In January 1931 Lawrence and Livingston met their first success. A device about 4.5 inches in diameter used a potential of 1,800 volts to accelerate hydrogen ions up to energies of 80,000 electron volts. Lawrence immediately started planning for a bigger machine. In summer 1931 an eleven-inch cyclotron achieved a million volts.
Yo, DM, should you see this and are bored maybe you could post that image, I still haven’t figured out how to tease the image url out of these things
In his new book, Present at the Creation, Amir D. Aczel tells the story of the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider. With the multibillion-euro collider, researchers hope to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang.
NPR (national public radio) is on a roll. This evening they followed up yesterday’s story with another cool LHC story:
Oh yea, it’s radio, but wait… turning data into sound… Particle Pings: Sounds Of The Large Hadron Collider
by Andrew Prince
“. . . But first, researchers must overcome two very mundane hurdles: how to handle all of the data the LHC generates, and how to get non-scientists to care.
One physicist has a novel way to solve both problems: sound.
“I have some musician friends that I was talking to about physics, which I do a lot, if people will let me, and I was doing impersonations of particles — as you do — or maybe not,” Lily Asquith says with a laugh. She is a physicist who until recently worked with the LHC at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. . .
Is this the collision of just two particles? If that is true, the result is truly remarkable. I counted sixty different direct energy/particle effects this single collision produced (not counting the apparent disintegratioin of the largest particles. .
It also showed that this collision must have been at an almost 45 degree angle on the target, producing an almost 90 degree deflection of the original particle. I wonder what a head-on collision might produce.
This just fascinating stuff!
In his new book, Present at the Creation, Amir D. Aczel tells the story of the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider. With the multibillion-euro collider, researchers hope to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang.
I’m currently reading Aczel’s book. A very friendly presentation of a fantastically complex machine and the ideas behind it.
Gee, I just recall that in a highschool English class we had to choose a not too famous person and write a two or three page biography of him (remember this was in the mid 1940s so the teacher didn’t say “him or her”.) I did mine on Earnest Orlando Lawrence. Bizarre that I still remember his first two names after about 64 years.
Is this the collision of just two particles? If that is true, the result is truly remarkable. I counted sixty different direct energy/particle effects this single collision produced (not counting the apparent disintegratioin of the largest particles. .
It also showed that this collision must have been at an almost 45 degree angle on the target, producing an almost 90 degree deflection of the original particle. I wonder what a head-on collision might produce.
This just fascinating stuff!
Probably not, each packet of protons has 100 BILLION protons in it and there are 2808 packets in each beam. Each collision has billions of potential collisions in each detector.
