GPWizard F1 Forum
Everything Else => Off Topic => Topic started by: Scott on August 03, 2009, 09:26:26 PM
-
Just a note for any of you techies - we had a visitor at our hotel recently, who is a Theoretical Physicist and works on the LHC, otherwise known as CERN for the last 20 years (specifically the Atlas project - the one that is supposed to answer a bunch of beginning of the world questions and about black holes, dark matter and all that jazz). He has offered to give myself and my son a tour of the 'cavern' and hopefully even the Atlas project. I can't wait!! I'll (if I'm allowed to) take loads of pictures and hopefully post some. It should take place sometime in the next 6 weeks...I'm sort of on call for it.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/ (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/)
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/ATLAS-en.html (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/ATLAS-en.html)
-
fascinating scotty, and go for it
strangely, I have not been able to find out what the "CERN" acronym stands for - is it the Centre or Commission for European Research Nuclear or pehaps an acronym in French?
-
Good stuff Scott. I'm sure it will be great. Very jealous.
-
What a wonderful opportunity! I look forward to hearing about it!
-
The only black hole that I can guarantee is my wallet when my missus has finished with it.
-
fascinating scotty, and go for it
strangely, I have not been able to find out what the "CERN" acronym stands for - is it the Centre or Commission for European Research Nuclear or pehaps an acronym in French?
I think it is the French version of European Centre for Nuclear Research
-
fascinating scotty, and go for it
strangely, I have not been able to find out what the "CERN" acronym stands for - is it the Centre or Commission for European Research Nuclear or pehaps an acronym in French?
You are right Scotty it is the French words, according to the CERN lhc website -
The name CERN
CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The name is derived from the acronym for the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, a provisional body founded in 1952 with the mandate of establishing a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. At that time, pure physics research concentrated on understanding the inside of the atom, hence the word ‘nuclear’.
When the Organization officially came into being in 1954, the Council was dissolved, and the new organization was given the title European Organization for Nuclear Research, although the name CERN was retained.
Sounds like a fabulous outing Scotty, I hope you enjoy every minute. :good:
-
If you take me with you Scotty, I will post loads of really bad Ferrari / Schumacher comments :DD
Enjoy yourself mate that is a once in a lifetime experience, they do some serious 'Star Trek' stuff there.
-
I have to say I am very jealous. Have fun Scotty
-
Monday Oct 12th...can't wait!
-
So how was it Scott?
-
Yeah, all that build up then no report. :o
-
According to recent press reports the collider has been sabotageing itself from the future, :o so I guess we have to wait a month or so for Scotty's report from next year to filter back in time. :D :DD :DD
-
I haven't even downloaded the pics from my camera yet...I was going to give you the report with them included. Give me a couple of days, it was a crazy busy weekend at the hotel.
Amazing though...stay tuned.
-
Alright...here goes.
I won't presume to give you guys a physics lesson, but here are the raw basics. We are constantly bombarded with particles from space, most of which are harmless, most of which are known. The idea was to take the most basic of particles, protons, and send them around a magnetic accelerator at a bit less than the speed of light, try to make them collide, and then use massive detectors to see what happens.
Depending on their specialty in physics, theoretical physicists believe these detectors could find new particles that are so far only theoretical, or dark matter, or perhaps even black holes and the slim possibility of finding a new dimension.
Whatever it finds, it will be on an extremely tiny scale, and could exist for a tiny fraction of a second (to debunk the consipiracy theorists who say turning on CERN could end the world).
Presently they are in the process of cooling all the magnets in the LHC Large Haydron Collider, of which there are some 3500 in a 27km ring ranging from 70-140m below earth and surrounded by 6m of cement. The LHC should be turned on right about the same time as Flavio is in court in France (unfortunately, he'll probably get more publicity).
The CMS detector, which was the experiment we had a tour of is an extremely heavy detector consisting of various detector elements including hand grown crystals, which account for most of its weight. It was assembled in the building above ground in seven sections that were lowered with one of the largest cranes (in regards to weight capacity) in the world and then slid together underground in the cavern that was built to hold it. They developed a revolutionary system of rolling airbags to put it together underground since there was no place for a crane.
So, here are some pictures...
-
We knew we were getting close to CERN because of the strange glow coming from the ground...the building is the above ground centre for the CMS experiment that we toured 100m underground.
-
This photo shows the 27km ring as it goes through the countryside. Most of it is on the French side of the border mainly due to expropriation laws that make it near impossible to expropriate land in Switzerland (which is why there are so many tunnels in Switzerland in case anyone wondered - highways are cheaper to build underground than through parcels of private land). In France they just sign a paper and bingo! the land is now the governments.
