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Do you believe in nuclear power, or is that more stupid ?
Are you afraid they might find some of the things they're looking for?
No, I am. I love that stuff. But I just don't go for evolution or the big bang and all that stupid . For me to sit around and try to believe any human knows for sure how we got here is completely re ed.
Do you believe in nuclear power, or is that more stupid ?
Are you afraid they might find some of the things they're looking for?
I've been watching the History Channel and they have been talking about CERN or w/e it is. Apparently we wouldn't have the internet or cell phones without it, so they say.
No.
No.
Honestly think humans are going to surely know how we got here and came to be? Nah-uh.
This thing rules, if for no other reason it is the beginning of The Grid era:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3689881.ece
Coming soon: superfast internet
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research ins utions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
So ze internets will come from one place, then to get bombed, and we all be forced to go into ze sunlight! Noooos!
Oh and btw I just registered the domain, http://grid.spurstalk.com/ and I'm not selling.
That's not a domain. Spurstalk.com is a domain - and it's not for sale.
I hope they're better at physics
The sad thing----The US and the State of Texas could have had the world's first large Super Collider. Construction of a super collider was actually started in North Texas in the 1980's but was cancelled due to poor management, cost overruns and politics. The cost had escalated from $4 billion to +$14 billion. Because of this we abdicated leadership in this field to the Europeans. Yet today we can fund $100 billion to mortgage companies and spnd billions more fighting stoneage civilizations half the world away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superco...Super_Collider
Smooth start for 'Big Bang' machine
PA
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Scientists today launched the "Big Bang experiment" - an attempt to recreate the start of the universe using the biggest and most complex machine yet built.
The £5bn Large Hadron Collider was powered up without a hitch at Cern, the European nuclear research organisation in Geneva.
After a tense first hour researchers announced they had achieved "full beam", meaning that a stream of sub-atomic particles was racing round the LHC's 27 kilometre-long circular tunnel at just under the speed of light. The next stage will be to fire a beam in the opposite direction.
The LHC, which took two decades to construct, is the largest particle accelerator the world has seen.
It is designed to smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other with energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before.
In the flashes from the collisions, scientists expect to reproduce conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the birth of the universe.
No one knows precisely what will come tumbling out of the primordial soup of disintegrating protons.
But the scientists have dismissed suggestions that the experiment could somehow cause the end of the world.
The LHC could help scientists explain mass, gravity, mysterious "dark matter" and why the universe looks the way it does.
It could also produce the first evidence of extra spatial dimensions and even create mini-black holes that blink in and out of existence in a fraction of a second.
The LHC, housed in the 27km (17 mile) tunnel under 100m of rock, straddles the borders of Switzerland and France between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.
Excitement builds for Cern scientists
"Turning on" the machine was a lot more complex than flicking a switch.
Atoms of hydrogen housed in a bottle no bigger than a fire extinguisher were first stripped of their electrons to reveal naked protons.
These particles then had to be fired through a succession of smaller accelerators before they were travelling at sufficient speed to be injected into the LHC.
It was a process that required unimaginable levels of precision with timing accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond.
The particles travel through a ring-shaped tunnel supercooled to just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (minus 271C), the lowest temperature allowed by nature.
Reaching velocities of 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, each beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 150km per hour.
The protons will be brought together in four huge "detectors" placed along the ring. Each detector is like a giant microscope, designed to probe deeper into the heart of matter than has been possible before.
Concerns have been voiced, in particular by German chemist Professor Otto Rossler, that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".
But those involved in the project insist they have reviewed all the evidence and concluded that it poses no risk to the universe.
Particle physicist Dr James Gillies, a spokesman for the LHC, said: "We have received a lot of worried calls from people about it.
"There's nothing to worry about, the LHC is absolutely safe because we have observed nature doing the same things the LHC will do.
"Protons regularly collide in the earth's upper atmosphere without creating black holes."
The first particle collisions are likely to take place within a few weeks.
In some cases, teams of more than 2,000 collaborating scientists will be sifting and analysing data from the machine.
Most will not be at the LHC's operating base at Cern.
A revolutionary computer network called the "Grid" - the next step beyond the World Wide Web - will make it possible for scientists all over the world to share huge amounts of processing power and carry out much of the work on their PCs.
