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September 10, 2008 : biggest scientific experiment since atomic bomb
Current mood: angsty
Category: Games
CERN to start up super-accelerator on September 10
Aug 7, 2008
GENEVA (AFP) — European particle physics laboratory CERN said Thursday it will start up its massive particle accelerator on September 10 hoping that it could throw light on the origins of the universe.
The so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics.
Scientists are banking that it will confirm the existence of a sub-atomic component -- the Higgs Boson, known as "the God Particle" -- that would fill in the last missing piece of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics.
A gamble costing six billion Swiss francs (almost six billion dollars, 3.9 billion euros) that has harnessed the labours of more than 2,000 physicists from nearly three dozen countries, the LHC is the biggest, most powerful high-energy particle accelerator ever built.
Beams of hydrogen protons will whizz around at near-light speed in opposite directions until, bent by powerful superconducting magnets, they will smash together in four bus-sized detector chambers, where they will be annihilated at temperatures hotter than the sun.
"Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch," the laboratory said in a statement.
The commissioning starts with the cooling down of each of the machine's eight sectors, then electrical testing of the 1,600 superconducting magnets, after which each sector's circuits, and then the sectors themselves, are powered together so the LHC can operate as a single machine.
"We're finishing a marathon with a sprint," said LHC project leader Lyn Evans.
"It's been a long haul, and we're all eager to get the LHC research programme underway."
However, there are unlikely to be any immediate discoveries once the LHC is set in motion.
"We will accumulate data for two years and it will take a lot of time to interpret," CERN's director general Robert Aymar said back in May.
First particles injected into Large Hadron Collider atom smasher
By Jad Marrouche
Last Updated: 7:01pm BST 21/08/2008
The first particles have been injected into the biggest atom smasher on the planet, marking the start of the countdown to probing the secrets of the universe.
Scientists are pushing ahead with powering up the machine, shrugging off speculative fears that it could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole.
Starting up the biggest scientific experiment ever built is not as simple as flipping a switch.
Earlier this month, the successful injection of the first particles - protons - into part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, took place.
This weekend, scientists are hoping to complete testing of another part of the machine, which sits in a 17 mile circular tunnel approximately 100 metres underneath the Franco-Swiss border, with the aim of seeing particles travel the whole way around for the first time.
As such preparations for the formal September 10th start date continue, the entire machine has been successfully cooled to temperatures below minus 270ºC, a fraction of a degree above the lowest achievable temperature.
In this temperature range, helium becomes a liquid, and is used to cool the superconducting magnets which keep the proton beams circulating at almost the speed of light as well as making the LHC the biggest refrigerator on the planet.
The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010.
The protons injected into the giant machine are obtained by removing electrons from hydrogen gas and are then accelerated in bunches.
For the tests, the proton bunches were first accelerated by the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a smaller 4.3 mile ring, before injection (like a lane merging onto a motorway) into the LHC, which has to be timed to the nanosecond to work.
Once the individual detectors around the LHC are ready (the "eyes" that study the effects of collisions between particles), further injection tests will attempt to ensure two counter-rotating proton beams circulate throughout the machine.
Capturing the remnants of high energy collisions between these beams will then become possible, setting the stage for the LHC to potentially rewrite the laws of physics as we know them.
Tests will continue into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the target energy for the end of 2008 - this is equivalent to each particle having the energy of a flying mosquito squeezed into a space a million million times smaller.
Withstanding any major setbacks, the LHC will see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the LHC's acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking particle physics research to a new frontier.
'We're finishing a marathon with a sprint,' said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. 'It's been a long haul, and we're all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.'
One aim of the machine is to improve current theory about the forces that bind together the particles in every atom. Known as the Standard Model, this is one of the triumphs of 20th-century science and fits in with the results of all experiments ever done on sub-atomic particles.
Key to that will be to find a crucial ingredient, the Higgs particle, whose existence goes some way to explain why atoms contain particles that have weight.
Others hope that a menagerie of new particles will be seen when the LHC is switched on - and perhaps some of them will help account for the "dark matter" that astronomers cannot see, although they can detect its existence via the gravitational forces it exerts on other particles.
Q. Where was Karl - "Bush's Brain / Turd Blossom"- Rove in July when he blew off the subpoena and refused to testify before the House Judiciary subcommittee?
A. He was in Yalta in the Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, at the Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference.
*(1)
Q.Who else was there, besides Tony Blair?
A. The President of Georgia; Mikhail Saakashvilli.
"Among the participants of the 5th annual organization Summit are Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund; Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia; Marek Siwiec, Vice President of the European Parliament; Aleksander Kwasniewski, the President of Poland in 1995-2005; Mario David, Vice-President of European People's Party; Victor Chernomyrdin, Ambassador of the Russian Federation to Ukraine; key strategists of the leading USA political parties – Karl Rove, the republican, and Bob Shrum, the democrat."
*(2)
So we can place Karl Rove and the President of Georgia in the same room in July.
Interesting….
We also know that John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser is closely tied to Georgia.
"John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser and his business partner lobbied the senator or his staff on 49 occasions in a 3 1/2-year span while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of the former Soviet republic of Georgia."
*(3)
John McCain is talkin tough and acting all "Presidential"…..
Yet he doesn't even know who the President of Russia is….
posted byJohn Nicholson 07/25/2008 @ 2:32pm As the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of how best to address what its chairman described as "the Imperial Presidency of George W. Bush," it was the ranking Republican in the room, Iowa Congressman Steve King, who observed that, "We are hear having impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee."
"These are impeachment hearings before the United States Congress," King continued. "I never imagined I would ever be sitting on this side when something like this happened."
