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BEHIND THE CERNS

August 24, 2009
by TOM LITTLEWOOD

Motherboard

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If you haven’t hit your nerd limit with today’s episode of Motherboard, here are some more pictures from our trip to the CERN Gigantic Earth Destroyer—sorry, Large Hadron Collider…

This scary-looking monster is called ALICE. It‘s going to detect the behavior of particles in the aftermath of a collision similar to that of the big bang. Everyone‘s hoping it will also generate a quark-gluon plasma, which will help us understand why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they’re made of.

This is Daniel Dobos, our guide for the ATLAS portion of the facility. He was a big Dan Brown fan and even had a personalized jacket with invertible writing.

To ensure superconductivity in the magnets, the whole Collider has to be cooled to -271.3°C (colder than outer space) which involves over 10,000 tons of liquid nitrogen and nearly 60 tons of liquid helium. If this stuff gets into the air it‘s not a good idea to take a little nap.

Despite being over 26 kilometers in circumference, the LHC is completely undetectable from the surface. The entire accelerator is housed approximately 100 meters underground and is accessed by a series of lifts and eerie tunnels like this one.

This is the computer control center of the LHC where the technicians prime the proton clouds before releasing them into the main accelerator. The monitor in the middle at the top is the incident alarm. As with most alarms, red indicates a serious error, but our guide claimed he had everything under control.

The control center also boasts a fine selection of empty champagne bottles. These represent the milestones that the guys down there have surpassed. As you can see, everything looks to be right on schedule.

Safe in the knowledge that no one wants a hungry scientist smashing particles together at approx 187,000 miles per second, there are three different restaurants on the CERN premises. This particular delicacy was a traditional French entrecote with pomme-terres purées and a tasty little jus de pois. Yes, we know what it looks like.

As well as thousands of the world‘s best scientists, CERN also relies on armies of technicians to test, maintain, and retest the delicate equipment. They’re the ones responsible for the occasional tags and hangmen you see around the facility (according to the scientists).

This unassuming little box is the hub of CERN‘s data transfer system. It also provides internet service to the population of Switzerland.

That’s about all from us, if you are still up for more megascience/convinced that all the stuff we’re talking about is actually somehow going to suck the planet into a black hole of its own devising, you should probably read this interview with LHC project leader Lyn Evans from Vice.