![[sex and science]](http://www.sunclipse.org/downloads/sexandscience3.png)
Well, my companion in crime known as the evilutionary superscientist P-Zed has blessed my site with a traffic surge, so it looks like I'm officially in business. And while I'm futzing around trying to fix the standard problems of a new installation (RSS feeds, integration with the rest of the hive mind, etc.), it's worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that some people face technical challenges several orders of magnitude more difficult.
Tim Head of Manchester has made this time-lapse video of the construction of the ATLAS detector, a major component of the soon-to-be-operational Large Hadron Collider. Squeezing five years of webcam footage into five minutes of video gives a rather visceral sense of the daunting complexity involved here. Soon, protons will be flying through this machine at 99.99-and-a-bunch-of-nines percent the speed of light, slamming into each other to make subatomic conflagrations whose temperature reaches that seen a mere nanosecond after the Big Bang. The flying debris from these collisions, particles whose energies and trajectories ATLAS will record, will create enough data to fill the equivalent of 27 CDs per minute — that's with the filter which picks 100 interesting events out of a billion — and frustrate a generation of graduate students.
There's three megameters of cable in there:
Tip a' the fedora to Seth Zenz.
Physical Science
Technology
Comments
When I was a child we thought of physics as staid and uninteresting. Little did we know. Now we understand how much you can learn by making things go real fast and crash into other things.
Posted by: Alan Kellogg | August 27, 2008 9:34 AM
I take it, then, that your RSS feeds won't automatically switch over from the old site to the new. *sigh* I suppose I can take literally seconds out of my day to click my mouse something like three times to update my feeds rather than you or some SciBlog tech guy taking who knows how long to switch your feed on the back end, but I won't be happy about it, no sir!
Posted by: Flavin | August 27, 2008 9:55 AM
Blake, Welcome to the ScienceBlogs fold. I will add you to my must visit list along with PZ, LM, & RD. I am particularly interested in the LHC. The results should be interesting. Any commentary on the developing story we be helpful.
Aethist and Proud
DenisC
Posted by: Denis Castaing | August 27, 2008 10:17 AM
Uh-oh, did anyone else notice that guy under-tightening that bolt? That's gonna come back at them :*)
I'm sure I recall Frank Close closing his RI Christmas lecture describing the excitement and awe one can feel by being the first person ever, in the whole of human history, to see a new sub-atomic particle trace from one of these detectors. Physics is fun, it's exciting, it's truly inspirational.
Posted by: Peter | August 27, 2008 10:25 AM
neither RSS nor atom seem to be playing ball. Is it just me having problems subscribing (through, via and around Google Reader)?
Posted by: Jonathan | August 27, 2008 10:26 AM
Argh. Sunclipse now appears in the list of blogs and the list of RSS feeds, but the feeds themselves aren't working. Oh, but my content is showing up in the Physical Science channel.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 27, 2008 10:29 AM
Welcome! I look forward to following this blog.
Posted by: Glenn | August 27, 2008 10:35 AM
Welcome to the Collective. Your RSS feeds are still Borged. Erm, borked.
Wait, what was I saying?
Posted by: StuV | August 27, 2008 11:05 AM
This must be, without a doubt, the most complex hi tech machinery ever build my humankind :S
Last sunday I overheard an IDiot saying that ID doesn't get results because the goverment doesn't give them this kinda funding to build a chronovisor to see the exact moment when the sky fairy pixie turns on the light at the beginning of times. Alas...
And welcome!
Posted by: Mytho | August 27, 2008 11:13 AM
It looks like we are going to get a real SCIENCE blog for once.
Unless it degenerates into a hate religion site.
TRY to remember that SCIENCE does not equal ATHEISM.
Posted by: Goldstein | August 27, 2008 11:19 AM
Hi Blake - Just stopped over from Orac's blog. Nice video of the ATLAS - Thanks.
Posted by: DavidCT | August 27, 2008 11:21 AM
Grow up, Goldstein. ScienceBlogs is for personal blogs with a heavy scientific slant. If Blake wants to make fun of religion, he will, and the rest of us will laugh, because it will probably be funny.
Posted by: mollishka | August 27, 2008 11:35 AM
The LHC is just awesome. I wish we would have built the one here in the US. Keep us posted (I am sure it will be in the news in a big way, but I always find way more stuff from blogs such as this one).
P
Posted by: Mr P | August 27, 2008 11:50 AM
I like how everything stops once a year for Christmas/New Years. We might be about to crack some deep secrets of the universe, but we still like our vacations :-)
Posted by: Matt | August 27, 2008 12:10 PM
Are there plans to create a distributed computing project to help with all of that data? That would be badass.
Posted by: Dustin | August 27, 2008 1:59 PM
Posted by: Dustin | August 27, 2008 2:02 PM
Does it come with a remote?
Posted by: Qwerty | August 27, 2008 2:29 PM
Very cool video Blake. Thanks for that.
Oh... and welcome to the scienceblogosphere(?)!
-DU-
Posted by: David Utidjian | August 27, 2008 4:06 PM
i expect there's folks fighting over that remote already.
All hands ready and lurking Capt. Blake.
:)
Posted by: Dustman | August 27, 2008 6:21 PM
One of the really sad (and scary) parts of the ridiculously high bitrate, of course, is that it means there will be no truly serendipitous discoveries made by the LHC; only what is expected and therefore filtered for will the found. Eek!
Posted by: moll | August 27, 2008 6:42 PM
In principle, yes; in practice, I'm not so sure that's really the right perspective. I mean, how is it any different from saying an accelerator can't detect physics which manifests at higher energies than the accelerator can achieve, or that a ground-based telescope can't observe the sky at frequencies blocked by the Earth's atmosphere? Then, too, the history of science is brimming over with discoveries made because the equipment was sensitive to a phenomenon even though nobody knew so beforehand. Optical microscopes are limited by the wavelength of visible light, but merely knowing this fact alone does not determine the behaviour of E. Coli in a dish.
In order to know if we've got a real problem, we'd have to have a specific hypothesis of new, interesting physics whose predictions would be lost in the LHC background.
When the United States fired Explorer 1 into orbit, the NASA guys were puzzled by the fact that sometimes, the radiation level measured by its onboard Geiger counter dropped to zero. Then a researcher realized that if the radiation count was too high, the counter would max out and read zero. Explorer 3 went into orbit with a shield around its Geiger–Müller tube which partially blocked the incident radiation, and sure enough, the numbers went up and up: in the regions of space where Explorer 1 had registered no radiation, the follow-up satellite found that there had simply been too many charged particles for the first probe to handle. And that's how we found out about the Van Allen Radiation Belts.
The moral of the story: the limits of the first experiment you try don't by themselves determine what you'll find out.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | August 27, 2008 7:35 PM