The cost of the LHC is mainly shared by Cern's 20 European member states, which include Britain. Six "observer" nations, including the US, Russia and Japan, make significant contributions.
Cern estimates the total cost of the project to be 10 billion Swiss francs, or £5bn. The material cost alone is put at £2.6bn.
Britain's direct contribution to the LHC each year is £34m.
The eyes of the world were on LHC project leader Dr Lyndon Evans, from Aberdare in south Wales, in the run-up to the "switch-on".
Looking relaxed in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, Dr Evans counted down the last few seconds before the first beam of protons was put into the LHC.
"Five, four, three, two, one, zero - nothing," he joked before a blip appeared on a computer monitor signalling that the long years of hard work had paid off and the machine was working.
Dr Evans, whose father was a coalminer, said: "This is really the biggest and most complex scientific project ever undertaken, and you cannot do a thing like this without engineers and applied scientists of very top quality."
Skills Secretary John Denham hailed the launch of the LHC today as an "extraordinary moment".
Noting that the project had taken two decades to come to fruition, he joked: "My lab technique used to be bad but I used to get set up quicker than that."
Mr Denham said theoretical research like this often produced practical benefits but said this was not the only concern of the Government in providing funding.
He said: "We do this fundamentally because we need to know. We need to know as human beings because we have a curiosity, an intellectual excitement."
Professor Jordan Nash, from Imperial College London, is working on one of the LHC's four experiments.
His team will help to analyse data provided by the 12,500-tonne CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector, which is designed to look for new physics in any form.
He said: "It's about testing theories and trying to pick which one of them is right.
"Theorists without data can't tell us which is the right answer."
Prof Nash said their discoveries could clinch Nobel Prizes for British physicists Professors Stephen Hawking and Peter Higgs if they confirm their theories.
But he added: "It's not about prizes. All of us do it out of fundamental curiosity about how the universe works.
"We have done all the easy stuff over the last 2,000 years. To push further takes a hugely complex apparatus."
Prof Nash said "big discoveries" could come out of the LHC over the next year or two - although he stressed that they might be buried in the huge amount of data the machine will produce.
"What we are going to learn is what nature consists of, not what we think it consists of - we may be barking up totally the wrong tree," he said.
"Today is the start. It means that we have successfully completed the preparations. Now we actually get to start harvesting the data."
Britain has contributed more than £500m to the construction of the LHC over the past 20 years.
Dr Andrew Taylor, director of facilities at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which supplies the UK's funding for Cern, said the machine would enable scientists to explore the "fabric of the universe".
He said he would "bet his house" that the LHC would discover the particle proposed by Prof Higgs - dubbed the "God Particle" - which is thought to explain how matter acquires mass.
Dr Taylor said British scientists helped to conceive and construct the massive machine - and would be heavily involved in the mammoth collaborative task of interpreting the data.
"The UK punches above its weight at an amazing level," he said. "Our theorists have been responsible for shaping the direction of the LHC."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sc...ne-924755.html
The only thing that actually sounds fishy to me is the constant running out of
"its the same thing that happens in nature every day"
Then why did you have to spend billions to study it. Go outside.
Yeah I don't think lone H+ atoms are flying at near the speed of light naturally every day, in a cold vacuum..........even in space. Where would the energy required come from?
Is it also completely re ed for humanity to want to figure out where we came from or how we got here? If you believe in God, surely it makes sense that God gave us brains for us to use to figure out. You know... experiments and stuff like that.
Everyone still exist?
Yes or maybe it's no.
I don't believe in the big bang.
And if someone believes in God they know how they got here.
haha you said hard on.....
Yeah, but we all think it's 2008 and have no consciousness of the reality of 2022.
Of course. Why wouldn't we?
All they did today was "tread" it. Shoot a bean through it and adjust the control magnets. The real experiments don't start till next month! Then they plauy with the God Particle:
The Higgs boson or BEH Mechanism, popularised as the "God Particle", is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics; and is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. An experimental observation of it would help to explain how otherwise massless elementary particles cause matter to have mass. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson is an integral and pervasive component of the material world.
I re-read the le and thought I saw hard on
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