Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 188 posts

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#131

Post by ednite »

amenghra wrote: post #82
ednite wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.

If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge. The only thing I can think of that has…

That is great news. The last time I checked, there was a long waitlist and needed to book online (maybe COVID-related?). Appreciate you sharing this story.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#132

Post by ednite »

aaxa wrote: post #40
ednite wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.

I worked at CERN a few years ago, so assuming they haven't build any new amazing facilities, these would be my top picks: - Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive. - The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate. - The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).

Thank you.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#133

Post by nick3443 »

mlindner wrote: post #42
pezezin wrote: post #17

Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day. The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.

I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures? To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.

The emergency copper quench conductors the thickness of my arm were pretty cool to see.

You got to realize they've built a giant circular vacuum tube surrounded by superconducting magnetic jackets that can steer and accelerate a particle beam (actually two going opposite directions), and giant cameras/calorimeters that image photons and other decaying particles from the beam collisions on the micrometer spatial scale. Each component individually may not be grand of scale and complexity but when taken as a whole it works together in amazing ways.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#137

Post by computerfriend »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN. Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.

Do you write O(n^2) code when there's an O(1) algorithm?

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#138

Post by jerf »

zombot wrote: post #55

What will be the blast radius if there is an accident?

Your body is subject to vastly more ionizing radiation every day than you'd receive from this entire batch of antimatter being introduced directly into your body. Check out the fun in an article like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_%28physics%29 for the sorts of things that go on every day of your life.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#139

Post by gus_massa »

sandworm101 wrote: post #121

Fyi, the transport and storage of antimatter is very interesting to those developing nuclear weapons. An antimatter reaction could theoretically be used to pump a nuclear warhead, enabling perhaps smaller nukes than are currently feasible. That is IF one could store and transport usable amounts of antimatter for extended periods.

It's just too expensive. I think a quadrillion per gram. You can bribe the whole population with a million dollars or if you prefer a more classic method just give the enemy president a trillion dollars.
Post reply on HN