Beautiful Minds...

I fell on this article of Scientific American, February 2008 issue, about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC being built at CERN, Switzerland) that promises to almost re-write the physics of our world as we know it. I don't know whether you either like or even bother at all about physics... the reason I am posting this is to share the cultural shock I felt when I read a passage of an article about the LHC called "The Discovery Machine". This passage, called "a machine of superlatives" provides statistics relating to the construction of this LHC gargantuan engineering monster that spreads for 27 km underground (deep) next to the airport of Geneva, Switzerland. Here's what they say about the beast:

(from Scientific American, The Discovery Machine, Feb 2008) To break into the new territory that is the terascale, the LHC’s basic parameters outdo those of previous colliders in almost every respect. It starts by producing proton beams of far higher energies than ever before. Its nearly 7,000 magnets, chilled by liquid helium to less than two kelvins to make them superconducting, will steer and focus two beams of protons traveling within a millionth of a percent of the speed of light. Each proton will have about 7 TeV of energy—7,000 times as much energy as a proton at rest has embodied in its mass, courtesy of Einstein’s E = mc2. That is about seven times the energy of the reigning record holder, the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Equally important, the machine is designed to produce beams with 40 times the intensity, or luminosity, of the Tevatron’s beams. When it is fully loaded and at maximum energy, all the circulating particles will carry energy roughly equal to the kinetic energy of about 900 cars traveling at 100 kilometers per hour, or enough to heat the water for nearly 2,000 liters of coffee. The protons will travel in nearly 3,000 bunches, spaced all around the 27-kilometer circumference of the collider. Each bunch of up to 100 billion protons will be the size of a needle, just a few centimeters long and squeezed down to 16 microns in diameter (about the same as the thinnest of human hairs) at the collision points. At four locations around the ring, these needles will pass through one another, producing more than 600 million particle collisions every second. The collisions, or events, as physicists call them, actually will occur between particles that make up the protons—quarks and gluons. The most cataclysmic of the smashups will release about a seventh of the energy available in the parent protons, or about 2 TeV. (For the same reason, the Tevatron falls short of exploring tera scale physics by about a factor of five, despite the 1-TeV energy of its protons and antiprotons.) Four giant detectors—the largest would roughly half-fill the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and the heaviest contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower—will track and measure the thousands of particles spewed out by each collision occurring at their centers. Despite the detectors’ vast size, some elements of them must be positioned with a precision of 50 microns. The nearly 100 million channels of data streaming from each of the two largest detectors would fill 100,000 CDs every second, enough to produce a stack to the moon in six months. So instead of attempting to record it all, the experiments will have what are called trigger and data acquisition systems, which act like vast spam filters, immediately discarding almost all the information and sending the data from only the most promising-looking 100 events each second to the LHC’s central computing system at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics and the collider’s home, for archiving and later analysis. A “farm” of a few thousand computers at CERN will turn the filtered raw data into more compact data sets organized for physicists to comb through. Their analyses will take place on a so-called grid network comprising tens of thousands of PCs at institutes around the world, all connected to a hub of a dozen major centers on three continents that are in turn linked to CERN by dedicated optical cables.

If you've managed to have read this far means that you, like me, never cease to get amazed by the power of the human brain. Just to imagine what it takes to put a project like this on its feet, secure the funding, find the right people and organizations to resource it, build it without huge budget overruns and then operate it for decades and rediscover the world, from initial idea and concept to final results, in itself shows the level of excellence some engineers and scientists have reached to date. We (especially I) often look stunned at the staring of new products such as modern Intel microprocessors or the new Apple thin laptop that his Jobness presented last Tuesday. I reckon those CERN engineers must be laughing at me and others like me for thinking this way. If we, simple peasants, could only visualize the levels of brain-excellence they (at CERN) have reached in modern engineering and science...

I suddenly feel so small and moronic...