"A thumb, middle finger, and tooth removed from the corpse of Galileo Galilei, lost for a century, have been recovered. The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze are planning to put the relics on display next year.
I think the middle finger should be installed facing the Vatican."
I have huge love for the LHC, but I can't help thinking everytime I see it, that it contains all the essential components of the largest circular mass driver [en.wikipedia.org] we could ever conceive of building.
For the love of G.K.O'Neill [en.wikipedia.org] (and Carl Sagan), why haven't we been able to get an international consortium together to build that?
For merely half of the cost of the LHC (or 25% of it, if it had been built in parallel with the LHC), we'd have a facility capable of launching several hundred tonnes of cargo into low earth orbit, all day, every day, for mere dollars-a-pound, for ever!
[The one in the photo is an artist's impression of a linear (no need to make it circular in a vacuum) lunar mass driver that was tech-spec'd and costed down to the last nut and bolt, a quarter of a century ago. Seriously, WTF?]
@SJ_Edwards: You're missing the point of the LHC. It's a research facility, built to study the origin of matter. A mass driver might be much cheaper, but it won't advance our understanding of the world in any fundamental way.
"artist's impression of a linear (no need to make it circular in a vacuum) lunar mass driver"
Vacuum has nothing to do with whether the mass driver is linear or circular. Moreover, considering that the Moon is much smaller than the Earth, any track laid down on its surface has a larger curvature than a similar track laid down on the Earth's surface, so a lunar mass driver isn't actually linear.
@Roklimber: I appreciate the reply (and the dialogue) as it elucidates my point further.
It is not the avowed (and wholely laudatory) purpose of the the LHC, that prompted my observation.
It is the fact that 60 countries pooled their fiscal, technological, intellectual and far more importantly (for the mass driver) their industrial resources, for a purpose that (as you say) can be of no immediate benefit to them [other than the (very considerable) benefit of participating in a purely scientific research endeavour].
There is a huge commonality of basic technologies between any superconducting supercollider (which is what the LHC is) and a mass driver.
Shorn of all its scientific research related equipment and sensors (ATLAS etc.) the LHC is a giant, circular, underground, superconducting linear motor, designed to gradually accelerate the smallest amounts of mass possible, to relativistic (near light) speed.
An earthbound mass driver is a giant, circular, underground, superconducting linear motor, designed to gradually accelerate [that's the point of it being circular, it allows lower g-forces on the cargo than a linear mass driver (you just send the cargo round and around until it reaches launch escape velocity)] a reasonable amount of cargo mass (kilos or tonnes) to earth escape velocity [17,000 mph (if you don't mind mixing an imperial measure with metric)] .
The LHC required an order of magnitude increase in the industrial production of superconducting materials, superconducting magnets, manufacturing and control technologies and trained a new generation of engineers to design, manufacture, deploy, operate and maintain them.
Most of these people (and the facilities that were created to fulfil this demand) are now unemployed (at least to any meaningful purpose and many in actuality) and will remain so for the foreseable future.
Not the most desirable result.
If you want to advance our understanding of the world (and the universe), the best way to do it is to combine as many countries (and scientists and technicians and bureaucrats) and their resources to achieve (and utilise) cheap, continuous access to space (orbital and deep space exploration and facilities, optical, radio, gamma, x-ray telescopes etc. etc)
[The fact that the original lunar mass driver was envisioned as a linear driver rather than circular (see earlier paragraph) was because its sole purpose was to accelerate 'buckets' of inert mass [either ore for orbital processing, or refined lunar products, aluminium, titanium and iron alloys, water (as ice) [the anticipated availability of which has now been recently confirmed :) ], Helium 3 (!) etc.] in as short a distance as possible, to minimise the total mass of manufactured components needed in the open vacuum available on the lunar surface.
It was a 'bootstrap' enabling technology, allowing the later building of much, much longer lunar surface linear drivers, capable of operating with accelerations compatible with organic materials, fragile manufactured components and living creatures (including and especially humans).
