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Published online 9 September 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1085
News: Briefing
LHC by the numbers
The largest particle accelerator in the world, which will feel its first full proton beams tomorrow, just oozes numerical hyperbole.
As the world's biggest particle accelerator prepares to crank up its proton beams, Nature rounds up the big numbers behind the mother of all atom smashers.
* 27 kilometres = circumference of the LHC.
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Did they mention: "Probability of unforeseen catastrophic event" ??
Considering that the LHC circumference is 27 km, they could have put it below a city and used the ring to transport people as in a subway - the tunnel was being drilled anyway. Borun Gupta
99.9999991% of lightspeed affords a relativistic mass increase of 7454 times. Each proton would have the apparent mass of a paraffin molecule with 531 carbons. One eagerly anticipates accelerating heavy atomic nuclei for some bigger bangs.
I enjoyed the comparisons to a nuclear aircraft carrier. It appears that the LHC could accelerate the USS Ronald Reagan to 2.8 knots and in the opposing beam line, its sister ship the USS Theodore Roosevelt also to 2.8 knots. The resulting collision would likely spawn destroyers and guided missile frigates as well as a number of short-lived exclamations of "Jumpin' jeeeprs!"
Big Ben is a bell. I thought you might be a bit more accurate with this kind of thing.
"6.9 kilometres = height of 4 million DVDs stacked on top of each other." Is that the height compressed by a gravitational field? Else, Lucy, there's some calculus to do. Otherwise you're putting Mt. Blanc at a disadvantage.
No mention of the bandwidth needed?
Gr8 work by the scientists. We can see New World, The Day After Tomorrow.
Google reports about 2530000 hits for "Higgs boson" and 1810 hits for "higgs bosun".
As mentioned Big Ben is the bell inside the tower. So did it really take 13 years to build the bell? If your researchers really are that poor, to what degree are the factual accuracy of your other stats?
And about 840 reports for Higgs' Bosom
Maybe the Higgs Bosom's explain the ~17,900 references to a "large hardon collider"?
The EU builds the LHC to get meaningful data; what we can get from the US aircraft? A big difference to show the way the EU moves forward and the US keeps still thinking the old way.