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Unlock the origins of universe
This following quotes are from an article at msnbc from March 2, 2007:
'GENEVA - Deep beneath the Swiss-French border near Geneva, thousands of physicists are building the world's largest and most expensive science experiment — a particle collider that they hope will bring them one step closer toward unlocking some of the universe’s oldest secrets.
Meet the Large Hadron Collider.
It is a $4 billion instrument that scientists at the European Center of Nuclear Research, or CERN, hope to use to re-create the big bang — believed to be the event that caused the beginning of the universe — by crashing protons together at high speed.
Housed in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel several hundred feet beneath Switzerland and France, the LHC will operate at 456 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-271 degrees Celsius), and collisions will occur 800 million times a second, the center says.'
It then talks about the magnet (admin: which later produced the first big issue at LHC):
This week, scientists and workers lowered a magnet weighing 2,110 English tons — a weight equivalent to five jumbo jets — 328 feet (100 meters) below ground.
Then continues with:
When they finally flip the switch on the LHC in November (admin: delayed), the magnet and several others will help to drive two streams of protons in opposite directions around the ring at close to the speed of light.
Upon collision, the beams are expected to create many new particles and possibly a reconstruction of the universe in its very first moments.'
And then continues with a quote from Steven Goldfarb, a research scientist from the University of Michigan:
“What's new and exciting to us is if we can try to understand basically our model of the universe, try to understand the building blocks of what we're made up of,”
Goldfarb is one of 2,000 scientists around the world involved in the design, construction and execution of the CERN project. He has been helping to oversee the installation of Atlas, a detector that runs 148 feet (45 meters) long and rises 82 feet (25 meters) high. Atlas is one of four detectors built along the tunnel ring that will capture information generated by the LHC.'
And then continues with:
'In fact, CERN says the collider will produce data at a rate equivalent to 5 million DVDs a year.'
And then talks about the data supercomputing power (admin: Alice, The Grid):
'In order to decipher that information, scientists will need unparalleled supercomputing power. To that end, CERN has come up with a revolutionary data processing system called grid computing, which will send chunks of data to different computers in a global network linked through high-speed connections.
“We need 50,000 PCs-worth of processing power,” says Grey. “Data will be stored in dozens of centers and many labs will be involved in the processing.”'
Source: msnbc
Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17399245
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