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Extreme Engineering

Entry 850, on 2008-09-13 at 15:05:29 (Rating 2, Science)

As I said in my last blog entry, the Large Hadron Collider seems to have captured the attention of a lot of the general public. This is unusual because they are usually very apathetic towards matters concerning science. I've been reading some information on, and viewing some pictures of, the LHC and its even more awesome than I previously thought.

The LHC is not a project which deserves the response of fear (because of mistaken ideas that it could destroy the world) and rejection (due to its time and cost overruns) - its a project which should be universally admired as a brilliant example of extreme engineering.

Check out these statistics...

The LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world, and one of the biggest machines of any type. Its contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometers and is from 50 to 175 metres underground.

The tunnel contains two parallel beam pipes that intersect at four points. There are 1,232 magnets which keep the beams on their circular path and 392 quadrupole magnets which keep the beams focused. Most of the magnets weigh over 27 tonnes. It takes 96 tonnes of liquid helium to keep the magnets at their operating temperature of 1.9 K (-271 Celsius).

When fully accelerated the protons move at 99.999999% of the speed of light and have an energy of 7 trillion electron volts. They rotate around the ring 11,000 times every second. It will also be possible to collide lead heavy ions with a collision energy of over 1000 trillion electron volts. The proton beam contains similar energy to a bomb yet the total mass is only about one billionth of a gram, and the energy stored in the magnets is equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT.

So its unfortunate that such a brilliant piece of technology is so misunderstood but I suppose that's inevitable when the media seems intent on pursuing simple, sensational stories instead of digging a bit and finding out the real facts.

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