It's baack

Science and Technology
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Large Hadron Collider Starts Doing Science Again http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/large-hadron-collider-starts-doing-science-again/ By Elizabeth Gibney | June 3, 2015 The highest-energy collisions ever seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are now producing data for science. Teams at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have spent two years upgrading what was already the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. At 10.40 local time on June 3 they officially set the newly supercharged collider running. … The first beams of protons following the shutdown circled around the 27-kilometer ring in early April, but at low energies. Since then, physicists have worked to check mechanisms designed to protect the machine and to calibrate the beams, before increasing the LHC's energy and bringing its four main experiments fully online. On June 3, the collisions started in earnest, with all four detectors collecting data for analysis. "At this stage, the actual number of colliding bunches is rather small, but the number will be progressively increased in the coming months," says Paul Collier, head of beams at CERN. With more bunches the data will flow in at a faster rate, he adds. His team hopes to increase the collision energy to 14 TeV eventually, before switching off again in 2018 for more u
pgrades. “At this stage, everything looks good for run 2 of the LHC and, hopefully, a bumper harvest of data at the new operational energy."
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Large Hadron Collider Starts Doing Science Again http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/large-hadron-collider-starts-doing-science-again/ By Elizabeth Gibney | June 3, 2015 The highest-energy collisions ever seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are now producing data for science. Teams at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have spent two years upgrading what was already the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. At 10.40 local time on June 3 they officially set the newly supercharged collider running. … The first beams of protons following the shutdown circled around the 27-kilometer ring in early April, but at low energies. Since then, physicists have worked to check mechanisms designed to protect the machine and to calibrate the beams, before increasing the LHC's energy and bringing its four main experiments fully online. On June 3, the collisions started in earnest, with all four detectors collecting data for analysis. "At this stage, the actual number of colliding bunches is rather small, but the number will be progressively increased in the coming months," says Paul Collier, head of beams at CERN. With more bunches the data will flow in at a faster rate, he adds. His team hopes to increase the collision energy to 14 TeV eventually, before switching off again in 2018 for more u
pgrades. “At this stage, everything looks good for run 2 of the LHC and, hopefully, a bumper harvest of data at the new operational energy."
Here is a case where the average person must accept the word of the scientists doing the work. I don't have access to the LHC at CERN to conduct experiments, and even if I could access the data, I don't have the knowledge and expertise to interpret the results. It really puts a perspective on those claims that "You weren't there to see it for yourself, so you don't know."
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Believe me, I think particle physicists are the some of the smartest people on earth. BUT…it sometimes seems like what all this amounts to is throwing rocks at other rocks and then studying the bits of rock that results. Similarly with astronomers who study asteroids and comets. An asteroid hits a moon, and the moon breaks up into a millions little rocks that begin a journey around the solar system. End of story. What good does it do to study and analyze all the little bits of stuff? They’re rocks and chunks of rocks! It’s like me getting a shovel, digging up some dirt, then spending my weekend studying the bits of dirt and categorizing into big pieces, little pieces, pieces with shiny things in them, etc. At what point do you just say hey man, it’s just dirt. Dirt is dirt, and rocks are rocks. There’s nothing bigger going on.

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Here is a case where the average person must accept the word of the scientists doing the work. I don't have access to the LHC at CERN to conduct experiments, and even if I could access the data, I don't have the knowledge and expertise to interpret the results. It really puts a perspective on those claims that "You weren't there to see it for yourself, so you don't know."
I think you might be missing something in the way you worded that is. It's not the work of "scientists" we must accept - it's the work of the entire expert (in that speciality) Scientific Community. A scientific community that is way more skeptical and self-critical in an honest constructive sense, (that is where honestly learning is the objective) - than anything you'll find among the interested layperson and their political, emotional, faith based biases. Bonus question: Is there any field of science where the average person is more informed than the learned scientists who actively study the field/problem?
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Believe me, I think particle physicists are the some of the smartest people on earth. BUT...it sometimes seems like what all this amounts to is throwing rocks at other rocks and then studying the bits of rock that results. Similarly with astronomers who study asteroids and comets. An asteroid hits a moon, and the moon breaks up into a millions little rocks that begin a journey around the solar system. End of story. What good does it do to study and analyze all the little bits of stuff? They're rocks and chunks of rocks! It's like me getting a shovel, digging up some dirt, then spending my weekend studying the bits of dirt and categorizing into big pieces, little pieces, pieces with shiny things in them, etc. At what point do you just say hey man, it's just dirt. Dirt is dirt, and rocks are rocks. There's nothing bigger going on.
I kinda agree and disagree with this. I'm sure if I looked long enough I could find a practical application of something that was discovered as result of studying moon dust, or at least I could find stories of science being done just for science and it leading to something. But, still the question of why do it is a fair one. I would be fine if we stopped colliding particles and put all of our resources into clean water and growing food with pesticides. After all, we made a lot of progress while we still thought the sun revolved around us. But, again but, at some point it becomes the type of socialism that we all fear, the kind where people are barred from investigating the big questions we all have based on some measure of practicality.
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I think you guys are missing the point. Smashing things together is how you find out what’s inside. It’s how you open the book of nature so you can read it. Nature doesn’t just let you peel back the leather cover and flip the pages. You have to be more creative.
If you want to know how the universe works you have to smash things together, and we need to know how the universe works.

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Here’s some fun videos

CERN Atom Smasher - How it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sldBwpvGFg Uploaded on Sep 16, 2008 by vmahajan9
Large Hadron Collider: how Cern's atom-smasher works The Large Hadron Collider has re-started scientific investigations after a two-year pause - but what exactly does it do and why? By PA, video source ITN10:22PM BST 03 Jun 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-video/4124605/Large-Hadron-Collider-experiment-explained.html (be sure to check out the side column for more informative videos)
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Although I notice there’s another video that apparently exposes the Vatican’s secret plan for CERN.
hmmm
Must have something to do with stealing the God Particle or something :lol:

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I think you guys are missing the point. Smashing things together is how you find out what's inside. It's how you open the book of nature so you can read it. Nature doesn't just let you peel back the leather cover and flip the pages. You have to be more creative. If you want to know how the universe works you have to smash things together, and we need to know how the universe works.
Oh I agree completely. And my reference to dirt and rocks was actually metaphorical in a sense. At what point are you just categorizing dirt, noticing patterns in the categorization, but the patterns are just man-made versus revealing something "big" about the underlying physics. So we're not discovering different types of particles, just small pieces of the same dirt, and we put them in different categorization buckets, but in the end it's still just dirt. Again, metaphorically speaking.