-
The now empty control room (actually only about a third of it) of CMS, only one of four major experiments on the ring itself. Once they turn it on, the room will be packed with physicists probably with standing room as well.
-
This monitor is showing the CMS status screen. While we were there, there were probably 30-40 technicians making last minute maintenance and adjustments.
-
This screen shows 5 control rooms around the world that are on 24hr video conference. At first I thought that this was a huge waste of satellite time, but they pointed out that I shouldn't forget that CERN was the birthplace of the internet, and as such they have probably some of the biggest broadband pipes in the world going into it, and those crisp videos don't take up much of the capacity (I thought about asking them to see if they could stream F1 on race days, but thought better of it).
The dork in the orange shirt would be me taking a picture of the screen.
-
Above ground security gate (card access) before the elevator.
The guy in the hard hat would be me about to be science-fied
-
This is some of the detector cabling. They are not computer racks, but detector processor systems (the computers are above ground). There are 6 rows of these over two separate floors. In the info centre, they showed us a stack of CD's which was to show how much data is collected each second by the detectors. The stack (without cases) was about 6m high.
-
Here are the underfloor cable runs as we went down the stairs.
-
The first door says it all.
-
The second shot is of a retina scan gate. If this gate is breached while the LHC is turned on, the whole thing shuts down and it takes over 3 weeks to cool everything down again before they can turn it on. This was one of the reasons we were unable to go into the accelorator tunnel itself...they had already stared pumping helium into the accelerator magnets to cool them down in preparation for November's startup.
There was also some sort of magnetic field when we went through the door. We were told not to have any loose change in our pockets...but it didn't affect my camera. I think the loose change rule is to prevent jokers from dropping coins through the metal grate floors into the guts of the place and causing havoc.
-
We are now in the CMS cavern. This shot is looking up at a massive hole in the ceiling, which goes up 100m and is how they dropped down each of the seven sections of the CMS.
-
This is from one end of the CMS detector itself. It is 15m high, 45m long and weighs something ridiculous like 27000 metric tons (I've forgotten exactly, but you can check the website yourself if you like). The lower half of the detector is pretty much the same, but was obstructed by a ton of equipment. The detector is exactly symetrical, so it looks the same from both ends. The protons enter it from both sides at the same speed.
Throughout the tunnels, there are two beams of protons going through the accelerators. At each of the 4 points where the experiments are, they are forked together using massive magnets. The accelerators will be populated by millions of protons at the same time running in opposite directions, but they expect that only a tiny fraction of them will actually collide. The entire LHC will be filled with protons over a short period and then they will just run continuously for about 7-8 hrs at a time until the beams diminish. Then it is filled up again and it starts all over.
You can see part of the beam fork shrowded in orange steel on the lower right hand side.
-
These were our hosts. The one in the centre with the white hard hat is the tour guide, who is a retired physicist who was actually responsible for the project that grew most of the crystals inside the CMS detector. He had an example to show us, and it weighted 3 times what I thought it would when I picked it up. The tall one on the right is the one who organized the tour for me - he is a theoretical physicist who works on another experiment called Atlas, which is no longer available for tours. The woman on the right is the wife of another physicist who had never been down in one of the caverns before, and thought she had better before it was too late (once it is turned on in November, that's it - no more tours).
-
This is the beam fork, which begins the process of bringing the beams together so that they collide inside the CMS. It was amazing to realize that all this massive machinery was to carry two small beams thinner than a pen refill. The green cylinders are some sort of magnetic system which bends the beams together.
-
These massive steel orange doors swing shut to shrowd the beam fork (keep in mind that this is not the technical word for it). They are all part of the system to control the magnetic fields that are involved in bending the beams.
-
This isn't a very interesting picture, but it is actually a shot into the guts of the CMS between the first and second sections of the experiment. I was amazed at how much of each section was self-contained. You could see way in almost to the beam pipes themselves.
-
Well, that's it. If you are starting here, scroll way down to my first introduction and then move your way back up to the top.
I hope you guys enjoyed the pics I put in. There are plenty more at http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/Media/Images/PhotoBook/index.html , which are far more impressive than mine, but they were taken almost two years ago when the CMS was being assembled.
-
Cheers Scotty :good:
There is nothing like a bit of physics to make you feel like a right thicko. I wish I knew what the half of it was all about.
-
Outstanding, Scotty! :good:
I've been looking forward to the pix. they were well worth the wait.
Thanks,
Cos
-
Looks amazing Scott. I'm sure it was fascinating.