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Randy
SFN Regular
USA
1990 Posts |
 Posted - 09/05/2008 : 13:02:34
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Next Wednesday the biggest machine and international scientific experiment ever built will be switched on. Called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), it is a giant $10bn "atom smasher" that has been constructed at the European centre for nuclear research (Cern) in Geneva.
...read on:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-big-question-is-our-understanding-of-the-universe-about-to-be-transformed-919480.html
Caution, 5 meg jpeg at link below.
TA section of the Large Hadron Collider - Hi Res...
http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/cubes/5.jpg
Been waiting for years and years for this puppy to fire up to warp drive. (No dilithiumn crystals needed here; but who knows, with spin off discoveries down the road).
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"We are all connected; to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, to the rest of the universe atomically."
"So you're made of detritus [from exploded stars]. Get over it. Or better yet, celebrate it. After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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pleco
SFN Addict
USA
2998 Posts |
Posted - 09/05/2008 : 13:15:38 [Permalink]
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| Make sure all your affairs are in order and that you have stocked up on whatever you need for the impending interdimensional rip that will be opened... |
by Filthy
The neo-con methane machine will soon be running at full fart. |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 09/05/2008 : 13:19:21 [Permalink]
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Been reading several articles this week on the LHC. Should be interesting. Might have a preliminary result on that sneaky Higgs boson by year's end. Another article suggests they will have enough expirimental data by the end of 2009 to draw some conclusions on supersymetry.
Or we could all be sucked into a black hole next week...
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 09/11/2008 : 13:49:11 [Permalink]
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I found this spoof of the LHC slightly amusing:
Excerpt:
| The Discovery Institute today unveiled a multi-million dollar PR apparatus known as the Logicless Harangue Collider (LHC). The LHC is described as “an infinite echo-chamber” in which super-dense articles are debated in a circular manner until being smashed together. |
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METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 09/11/2008 : 17:22:08 [Permalink]
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Our friends at Answers in Genesis also waxeth philosophical, or something, as well: Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have hit the switch to activate the nearly $9 billion Large Hadron Collider. But what will it produce—a mini big bang or more hot air?
Flowing champagne marked the startup this week of the Large Hardon Collider (LHC), a nearly 17-mile-long (27 km) tube located 300 feet (91 m) beneath the Swiss–French border. The new LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, designed to (essentially) hurl two beams of magnet-accelerated particles at each other inside a vacuum, with the inevitable, hoped-for result being some incredible collisions.
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emphasis theirs.
It will not produce a "mini big bang," and in vacuum and at the temperatures it runs at, the only hot air will be from the usual chowder-heads at the Creationist sites.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 05:08:34 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by pleco
Make sure all your affairs are in order and that you have stocked up on whatever you need for the impending interdimensional rip that will be opened...
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The nice thing about the End is that it really doesn't matter what state your afairs are in. That's really the best part about it, IMO.  |
-Chaloobi
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 05:14:57 [Permalink]
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| The one thing I don't like about the LHC is that it's the cheap version of the Superconducting Super Collider that was under construction in the US until Congress cut it's funding in the early '90s. (My home town made the short list for locating the thing, but Texas got it.) That virtually guaranteed the US would fall into the backwater of particle physics and that is deeply disappointing to me. [rant] We can absolutely WASTE (no less than) a trillion dollars invading and occupying a country that was no threat to us with no reasonable chance of any return on the 'investment' other than hate, discontent, and a powerful Iranian ally, but one percent of that to puzzle out the secrets of the universe is just too damn much. Fuckers. [/rant] |
-Chaloobi
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| Edited by - chaloobi on 09/12/2008 05:18:54 |
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pleco
SFN Addict
USA
2998 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 05:17:11 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by chaloobi
Originally posted by pleco
Make sure all your affairs are in order and that you have stocked up on whatever you need for the impending interdimensional rip that will be opened...
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The nice thing about the End is that it really doesn't matter what state your afairs are in. That's really the best part about it, IMO.
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Ah, but what if it isn't The End, and something like out of The Mist where you have to fight for your survival while a bunch of raving mad evangelicals run around screaming about the End Times? Make sure you've got plenty of ammo - god will sort 'em out in the end, right? |
by Filthy
The neo-con methane machine will soon be running at full fart. |
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chaloobi
SFN Regular
1620 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 05:20:07 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by pleco
Originally posted by chaloobi
Originally posted by pleco
Make sure all your affairs are in order and that you have stocked up on whatever you need for the impending interdimensional rip that will be opened...
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The nice thing about the End is that it really doesn't matter what state your afairs are in. That's really the best part about it, IMO.
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Ah, but what if it isn't The End, and something like out of The Mist where you have to fight for your survival while a bunch of raving mad evangelicals run around screaming about the End Times? Make sure you've got plenty of ammo - god will sort 'em out in the end, right?
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If it comes down to that, it's the End. |
-Chaloobi
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Rubicon95
Skeptic Friend
USA
220 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 06:56:34 [Permalink]
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If it does create an interdimensional rift, my long hours of playing Half-Life will come in handy.
Howitworks.com had a good primer on what the LHC is. There was a video attached to the site. The emcee looks like a reject from an English boy band. But hey, telling how you are going to implode the Earth while wearing Armani, just says style. |
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pleco
SFN Addict
USA
2998 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 07:00:52 [Permalink]
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Yes, everyone will need a crowbar handy...or maybe we are going to be okay anyways...
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by Filthy
The neo-con methane machine will soon be running at full fart. |
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 08:06:30 [Permalink]
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| Well; if Gordon Freeman is on board; I feel safer already. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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astropin
SFN Regular
USA
970 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 09:27:29 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by pleco
Ah, but what if it isn't The End, and something like out of The Mist where you have to fight for your survival while a bunch of raving mad evangelicals run around screaming about the End Times? Make sure you've got plenty of ammo - god will sort 'em out in the end, right?
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But isn't that what's happening here in the US now? I picked off three evan's this morning  |
I would rather face a cold reality than delude myself with comforting fantasies.
You are free to believe what you want to believe and I am free to ridicule you for it.
Atheism:
The result of an unbiased and rational search for the truth.
Infinitus est numerus stultorum |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 09:33:51 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Simon
Well; if Gordon Freeman is on board; I feel safer already.
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And where can I get one of those gravity guns?? |
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astropin
SFN Regular
USA
970 Posts |
Posted - 09/12/2008 : 09:38:21 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by filthy
It will not produce a "mini big bang," and in vacuum and at the temperatures it runs at, the only hot air will be from the usual chowder-heads at the Creationist sites.
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Well it is sort of "a mini big bang". My understanding is that it recreates the conditions that were present just after the big bang (just on a vastly smaller scale).....so in that sense. |
I would rather face a cold reality than delude myself with comforting fantasies.
You are free to believe what you want to believe and I am free to ridicule you for it.
Atheism:
The result of an unbiased and rational search for the truth.
Infinitus est numerus stultorum |
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The Large Hadron Collider
