Dramatic Flare said:
How many hours of paperwork and/or mathematics goes into one single firing of the LHC?
Has any damage been done yet (something that needed to be fixed before it could be used again)?
Is it intimidating to work with a large group of people who have PhDs while you are still working towards yours?
Are any of them hot? (Stupid question, but a fun one nonetheless.)
Have you found or discovered anything by accident yet? For instance, have you tried finding the Higgs Boson but instead found a quark somehow outside of a proton?
Have you guys considered putting something random and stupid inside, just for shits and giggles?
When will you actually try and find the Higgs Boson?
Righto:
-Pass. I work on the ATLAS experiment, it's a completely different piece of kit from the actual LHC accelerator with a separate control room and separate staff. But if it's anything like ours then there would have been masses of paperwork and mathematics to set the thing up, but now all the fine details are controlled by computer. You can go in and tell it what to do manually, but for the most part you just click go and then (carefully) monitor it.
-I haven't heard of any damage recently, there was that fiasco with the magnets a year or so ago, but the biggest problem with that was that the masses of liquid helium used to cool the magnets made the tunnels so cold that they had to wait for it to WARM UP before they could send anyone down. Everything's working fine right now though.
-Yes.
-Being physics it's about 80-90% male. But you do get a couple of knock-outs here and there (mostly there).
-Not yet. Unfortunately most discoveries take a good few months-years of analysis. At the moment we're happy to be getting a tonne of data to analyse. Discoveries come later.
-No, you have no idea how expensive the damage caused would be if you did that inside one of the detectors, and it wouldn't be any fun in the main pipe because it's only a few centimetres across.
I wouldn't mind seeing what happens if, for instance, you put a melon in the beam dump (basically a big pile of concrete which they fire the beam into when they want to get rid of it). To my knowledge no-one's done it... yet... Could turn it into a youtube show, "Will it vaporize" or something.
-We're getting seriously underway with out part of the search within the year. Will we find it, I have no idea I'm not really a theorist and even the theorists are about 50/50 on that.
