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Sascha Mehlhase built a model of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider out of LEGO bricks! It contains around 9,500 bricks and took 33 hours to assemble, in addition to 48 total hours of work just designing it. Read more about and see more pictures at his site. Link -via reddit
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Scientists at CERN in Geneva are releasing results of an experiment and are asking for scientific reviews. They’ve found that subatomic neutrinos may move faster than photons, which means faster than the speed of light. If all findings are accurate, this would debunk Einstein’s theory of relativity claim that nothing can move faster than light.
Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds* faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds.
However, even Ereditato says it’s way too early to declare relativity wrong. “I would never say that,” he says. Rather, OPERA researchers are simply presenting a curious result that they cannot explain and asking the community to scrutinize it. “We are forced to say something,” he says. “We could not sweep it under the carpet because that would be dishonest.” The results will be presented at a seminar tomorrow at CERN.
*60 nanoseconds = 0.00000006 seconds. Double-checking the results must be painstaking.
These computer generated images were created during experiments to replicate the big bang. Scientists at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland are doing so in an effort to determine how the universe came into existence by recreating sub atomic explosions that may have occurred during the time of the big bang.
It sounds like something out of Star Trek but scientists have been able to trap antimatter for 17 minutes, improving on an experiment last Fall that was able to trap antimatter for merely fractions of seconds.
So just how difficult is it to trap antimatter for study? Just like in Star Trek, the combination of matter and antimatter particles leads to the annihilation of both and the production of a small flash of energy. Thus, to successfully trap antimatter, researchers use magnetic fields to contain antiatoms. When they turn off the field, the resulting annihilation events–recorded by a special detector–clue the scientists into just how many antiatoms are left after a set period of containment time.
Like Miss Cellania earlier posted, scientists today are celebrating the success of the Large Hadron Collider. CERN scientists were able to collide protons at energy levels never seen before, marking the beginning of a whole new world of physics experimentation. And, again we say, “Yippee No Black Holes.”
There was cheering in the control room at CERN, the European nuclear research centre in Switzerland, as one of the biggest and most complicated scientific experiments got fully underway.
The experiment is seen as a major breakthrough in efforts to understand the fundamental nature of the universe.
Link (At the link you can listen to a BBC interview with Dr Bose from Boston University.)
We just wanted to remind you that you can get your own Large Hadron Collider T-shirt by visiting the online shop.
You can’t make stuff like this up. A piece of a baguette dropped by a passing bird caused a shutdown at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
The LHC is scheduled to be reactivated later this month. The bread incident won’t affect those plans. Link -via Boing Boing