In actuality a linear drive would still be unacceptably long [much as this reply is:) ] operating at these acceleration levels on the lunar surface, as it still needs to be geometrically straight (or 'level', for a circular drive) in order to avoid the unacceptable lateral accelerations caused if it were to attempt to follow, rather than ignore completely (as the LHC does) the curvature of the planet's (0r moon's) surface.
It's a practical engineering cost/ benefit decision that dictates linear drive on the 'open to vacuum' lunar surface for cargo, circular drive for 'man-rated' purposes everywhere and circular drive for all purposes on the (or below) earth surface, where the drive must operate in a created and sustained vacuum, until its 'payload' has reached the required speed and is released tangentially from the circular drive.
In to the atmosphere (and very, very rapidly out of it) in the case of a mass driver and through a further vacuum and into an instumented target in the case of all superconducting supercolliders such as the LHC.]
I hope you appreciate the depth of commonality between these two disparate goals and the technologies needed (and already created with the LHC) to achieve them.
It is a truely fascinating area, where a great deal of time, thought, expertise and capital (most of it personal, rather than private or governmental) has been spent by many incredible people (some sadly, no longer with us) in the turning of a theoretical possibility, into a practical, fully engineered and costed probability.
I hope you find the wikipedia links (and their additional links) that I appended to my original comment rewarding, as it is only through more widespread knowledge, that this probabilty will be actualised.
@ThisDudeRufus: Of course, the more logical scenario is that I'm being prevented from "hitting that" by my future self, who understands that the consequences of it are too horrifying to contemplate.
What about the entire ending of "Knowing"? The world is destroyed by a giant solar flare and you pick two kids to save and live on another planet-- two kids who know nothing about survival. Nice one, stupid aliens. #twister
The moment I read the title of this article I immediately thought of "Ahh they outran the COLD in Day After Tomorrow", so I was glad to see that on the list. I didn't even watch the whole movie, I just caught the end part where they were running from poorly CG'd wolves and the COLD. Ahh.
There was a movie that I can't remember the name of where the characters have to swim through an underwater tunnel for awhile. When they emerge it is pitch dark, so they light a match to see. They light a match. They're completely submerged in water. #twister
@Josh Thibodeau: Well if that's what they were using they didn't do a very good job of explaining that these were special matches that you don't see all the time, which is exactly what they looked like to my untrained eye. #twister
As a long-standing admirer of crap media - yes, I saw _Manos: The Hands of Fate_ *without* robots at the bottom of the screen - I have to defend _The Core_ a bit. Yes, it's silly, but it's intentionally silly. It pokes fun at itself enough that I can't blame it for being ludicrous, and, at the very least, the screenwriters *knew* that the whole idea was thoroughly stupid.
Unlike, say, _Volcano_, which *is* thoroughly stupid, but seems utterly convinced that it's Serious Drama, or something. I showed it to some people I know in paleo, one of whom has worked at the Tar Pits, one of whom went to UCLA, all of whom took one look at the events happening on screen and almost instantly started writhing in pain, from the instant the heat started coming up from below. You don't know what agony is, apparently, until you put a movie about a shield volcano coming up through "Geology Via Frappe Setting On The Blender" California.
