Well, we have a beam going all the way around, yay! Looking at the grid monitoring systems our site is still up and running. All good.
Actually, not much work is being done here at RAL — there is a big area in one of the other buildings with a couple of screens showing News24, and this is full of people drinking coffee and eating cake. Elsewhere on site, many of the people not down there have live news coming out of radios and PCs in their offices.
This really is a big deal. While we are some way off actually having any serious results coming out of the LHC (they need to get a beam circulating in the other direction, then get collisions happening, and then ramp the energy levels up to the point where the exciting stuff can actually happen), the media coverage has been phenomenal and despite the rubbish being spouted about the end of the world, we are actually seeing some good mainstream science coverage. It's really difficult to explain just how cool this is, but I think this will probably have the significance of (or exceeding) the moon landings. Only time will tell.
I'm just chuffed (and humbled) to actually be a very tiny part of this experiment. I wish I understood it better, but it's a good incentive to do some more studying.
1 comment:
Congratulations, it's one of the great achievements of the century, indeed of any century. It's wonderful when so many countries and people come together and build a huge machine with only one purpose, to see the universe as it really is.
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The Universe:
...Such stuff as dreams are made on...
Yet stuff to thump, to call a spade a spade on.
No myth - Bantu,
Kurd, Urdu, Finnish, Erse -
Had for the heaven such hankering
As ours, that made new eyes for seeing true.
For seeing what we are:
Sun-bathers of a nuclear star,
Scuffling through curly quarks - mere fact a merry thing!
Then let's, with the girls and good P.L., sing carols in a ring!
Caution: combustible myth, though. Near and far
The core's aglow. Ho heat like this,
No heat like science and poetry when they kiss.
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The Observatory Ode
John Frederick Nims
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