"" bshawise: Ring of Magnets

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Ring of Magnets


Have you read about the CERN Large Hadron Collider (code name: LHC)? It's $531 million ring of supercooled magnets 17 miles in circumference straddling the French and Swiss border 330 feet underground. The ring is attached to huge barrel-shaped detectors (essentially gigantic digital cameras weighing thousands of tons each that can take millions of snapshots a second. Each year the detectors will generate 15 petabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of CDs 12 miles tall. What happens in this ring of magnets you ask? Beams of protons whip around the 17 mile track 11,000 times a second in opposite directions. And SMASH into each other. What happens then? Depends which scientists you ask. The ones in the video below believe we'll discover the secrets of the universe, invisible matter, new dimensions. Other legitimate scientists think it'll spawn a black hole that will swallow the earth. They'll admit it's a long shot, one in 50 million chance, but argue it's the same odds as winning the lottery. Which...happens. I believe we'll discover Tang 2.0.

I am intrigued to see what happens. But even more so, it makes me wonder how we have the ability to build a machine that not-crazy scientists believe has the power to suck us all into an invisible hole YET, we can't build a car that runs on anything besides gas. Or a device that can replace my pancreas. Or a better way to apply sunscreen. We're a month from creating tiny black holes and entering new dimensions but years from seemingly simple breakthroughs that could actually change a lot of peoples' lives. What a crazy world we live in.

4 comments:

John Arns said...

You said it Brad - craaazy world. But despite everything, our God works in marvelous ways to sovereignly ALLOW both the sane and the crazy scientists to make discoveries, whether they acknowledge Him or not in their work. The Lord makes all things work for His glory in His time -- He's created situations where scientists and doctors achieve great success in medical miracles to benefit us -- and just maybe those seemingly simple breakthroughs won't be as far into the future as we think! I'm hoping for that! ~~Let's keep focused on the HEAVENLY BLUEPRINTS~~

Clarke said...

i too, think it's silly that they can build stuff like that and yet, we still have cars that run on gas. we most definitely have the technology, so why am i still paying $4.10 a gallon? balogna.

John Arns said...

I agree completely regarding cars and gasoline ! Too frustrating ! But rest assured, the greedy mongrels halting technological advances for their own benefit will eventually get their comeuppance.

Anonymous said...

Yeah. I live right on top of this magical magnet. Welcome to Geneva.