Interestingly, I was in the room when a couple of the same people saw some of _Dante's Peak_, and the worst thing they said about it - and these people are, basically, professional sedimentary geologists, not vulcanologists, so take this for what it is - was that it was pretty much a volcanic "Greatest Hits", and you wouldn't expect to get such clear-cut and perfectly distinct events from an eruption. So, not so bad. #twister
@capnrob: Oh, and as long as I'm posting here, I might as well point people to the book that _Volcano_ was swiped from - John McPhee's _The Control of Nature_, the third of it that dealt with the eruption near Heimaey of Eldfell, and what the inhabitants of the local town did to prevent the lava from filling in their harbor. If you haven't read it, it is, quite honestly, one of the most jaw-dropping true life stories you'll ever read - for instance, there's a bit where McPhee discusses how a *mountain* broke off and sailed around the lava flow for a few weeks. Durndest thing ever. #twister
@capnrob: Volcano is stupid enough that my mother, who's entire science qualification is that as a special education teacher she's functioned as an assistant to some high school earth science classes actually starts writhing in pain over that movie. When someone with a 10th grade science education can explain to you why your movie is retarded, your movie is truly retarded. #twister
@Adah: Yes, but it's *particularly* amusing when the people doing the writhing are all yelling at the screen using words that are eighteen letters long and describing the geology of the Los Angeles basin and the various faults with their hands. #twister
11/22/09
[news.bbc.co.uk]
#tips
11/21/09
Weze allz gonna dyze?
11/21/09
[lhc.web.cern.ch]
11/21/09
[www.boston.com]
11/21/09
"A thumb, middle finger, and tooth removed from the corpse of Galileo Galilei, lost for a century, have been recovered. The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze are planning to put the relics on display next year.
I think the middle finger should be installed facing the Vatican."
That last line is just priceless!
11/21/09
Note the similarity between the LHC picture above and The Time Tunnel? Tune in next week for the exciting return of Tony Newman and Doug Phillips.
11/21/09
11/21/09
and the Internets go to.....
11/21/09
The question now is: will Tony come back singing?
One thing is for sure: the best (for the LHC) is indeed yet to come.
11/21/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
@gorehound: If resemblance is any indication then yea, I'd say we're doomed.
11/20/09
I have huge love for the LHC, but I can't help thinking everytime I see it, that it contains all the essential components of the largest circular mass driver [en.wikipedia.org] we could ever conceive of building.
For the love of G.K.O'Neill [en.wikipedia.org] (and Carl Sagan), why haven't we been able to get an international consortium together to build that?
For merely half of the cost of the LHC (or 25% of it, if it had been built in parallel with the LHC), we'd have a facility capable of launching several hundred tonnes of cargo into low earth orbit, all day, every day, for mere dollars-a-pound, for ever!
[The one in the photo is an artist's impression of a linear (no need to make it circular in a vacuum) lunar mass driver that was tech-spec'd and costed down to the last nut and bolt, a quarter of a century ago. Seriously, WTF?]
11/21/09
"artist's impression of a linear (no need to make it circular in a vacuum) lunar mass driver"
Vacuum has nothing to do with whether the mass driver is linear or circular. Moreover, considering that the Moon is much smaller than the Earth, any track laid down on its surface has a larger curvature than a similar track laid down on the Earth's surface, so a lunar mass driver isn't actually linear.
11/21/09
It is not the avowed (and wholely laudatory) purpose of the the LHC, that prompted my observation.
It is the fact that 60 countries pooled their fiscal, technological, intellectual and far more importantly (for the mass driver) their industrial resources, for a purpose that (as you say) can be of no immediate benefit to them [other than the (very considerable) benefit of participating in a purely scientific research endeavour].
There is a huge commonality of basic technologies between any superconducting supercollider (which is what the LHC is) and a mass driver.
Shorn of all its scientific research related equipment and sensors (ATLAS etc.) the LHC is a giant, circular, underground, superconducting linear motor, designed to gradually accelerate the smallest amounts of mass possible, to relativistic (near light) speed.
An earthbound mass driver is a giant, circular, underground, superconducting linear motor, designed to gradually accelerate [that's the point of it being circular, it allows lower g-forces on the cargo than a linear mass driver (you just send the cargo round and around until it reaches launch escape velocity)] a reasonable amount of cargo mass (kilos or tonnes) to earth escape velocity [17,000 mph (if you don't mind mixing an imperial measure with metric)] .
The LHC required an order of magnitude increase in the industrial production of superconducting materials, superconducting magnets, manufacturing and control technologies and trained a new generation of engineers to design, manufacture, deploy, operate and maintain them.
