Newsweek: The Large Hadron Collider

There is a Gabriel among the control room crew. He doesn't play the trumpet, to my knowledge. ;-)

Jeroen Belleman

Does he look like this ?

Drudge headline:

World Did Not End...

John

I don't think they did any collisions, yet. They only did a verification that the beams went all the way around in both the clockwise and counterclockwise paths.

You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas. Go directly, do not pass GO, do not collect two hundred dollars... -- Tom Lehrer

Bob

High Energy Physics is indeed a mixed bag. Feynman famously said that it is like investigating watchmaking by shooting watches at each other and observing the parts that fly off. At its best, it's a challenging field that uses amazingly sophisticated techniques, attracts very bright people in large numbers and is a wonderful field to work in, and it does reveal basic scientific truth about the universe. At worst, however, it is repetitive (another resonance particle...) and career-destroying due to boom-bust funding and lack of avenues for meaningful individual contribution---there are HEP papers with author lists longer than the text itself. Some experiments run for years, and their technology becomes outdated, so it's not always the geek haven with latest toys.

Still, most people I know in HEP (I myself never worked in the field) are very clever. You asked about HEP spinoffs? how about the financial industry? Large part of the quantitative finance field in the 90's was implemented by physicists who left the field in the aftermath of the Supercollider fiasco, and were hired by the banks for their computer simulation skills. Of course the current financial crisis is in part a result of the fact that they were smug and didn't question their assumptions enough :)

You said that Web can't be counted as a valid spinoff--but it was a result of a culture of openness and dependency on computer communication inherent in science in general, and HEP had the most money, and the best graphics and fastest networks, so they were best positioned to invent it. Remember late 80-s: Prodigy, modems, 320x240 4-color graphics...that was the reality for most of us.

I worked as a summer student in a HEP lab in early 80s and I was blown away at the sophistication and advanced stuff in electronics and computers they had. It was inspiring to me. Even today, I am looking at the pictures of LHC detectors and I admire their skills and knowledge---it just looks well executed.

In the end, I think that to a first degree it doesn't matter what's the project---just that _something_ is being done. In the sixties it was the Apollo program. In the seventies/eighties, maybe it was the HEP. Now it seems to be the military/defense: around here, it's amazing how many Lockheed-Martin and Northrop-Grumman offices sprout around here. I know what I'd rather do.

It was tested already last month, so no wonder that it works:

Never mind that they'd postponed it from May to September, it worked first time because it had not worked until it did.

I remember when I built my first radio and that worked the first time I succeeded in getting it to work, several hours after I'd switched it on and tuned in the IF strip.

No, it's for people who don't want to be socially ostracized.

/BAH

That's what I said. Cowards, who are afraid to tell the truth, and idiots for not telling it.

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aioe.org, Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I will not see your messages.

If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account:

There are two kinds of people on this earth: The crazy, and the insane. The first sign of insanity is denying that you're crazy.

Well, what confused me about the two quotes was that if (1) the LHC destroys the Earth, then (2) how can there then be any visitors from the future?

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The LHC won't destroy the earth directly, it would just mess up the natural extra dimensional barrier by sending signal into them. Prior to this. We only have random cosmic rays reaching into them, but the LHC changes it. You see, the extra dimensions are inhabited.

cal

quoted text -

Only by very hot females..

So that's one more place that you'll never get a date?

Yeah, probably..

At its best it is about being polite and respectful. At its worst it is a way of censoring dissenting opinions.

When have you ever seen this?

This is the application I see when PC is used. You can't tell someone they screwed up, or that they are useless. You have to lie and tell them, "Well, It could have been a lot worse. Only 300 people died because you messed up." "You don't sweat much, for a fat woman"? "Great! They only charged your kid with manslaughter, instead of murder."? People need to take responsibility for their actions, and being PC doesn't help.

us.

The web would have happened anyway. NNTP that you are using here is a pure computer network product, independent of HEP.

Political correctness has no "best" - it's ALL bad.

Exactly!

Thanks, Rich

Are they the mitherinos' sparticles?

-- Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration, Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".