, whatever it may be. Not to use
the oft abused phrase lightly, I think this is a paradigm shift in our study
of sciences where we've taken serendipity out of the equation and replaced it
with engineering. LHC isn't a science project. It is the industrialization of
discovery, for at the scale they are operating, it has to be.

Personally, I highly doubt we'll find Higgs anytime soon or ever. However, I'm
pretty certain LHC will push the limits of our knowledge further.

~~~
rubidium
Not to downplay the LHC, but scientists and physicists have been creating the
material ("making the next piece") for fundamental new physics for a while
now. The quantum hall effect, Bose-Einstein condensates, nuclear explosions,
etc...

LHC certainly is a big step in particle physics, but I'd be hesitant to label
it a paradigm shift. Nature is nature; it's there and waiting to be figured
out... but sometimes it doesn't naturally create what it's capable of
creating.

~~~
nollidge
To be pedantic regarding your last sentence, these sorts of collisions do
happen in nature. It's just that they're pretty much impossible to observe
given that we have to look really, really close and they're so spread out.

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dantheman
A historic tweet:

Experiments are collecting their first physics data - historic moment here!
Watch the webcast, look at the photos - all live! <http://twitter.com/CERN>

~~~
chime
Direct link to the webcast: <http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/>

~~~
jdee
webcams inside the collider itself <http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-
webcams.html>

~~~
barrkel
Very good.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
My first thought was: "That's not what it would look like."

I'm too much of a geek.

~~~
JshWright
Or not enough of one...

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Please elaborate. What I meant was that if they did make a black hole, and it
for some reason would stay on earth (instead of being flung out of the solar
system at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light), all the matter on
earth would form a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of less than 1 cm.

Thus, a black hole created at rest at CERN devouring the earth would never be
seen -- it would just fall down and let the pressure of earth push matter into
it. Done properly, the webcam feed should show a pretty major earthquake that
just keeps getting worse.

~~~
russell
Wrong. Any black hole produced at CERN Would evaporate instantly.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole> If it were possible to create
an earth eating black hole, cosmic rays would have done the job long ago. They
are way more powerful than the LHC.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
I am aware of Hawking radiation, but it does not properly explain how a black
hole would evaporate after reaching Planck mass, only that it would reduce in
mass until it was unable to attract anything. (There is a very reasonable
proposal that black holes thus reduced would actually be stable weakly
interacting massive particles, and would form much, if not all, of dark
matter.) Also, if a black hole would be created at CERN, it would be fed by a
very energetic proton beam, potentially much faster than it could possibly
evaporate by hawking radiation.

That cosmic rays also potentially produce black holes is also not a good
argument against their production, but only against the danger they pose. A
black hole with the mass of a few grams has a very tiny cross-section, and
since momentum is conserved, would probably be moving very close to the speed
of light. Should a cosmic ray hit earth and produce one, it would likely pass
right trough earth without hitting any significant amount of matter or slowing
down. This is of course also true for any black hole created at CERN -- The
protons traversing the rings are doing so at roughly 0.99999999c. Should a
black hole be created, it would leave the solar system in a rather short time,
at least from it's perspective.

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lutorm
This is cool. 15 years ago I did my Master's thesis at ATLAS, but that's the
last I had to do with particle physics. I'm glad I didn't wait around for data
to actually show up... (Back in 1995, 2004 was the planned start date.)

------
helwr
I'm wondering what kind of computation engine and database they use to process
and store the torrents of data. I bet its a no-no-no-SQL

~~~
carterschonwald
There've been a few articles on that topic over time, though I don't have any
links handy. Databases don't even enter the basic processing infrastructure,
as they're dealing with on the order of terabytes of new data per second! I
thing they even had to connect their cluster together with fiberoptics just to
be able to handle all the data traffic!

~~~
scdlbx
Typically a cluster is connected with fiberoptics or similar media anyways.
That they are doing the same is not surprising.

------
derwiki
Dear LHC, usher in a "new era" in collaboration too -- open source all
collected data.

~~~
bd
Are you ready to process 15 petabytes of data that LHC is expected to produce
annually?

<http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Computing-en.html>

~~~
derwiki
I personally am not, but if someone else CAN then I don't think they should be
stopped. I also don't think that's a good reason to not open source data.

It would be especially hot if this was one of those free datasets on AWS.

