The Large Hadron Collider goes live today. Some people have been concerned that it will accidentally destroy the planet (see first reference), if not a good chunk of the universe. Such worries are overstated; there is an infinitesimal chance that it will destroy part of France.
Just in case, though, watch this site. If the message of the day at “Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?” changes, take the relevant precautions.
: Zubon
HT: Daniel Drucker
Update: xkcd rings in again.
For these interested in following the experiment there is a live webcast which is currently overloaded here http://webcast.cern.ch/index2.html
And a less overloaded twitter page here http://twitter.com/cern
I am going to keep pinging that site so I will know. You know “Be Prepared” and all that.
In high school I went to the FermiLab saturday morning physics program, it was a ton of fun. That was actually the same year Leon Lederman won the Nobel Prize which was neat. We had little classes that he and some of the other physicists taught, and got to “see the experiments” which is basically a bunch of grad students sitting in front of a computer.
Though we did get to see the experimental equipment – themselves were basically a giant room sized block of material, or water, that tried to detect particles shooting through it.
Also most of that equipment was painted orange and blue at the time, so I guess someone went to Illinois.
And buffaloes, lots of buffaloes, the joke being “the buffaloes die first”
The biggest thing I learned was that they didn’t do integrals, they hated them too! (yay!) Instead they plotted graphs on paper and cut them out, then weighed the paper. Compared to a known area of paper a simple ratio revealed the area under the curve. :) Damn and I spent all that time in calculus.
“there is an infinitesimal chance that it will destroy part of France.”
The CERN is in Switzerland ! :p
The LHC lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border.