When does that massive big "Hydron collider"? thingy start working?

Question

And how soon will we know what fantastic discoveries have been made that will benefit mankind?

Answer 1

According to CERN's web site, the LHC should be in operation by August (2008).

This is their web site.



http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRele...

Answer 2

It will start in about 6 months. Insomniac is wrong, the data will be analyzed not by a dozen individuals, more like 100.000 individuals. At least 12.000 work directly there.

The discoveries churned out will be useless in the short term. It wont lower the price of gas or make your p***s larger but they will help us understand the universe and in the long term develop amazing technologies who you probably will never enjoy, but your descendants will.

And no, the money isnt needed elsewhere. The whole thing costs 10 billion dollar, two fracking weeks worth of funding for the Iraq war.

Answer 3

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator complex intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the standard model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. This model is known to break down at a certain high energy level.

The LHC is being built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.[1] It is funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

The collider is currently undergoing commissioning while being cooled down to its final operating temperature of approximately 2 K (−271.15 °C). The first particle beams are due for injection in August 2008, with the first collisions planned to take place about two months later.

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.  The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.

Concerns have been raised regarding the safety of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the LHC might produce dangerous phenomena, including micro black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles and magnetic monopoles.[16] In response to these concerns, the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, performed a safety analysis of the LHC and concluded in a report published in 2003 that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat".

Prof Irina Aref'eva and Dr Igor Volovich, mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow believe the energies generated by the subatomic collisions in the LHC may be powerful enough to rip space-time itself, spawning wormholes. A wormhole not only has the ability to take a shortcut between two positions in space, it can also take a shortcut between two positions in time. So, the LHC could be the first ever "time machine", providing future time travelers with a documented time and place where a wormhole "opened up" into our time-line. This year could therefore be "Year Zero", the base year by which time travel is limited to.

Relativity doesn't dispute this idea, but the likelihood of a person passing through time is slim-to-impossible when the dimensions of a possible wormhole will be at the sub-atomic level at best and it would only be open for a brief moment. Testing for the presence of a man-made wormhole would be difficult even if we knew what we were looking for (perhaps a small loss in energy during collision, as energy escapes through the wormhole?).

One of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider is to simulate microscopic black holes that might have been generated in the first few moments of the Big Bang. Some people are worried that these artificial black holes might get loose, and then consume the Earth from within, eventually moving on to destroy the Solar System.

The physicists are confident that any black holes they create will evaporate almost instantaneously into a shower of particles. In fact, the theories that predict that black holes can be created also predicts that black holes will evaporate. The two concepts go hand in hand.

The other worry is that the Large Hadron Collider will create a theorized material called strangelets. This "strange matter" would then be able to infect other matter, turning the entire planet into a blog of strange matter.

This strange matter is completely theoretical, and once again, the same theories that say it might be produced in the Large Hadron Collider also rule out any risks from it.

One of the most important considerations is the fact that the Moon is struck by high energy cosmic rays that dwarf the power of the Large Hadron Collider. They were likely blasted out of the environment around a supermassive black hole.

These have been raining down on the Moon for billions of years, and so far, it hasn't turned into a black hole or strange matter.

You can read more about the Large Hadron Collider lawsuit here. Or how it might create wormholes, a view into other dimensions, or unparticles.

Answer 4

Probably another month or two to get running.

Some discoveries and simple measurements might be made in as soon as a few months after that maybe.  Most anticipated discoveries will take years of data collecting and analysis.

None of them is at all likely to be of any practical application anytime remotely soon.  But you never know.  Nobody in the early 1900s could have anticipated the many ways that quantum mechanics would be applied.  And the secondary technological spinoffs of big science projects certainly have value, sometimes far exceeding the initial investment.  CERN claims credit for starting the internet (a bit of a stretch).  If you buy that claim (or at least give them a share of credit along with the US military, Al Gore, and others), then CERN has already paid off all the money invested in it with plenty to spare for a long time.

Answer 5

CERN will be fired-up soon, despite a couple of lawsuits saying "For God's sake don't switch that on!" as it MAY produce a black-hole on the planet, killing us all horribly.  

What discoveries?  Nothing that will cure a sick child, heal the sky or make a gallon of petrol go a yard further in a car.  This is a massive white-elephant, BIG SCIENCE being done, simply because it CAN be done.  If we are not annihilated, a dozen people around the world will look at the conclusions of analysis of MASSES of data, and say "HHmmnn, interesting."

That money is needed elsewhere.