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The capacitors in this "tree" were used to regulate the voltage in the 13.8 kV high-current electrical feeds for the Fermilab main ring. It hasn't been used in a number of years, is in a state of disrepair and may soon be torn down.
A brand new discovery was made at CERN by the Large Hadron Collider...
...well, graffiti at a nearby park bench
The large general-purpose particle physics detector "Compact Muon Solenoid" in its 100-meters-underground cavern
The Capacitor tree at the Fermilab Master Substation.
At one point in time, I believe that it was used for power factor correction for the lab, though it is no longer in use. There is talk of having it removed, so i figured I would try and get out as it was a nice night and take some photos.
Somewhat inspired by Mark Kaletka's HDR from a similar perspective.
The light green cables will collect the optical signal from the 70 million channels of the silicon particle tracker.... and bring them to the computer farm ready to analyze them. More pictures and explanations here
Collider tunnel at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. This goes around in circle for about 17 miles.... the beam pipe on the right is surrounded by superconducting liquid-helium-cooled magnets. Protons in the pipe will reach 99.999% of the speed of light. Or so I'm told.
The best way to get around is on bike.
Drove in to work last Thursday, and saw that the capacitor tree was just a couple tangled tubes anchored to the ground.
One of the coolest functional art pieces at the lab, though in recent years it had been relegated to simply art.
For more information, see accelconf.web.cern.ch/accelconf/p77/PDF/PAC1977_1352.PDF
Hydrogen atom. Computer artwork of an atom of the element hydrogen. The atom is shown as a nucleus (a proton, pink), and an electron orbiting in a wavy path (light blue). The blue sphere represents the basic spherical orbital of the hydrogen atom, called the ^I1s^i orbital. This orbital defines the distance from the nucleus where the electron is most likely to be found. Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe.
The beam pipe coming out of the green nozzle and pointing at the center of the detector. More pictures and explanations here
OK. Believe it or not, you're looking at the internet. Or at least a major part of it... when CERN's last collider was up and running in the late 80s and early 90s, they needed a way to crunch all the data they were getting... so they developed a way for computers to efficiently network and talk to one another. This eventually became the backbone of the internet. CERN's computing center is still one of the 3 main hubs for ALL internet traffic, meaning that you might be connecting through it right now.
This HAL-9000 kind of thing is the user interface for a room full of switches and hubs.
Collider tunnel at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. This goes around in circle for about 17 miles.... the beam pipe on the right is surrounded by superconducting liquid-helium-cooled magnets. Protons in the pipe will reach 99.999% of the speed of light. Or so I'm told.
The core of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- currently under construction.
Cross section of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. I was told this was probably the last panel to go in on this section -- everyone who worked on it signed it. Light was dim, so it came out blurry...
The CERN Data Centre — part of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, situated on the French–Swiss border.
- Version française :
« Aurore sur le CERN » — 24 décembre 2023, le soleil se lève sur les Alpes.
Le Centre de Calcul du CERN — une entité de l’Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, située à la frontière franco-suisse
This one's for anyone else who watched Horizon last night.
"Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to re-write the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?"
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©2009 Jason Swain, All Rights Reserved
This image is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without the explicit written permission of the photographer.
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The CERN Data Centre — part of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, situated on the French–Swiss border.
- Version française :
« Aurore sur le CERN » — 24 décembre 2023, le soleil se lève sur les Alpes.
Le Centre de Calcul du CERN — une entité de l’Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, située à la frontière franco-suisse.
The large general-purpose particle physics detector "Compact Muon Solenoid" in its 100-meters-underground cavern
Jens Vigen, head of the Scientific Information Service of CERN, with his back to an old wooden directory of the CERN Library
Jens Vigen, head of the Scientific Information Service of CERN and promoter of the "Ride to work!" campaign, riding his bike through the shelves of the CERN Library
Again, the main beam pipes are visible at the bottom. The larger set of chambers in the middle are the dilution kicker magnets, which spread the dumped beam out so that its energy is not concentrated on one piece of the dump. The large red cables are the power supply cables for the magnets, coming in from large (file cabinet sized) power converters sitting in a parallel tunnel. In this diagram ( lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/com... ), you can see the dilution kickers as MKBH and MKBV.
