Large Hadron Collider Begins Testing
 

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/i...a4at144dpi.jpg

The Large Hadron Collider, soon-to-be the world's most powerful atom smasher, begins testing this weekend.

CERN will fire the first test beam through one of the particle accelerator's sectors.

?It?s, ?Let?s see what happens,? ? Judy Jackson, head of the Office Communications at Fermilab, told Popular Mechanics. ?It?s a very complex machine. This is a step towards getting ready.?

Then, on September 10th, a full-power beam will travel through the accelerator's entire 17 miles of tunnels, reaching up to 99.99 percent of the speed of light. And finally, assuming all goes well, the first real science experiments will begin some time in October.

Though the initial test beams won't be nearly as energetic as physicists hope subsequent beams will be, they mark an important milestone for the world's largest machine. It's cost something like $8 billion and taken 12 years to build it and now we all get to see if it actually, you know, works. After it's up and running, researchers hope to use it to answer some remarkably important questions about the nature of mass, dark matter, and the earliest moments of our universe.


?It?s, ?Let?s see what happens,? ? WTF!?!?!?!?!?!? :Oh crap

i volunteered to be the first guy to have a hot potato fired up his ass at the speed of light...

lets hope i get the call... fingers crossed....

They really need a different spokesperson for that doomsday machine.

"And finally, assuming all goes well..."

Fuck sakes people... this is shit we DO NOT WANT TO READ!

this is fucking stupid. All that money to determine when earth was created?

LITTTTTTTTTTTLE Bit more to it than that. Google Higgs Boson or god particle. Also google gravitons.

I read this wrong. I thought it said Large Hardon Collider... I was looking for a new gay sponsor. :pimp

No. Things like this people always say "what a waste of money" usually because they don't understand what it fully means. What this means to physics and science in general should be pretty huge. The knowledge that this can bring in... who knows what kind of new discoveries science can make with this $8,000,000,000 "Toy".

Most every toy that we have today once started as something that most thought was incredibly stupid.

That picture is really cool, it's like something out of X-Men.

And actually, $8 billion is not even all that much in the grand scheme of things and when it is being backed by some of the worlds largest economies over a period of 12 years...

Uhhh so what is it?

That sounds alot like “Let’s see if we're still here tomorrow”. :(

Yeah, it's like a weekend for the US military in Iraq.

...couldn't have said that better

sad but true.