Most of these people (and the facilities that were created to fulfil this demand) are now unemployed (at least to any meaningful purpose and many in actuality) and will remain so for the foreseable future.
Not the most desirable result.
If you want to advance our understanding of the world (and the universe), the best way to do it is to combine as many countries (and scientists and technicians and bureaucrats) and their resources to achieve (and utilise) cheap, continuous access to space (orbital and deep space exploration and facilities, optical, radio, gamma, x-ray telescopes etc. etc)
[The fact that the original lunar mass driver was envisioned as a linear driver rather than circular (see earlier paragraph) was because its sole purpose was to accelerate 'buckets' of inert mass [either ore for orbital processing, or refined lunar products, aluminium, titanium and iron alloys, water (as ice) [the anticipated availability of which has now been recently confirmed :) ], Helium 3 (!) etc.] in as short a distance as possible, to minimise the total mass of manufactured components needed in the open vacuum available on the lunar surface.
It was a 'bootstrap' enabling technology, allowing the later building of much, much longer lunar surface linear drivers, capable of operating with accelerations compatible with organic materials, fragile manufactured components and living creatures (including and especially humans).
In actuality a linear drive would still be unacceptably long [much as this reply is:) ] operating at these acceleration levels on the lunar surface, as it still needs to be geometrically straight (or 'level', for a circular drive) in order to avoid the unacceptable lateral accelerations caused if it were to attempt to follow, rather than ignore completely (as the LHC does) the curvature of the planet's (0r moon's) surface.
It's a practical engineering cost/ benefit decision that dictates linear drive on the 'open to vacuum' lunar surface for cargo, circular drive for 'man-rated' purposes everywhere and circular drive for all purposes on the (or below) earth surface, where the drive must operate in a created and sustained vacuum, until its 'payload' has reached the required speed and is released tangentially from the circular drive.
In to the atmosphere (and very, very rapidly out of it) in the case of a mass driver and through a further vacuum and into an instumented target in the case of all superconducting supercolliders such as the LHC.]
I hope you appreciate the depth of commonality between these two disparate goals and the technologies needed (and already created with the LHC) to achieve them.
It is a truely fascinating area, where a great deal of time, thought, expertise and capital (most of it personal, rather than private or governmental) has been spent by many incredible people (some sadly, no longer with us) in the turning of a theoretical possibility, into a practical, fully engineered and costed probability.
I hope you find the wikipedia links (and their additional links) that I appended to my original comment rewarding, as it is only through more widespread knowledge, that this probabilty will be actualised.
Ad Astra.
11/20/09
11/20/09
11/20/09
(Not literally, though. It would probably break.)
11/20/09
11/21/09
11/13/09
11/13/09
Breaking Point: Stallone opens his gob. 'I AM THE RESCUE'!!! Great! #twister
11/13/09
There was a movie that I can't remember the name of where the characters have to swim through an underwater tunnel for awhile. When they emerge it is pitch dark, so they light a match to see. They light a match. They're completely submerged in water. #twister
11/16/09
11/16/09
11/13/09
Unlike, say, _Volcano_, which *is* thoroughly stupid, but seems utterly convinced that it's Serious Drama, or something. I showed it to some people I know in paleo, one of whom has worked at the Tar Pits, one of whom went to UCLA, all of whom took one look at the events happening on screen and almost instantly started writhing in pain, from the instant the heat started coming up from below. You don't know what agony is, apparently, until you put a movie about a shield volcano coming up through "Geology Via Frappe Setting On The Blender" California.
Interestingly, I was in the room when a couple of the same people saw some of _Dante's Peak_, and the worst thing they said about it - and these people are, basically, professional sedimentary geologists, not vulcanologists, so take this for what it is - was that it was pretty much a volcanic "Greatest Hits", and you wouldn't expect to get such clear-cut and perfectly distinct events from an eruption. So, not so bad. #twister
11/13/09
11/13/09
11/13/09