Sunday, November 22, 2009

Throwing Protons at Protons

I love tech stuff. This kind of research is fascinating but I really wonder how practical this is going to be to the world. Humanity may not need to know how the Big Bang happened, we know how it turned out. Maybe they will find out how to beam whole matter around and eventually bring us the Transporter Beam. Any way, what ever, there was a huge amount of money sunk into this facility which was supposed to go here in the U.S. but federal money could not be had so it went overseas.

This video does a really good job of describing what is going on inside the several underground rings. Really fascinating to me.


On my last flight out west I flew through Chicago's Midway airport which is not anything special but on the flight out heading west the plane flew low for many miles instead of the immediate climb to cruising altitude. As we flew southwest over the Illinois prairie I could easily make out the ring of the buried Fermi National Accelerator which is no where near the size of the Hadron Collider (6.28km versus 27,m). Just as impressive however for what they use them for, almost nothing. Fermi Labs being famous for the first controlled nuclear pile (hand calculations provided by Enrico Fermi himself).

Interesting. Not sure of the benefit except for winning at Trivia.

BT: Jimmy T sends.

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