What’s the worst that could happen?
Likes: smashing stuff up Dislikes: creating black holes.
This New Scientist blog post sorta sums it all up. I’m hoping for time travellers.
Nice to know that amongst the bits and bobs that wil be colliding in the LHC tomorrow will be strange quarks as well as various other flavours such as cherry, sideways and itchy. Yes, I have a strong grasp of particle physics.
On a more level-headed note I’m glad to see that researchers from Trinity College Dublin and Grid Ireland are part of the clever and talented peeps that will make sense of the data collected tomorrow after the post-Big Bang events.
Press Release from TCD:
“The world’s largest physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, designed to recreate the conditions of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang, will be switched on this Wednesday, September 10th. Early in the morning, scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, will start circulating a beam of protons at extremely high speed around a 27km long tunnel near Geneva.
Researchers in the Computer Architecture and Grid Research group in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Computer Science and Statistics are part of the global effort to analyse the data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment. In order to provide the computing power necessary to store and process this data, hundreds of sites around the world have joined forces to create a giant computing system, known as a “grid”. Scientists can move data around the grid and run programmes on any one of the tens of thousands of computers that are connected.
TCD has been involved in the grid since its earliest days. The Grid-Ireland computer room now contains 768 processors and over 130 terabytes of hard disk space (equivalent to more than 20,000 CDs) which are connected to the worldwide computing grid. TCD’s resources are being used to store and process data from ATLAS and LHCb, two of the experiments being conducted at the LHC. To date TCD computers have done the equivalent of 300,000 hours of processing to support LHC research.
Dr. Stephen Childs, Deputy Grid Manager for Grid-Ireland at TCD, explains why the College is involved with grid computing and the LHC: “There are three main benefits to our involvement with the LHC. Firstly, we are making a valuable contribution towards this significant global experiment. Secondly, we can directly support Irish scientists working to analyse LHC data. Thirdly, we are gaining valuable experience with grid technology which we can then pass on to Irish researchers from all disciplines”.
“Although nothing else operates on quite the same scale as the LHC, the technology being developed will provide a framework for online collaborative experiments of all kinds,” Dr Childs added”
I always thought the Grid was the most interesting thing about the whole LHC project. Apparently it’s destined to replace the current Internet as we know it. Exciting stuff.
Hi Marie. Just found your blog via your Facebook posting. Well done for starting it – I remember you mentioning it a while back. (I’d love to do something like this too, but like you suffer from writing overload during the day, so it’s hard to sacrifice nights to it as well. Perhaps some day there’ll be a portable device where you can record your thoughts in audio format, then upload instantly to a blog. (Actually that would be quite scary.))
Anyway, re the LHC, I am going through a minor atomic physics obsession at the moment, so I thought I’d weigh in and say that, as far as I know, nothing will actually ‘collide’ tomorrow. They will just send a beam of particles around the tunnel in one direction. If that’s a success, they will later send a beam in the opposite direction. Then later this year, they hope to send two beams around in opposite directions at the same time, causing a collision (and potentially the end of the universe as we know it). So we have another few weeks before we need to panic!