Tenuous link: pipes
Photos of the LHC almost always show the large blue dipole magnets, which bend the beams around the curves at the corners of the ring (which is really more of a rounded octagon). So it was interesting to see what the beam pipes look like in a straight section, where there are no magnets. Those two pipes coming from the bottom right are the two main LHC beam pipes. These photos were all taken in the beam dump area at P6: the pipe above the two main beam pipes is one of the beam dump lines. The beam dump line starts out no wider than the normal beam pipes, as seen here. Later a "dilution kicker" magnet spreads it out in order to dissipate the beam energy over a wider area of the dump.
Tenuous link: joint
Section of the now-decommissioned Cockroft-Walton accelerator, which for 40 years provided the first stage of proton acceleration.
UK artist Chris Levine's fabulous laser installation at Dark Park - DARK MOFO 2017.
Hard to do it justice in a still but three 25-metre tall towers positioned in a 50-metre circle shoot super powered lasers 10 kilometres into Hobart's night sky.
Set to sounds from Rob Del Naja (Massive Attack) and Marco Perry the work is in Levine's words, "creating intersections that “reflect the science of particle physics and sacred geometry”."
gobsmacking :-)
Fujifilm X-Pro2, XF18/2, 14 secs at f/7.1, ISO 400
Distorted little monster isn't it the XF18...
The legs are resistors (blue cylinders), capacitors (silver doughnuts) and diodes (clear diagonal cylinders with squiggles, on the left). The silver domes at the top get charged to 750,000 volts, which accelerates ionized hydrogen into the accelerator complex (or did when this was still being used). The entire room is electrically grounded.
Yes...
The old pre-accelerator at Fermilab, no longer in use. This thingamabob steps up a 75kV AC signal to 750kV DC to give the hydrogen ions their first kick into the accelerator. After hydron ions (protons) leave this gizmo, they are imparted with an energy of rest mass + 750keV (kilo-electron-volts). from here they were eventually boosted up to 0.98 TeV (tera-electron-volts) and smashed into antiprotons of equal energy.
This large 3 story room of sciency looking stuff has been replaced with a pair of doohickeys the size of a refrigerator.
Pic #2 of UK artist Chris Levine's fabulous laser installation at Dark Park - DARK MOFO 2017.
Hard to do it justice in a still but three 25-metre tall towers positioned in a 50-metre circle shoot super powered lasers 10 kilometres into Hobart's night sky.
Set to sounds from Rob Del Naja (Massive Attack) and Marco Perry the work is in Levine's words, "creating intersections that “reflect the science of particle physics and sacred geometry”."
gobsmacking :-)
Fujifilm X-Pro2, XF18/2, 14 secs at f/7.1, ISO 400
Distorted little monster isn't it the XF18...
Higgs boson
the particle that all matter share
what the water and threes have
what the whales and the bees have
what the dictators and the saints have
shared by the core of our sun or the dirt on mars
yet we consume and destroy all our fellow travels through time
till the higgs boson unwinds
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
The "God particle" is the nickname of a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. In layman’s terms, different subatomic particles are responsible for giving matter different properties. One of the most mysterious and important properties is mass. Some particles, like protons and neutrons, have mass. Others, like photons, do not. The Higgs boson, or “God particle,” is believed to be the particle which gives mass to matter. The “God particle” nickname grew out of the long, drawn-out struggles of physicists to find this elusive piece of the cosmic puzzle. What follows is a very brief, very simplified explanation of how the Higgs boson fits into modern physics, and how science is attempting to study it.
The “standard model” of particle physics is a system that attempts to describe the forces, components, and reactions of the basic particles that make up matter. It not only deals with atoms and their components, but the pieces that compose some subatomic particles. This model does have some major gaps, including gravity, and some experimental contradictions. The standard model is still a very good method of understanding particle physics, and it continues to improve. The model predicts that there are certain elementary particles even smaller than protons and neutrons. As of the date of this writing, the only particle predicted by the model which has not been experimentally verified is the “Higgs boson,” jokingly referred to as the “God particle.”
