• mr_robot@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    10 months ago

    Remember how nut-jobs were convinced that using the LHC would create an earth-eating black hole? I miss the simpler times.

    Uneducated conspiracy theorists seemed laughably quaint back in 2012.

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      2012? The LHC black hole shit was the mid 2000s, around 2008 is when it peaked.

      Which itself was a repeat of the same concerns that were thrown around in 2003, when CERN thoroughly debunked them the first time.

      And I have full confidence we’ll see a return of them once this project gets closer to fruition.

  • Gork@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    Are the two intersecting to give scientists the option of transferring from one collider to the other? If so, why intersect at two points (they overlap a little) instead of just one (at a single tangent point)?

    • Fermion@mander.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      https://www.cern/science/accelerators/accelerator-complex

      Yes, the maximum energy that a syncrotron can accelerate a beam to is determined by its size and field strength. There are multiple rings that are used to bring beams up in energy levels before feeding to the next. Each ring has many bunches of particles circulating. So each bunch has to be going close to the same speed. You wouldn’t want to do all the accelerating in one ring because it wouldn’t allow nearly continuous operation.

      As for two intersecting points, the collisions involve colliding two beams. So there’s two different kicking/injecting points one for each direction.

      https://cds.cern.ch/record/2002005/files/CERN-ACC-2015-030.pdf