Gallery: Scientists react to Hadron success
by Andy Smith | September 10, 2008 5:48am PDT | Image 1 of 5
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The new science resulting from this grand experiment will turn up in the coming weeks and months, but what Wednesday's event did prove was that the world's largest machine works. Part of that machine is the cathedral-sized Atlas detector, one of two general-purpose detectors (the other is the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS) in the LHC.
Atlas's development and construction benefited from a great amount of UK involvement, particularly that of the Science & Technology Facilities Council. Pictured above is the very first image from Atlas showing the particle beam passing through.
ZDNet.co.uk was at a Science & Technology Facilities Council event in Westminster to see, via video-link, the LHC being initiated. On the following pages are some initial reactions from those involved in Atlas and the wider LHC project.
Photos and text from ZDNet UK
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Although, in reality this is just the first step to bigger and better things. Maybe there is hope for mankind after all.
I say good luck and God bless to something that might someday really amount to something.
As far as the Hubble goes, I'm still amazed at what they accomplished after getting the telescope "corrective lenses". I wonder if they can get tinted contacts for that thing.
As far as the LHC, they have accomplished what they set out to do: build a functioning collider which uses higher energies than previously possible. This is the beginning of many years of experimentation: building a laboratory for higher-energy physics is exactly what they set out to do.
I hope you don't imagine that this was done just to run one experiment to make "micro black holes" which aren't black holes in the astronomical sense, at all.
I know, for, I am one of them. But it will be too good to be true.
The cleanest solution is total annihilation, nobody left around to worry about it.
BTW, I do not subscribe to the theory that this machine can cause such an event, mostly because these types of sub-atomic reactions occur regularly in the upper atmosphere and for better or worse, we're still here.
Makes for a neat movie plot though.
Since all high energy experiments are well planned in advance, electricity suppliers know when to expect increased loads. It's kind of like your local NASA installation or something running electricity-intensive testing, frequently at night when local demand is lower anyway.
It would be kind of crazy if they somehow blew the grid, though. I don't suppose First Energy is running generation plants on the the French grid?
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