Each of the subatomic particles contributes to the forces that cause all matter interactions. One of the most important, but least understood, aspects of matter is mass. Science is not entirely sure why some particles seem mass-less, like photons, and others are “massive.” The standard model predicts that there is an elementary particle, the Higgs boson, which would produce the effect of mass. Confirmation of the Higgs boson would be a major milestone in our understanding of physics.
The “God particle” nickname actually arose when the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman was published. Since then, it’s taken on a life of its own, in part because of the monumental questions about matter that the God particle might be able to answer. The man who first proposed the Higgs boson’s existence, Peter Higgs, isn’t all that amused by the nickname “God particle,” as he’s an avowed atheist. All the same, there isn’t really any religious intention behind the nickname.
related news:
news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/scientists-unveil-proof-god-...
More explanations at the top of the set
Last few hours of emptiness inside. The two barrel wheels have been moved onto the fully cabled Z- side of the vacuum tank containing the magnet. The tracker insertion platform sits on top of the HF raising structure. The tracker is now inside. A picture taken during insertion.
Cooling jets at the Main Injector at Fermilab.
The main injector ring consists of a large amount of water cooled magnets that provide beam to experiments. The water cooling circuits use cooling ponds to keep everything cool during operation. They also provide aeration for the fish living in the ponds.
The CERN Data Centre — part of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, situated on the French–Swiss border.
- Version française :
« Aurore sur le CERN » — 24 décembre 2023, le soleil se lève sur les Alpes.
Le Centre de Calcul du CERN — une entité de l’Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, située à la frontière franco-suisse
View On Black-Hole
After meeting at a lap-dancing club,,, in Lapland, the Nobel Prize winning wheelchair-bound physicist Professor Stephen Hawking and top Hollywood actor Tom Cruise became the closest of friends.
Convinced by Cruise of the sound reasoning behind L. Ron Hubbard's classically invented religion of Scientology, Professor Hawking became a devout adherent himself, and decided to devote all of his massive scientific braininess, plus [+] some maths, to proving that all the weird space stuff about Thetans, Xenu etc, that's fundamental to the Scientology belief system, was scientifically accurate.
But Tom Cruise reckoned that this would be a waste of "Time" (something which Hawking is a bit of an expert on), and told him of his intense jealousy regarding the runaway commercial success of the salad dressings marketed by ageing rival hollywood actor [the now sadly late] Paul Newman.
Stephen Hawking was so grateful to Cruise for revealing to him the profound truths of the Scientology religion that he agreed to use all of his scientific powers, and nuclear physics itself, to create the finest salad dressing in the Entire Universe[s], which could be sold under the 'Scientology Salad Dressing' label, to raise money and spread the gospel according to old L. Ron, and blow "that old bastard" Newman and his salad dressing away.
For months Hawking toiled away in a secret subterranean Cambridge laboratory full of radioactive materials, egg whites, garlic, and olive oil, plus some top-grade balsamic vinegar, with the invaluable aid of lab assistant John Travolta, when finally his moment of ultimate triumph arrived!
The birth of Professor Stephen Hawking & Tom Cruise's Special Scientology Salad Dressing.
Very, very luckily, I was the only other person present, to capture the amazing moment on my trusty 75 year old Voigtlander Brilliant box camera, loaded with Eddie Olive's special x-pro out-of-date slide film.
I processed it in some of the highly radioactive 'Scientology Salad Dressing' immediately after exposure, then scanned and sharpened with my 'Mac-a-Mania' home-written photo processing software,,, with the above results,
A true "exclusive", I feel!
The computing engineer, many times French champion of para-alpine skiing and ascensionist Jean-Yves Le Meur in his office at CERN
This is just one of a bunch of pics I took at yesterday's Fermilab Photowalk at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Just a handfull of pics to show off with more to come. The public spaces at Fermilab are neat and well worth a visit, but if you ever get the chance to go behind the scenes, at a place like this, TAKE IT! Fermilab, Batavia, IL