King was not happy about the circumstance.
A resolute defender of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the congressman was objecting to the very mention of the "I" word.
As it happened, impeachment was mentioned dozens of times during the hearing, often in significant detail and frequently as a necessary response to lawless actions of the president and vice president.
King's statement addressed the uncertain character of Friday morning's attempt by the relevant committee of the chamber empowered by the founders to impose accountability on presidents and vice presidents to tackle what Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, D-Michigan, referred to as "numerous credible allegations of serious misconduct by officials in the Bush Administration."
Conyers explained that "to the regret of many, this is not an impeachment hearing." For that to happen, Conyers argued, the committee would need clearer authorization from the full House.
But members of the committee, the Democrats and the Republicans, as well as a bipartisan panel of House members and another panel of former House members, and academics and activists, repeatedly put the impeachment on the table of a chamber where the speaker had once denied it a place.
Congressman Maurice Hinchey, D-New York, told the committee that President Bush and Vice President Cheney had committed acts that make theirs "the most impeachable administration in the history of our country."
Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson-Lee, held up a copy of the Constitution and announced, "There is a real question of whether this Constitution is being protected."
Republican members of the committee griped. Indiana Congressman Mike Pence complained that the entire session – with its discussion not just of impeachment but of legislative initiatives to address executive secrecy and overreach – caused him to worry about "the criminalization of American politics."
Addressing his remarks to Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, the author of articles of impeachment against President Bush and Vice President Cheney that provoked Friday's hearing, Pence said, "I just believe the gentleman from Ohio is wrong."
Kucinich, who is not a member of the Judiciary Committee, stood his ground, arguing when he addressed the committee that a failure to impeach would not merely let Bush off the hook but signal to future presidents that they, too, may reject the rule of law and refuse to cooperate with Congress.
Several members of the committee were, if anything, more passionate in their remarks than Kucinich.
Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson told his colleagues that if they failed to act and President Bush authorized an illegal attack on Iran, they might look back on their dismissal on the neglect of their duty to check and balance an errant executive as a deadly mistake.
It was that sense of urgency that motivated committee member Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, to say explain that, "What this Congress does, or chooses not to do in furthering the investigation of the serious allegations against this administration – and if just cause is found, to hold them accountable – will impact the conduct of future presidents, perhaps for generations."
"Mr. Chairman," Baldwin continued, "there are those who would say that holding this hearing – examining whether or not the president and vice president broke the law – is frivolous. I not only reject this, I believe there is no task more important for this Congress than to seriously consider whether our nation's leaders have violated their oath of office. The American public expects no less. It is, after all, their Constitution. No president or congress has the authority to override that document, whereby 'We the People' conferred upon the branches of government limited and defined power, and provided for meaningful checks and balances."
There can be no question at this late date in the Bush presidency that the issue of whether the American system will be characterized by "meaningful checks and balances" is at stake – and that goes to the heart of the matter of why Friday's hearing ought not be the end of a process but a beginning.
Even after George Bush and Dick Cheney have left the White House, the definition of the presidency that they have crafted will remain.
"On January 20, 2009, the next president and vice president of the United States will stand before the American people and take an oath of office, swearing to '… preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.' This commitment and obligation is so fundamental to our democracy that our nation's founders prescribed that oath in our Constitution. They also provided for the removal of the president and vice president for, among other things, 'high crimes and misdemeanors,'" Baldwin explained to the committee. "Presidents and vice presidents do not take that oath in a vacuum. They are informed by the actions or inactions of past presidents and congresses, who establish precedents for the future."
It is in the power of the Congress to begin setting the precedent to which Baldwin addressed herself. That power was defined by the framers of the Constitution, as were the practices and procedures to be used in executing it.
With that in mind, Baldwin correctly outlined the next steps for a committee and a Congress that has begun to place not just the matter of impeachment but the broader question of the imperial presidency on the table but that certainly has not completed the process"
(The) American people have been forced to sit by while credible allegations of abuse of power mount:
• We have seen this Administration fabricate the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and allege, despite all evidence to the contrary, a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. These lies dragged our country into a preemptive and unjustified war that has taken the lives of more than 4,000 U.S. troops, injured 30,000 more, and will cost our nation more than a trillion dollars.
• We watched as this Administration again undermined national security by manipulating and exaggerating evidence of Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities and openly threatened aggression against Iran, despite no evidence that Iran has the intention or capability of attacking the U.S.
• We have looked on in horror as the Administration suspended habeas corpus by claiming the power to declare any person an "enemy combatant" – ignoring the Geneva Convention protections that the U.S. helped create.
• We have seen torture and rendition of prisoners in violation of international law and stated American policy and values, and destruction of the videotaped evidence of such torture, under the tenure of this Administration.
• We have seen this Administration spy on Americans without a court order or oversight in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
• We watched as U.S. Attorneys pursued politically-motivated prosecutions in violation of the law and perhaps at the direction of this White House.
• We watched as Administration officials outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a covert agent of the CIA and then intentionally obstructed justice by disseminating false information through the White House press office.
As we know, the framers of our Constitution called for impeachment only in the case of high crimes and misdemeanors. The standard is purposely set high because we should not impeach for personal or political gain – only to uphold and safeguard our democracy. Sadly, in my judgment, at least two high ranking administration officials have met that standard. Although the call to impeach is one I take neither easily nor lightly, I now firmly believe that impeachment hearings are the appropriate and necessary next step.
Ron Paul: Faith-Based Currency Published on 22-07-2008
By Dr. Ron Paul
The Latin term "fiat" roughly translates to "there shall be". When we refer to fiat money, we are referring to money that exists because the government declares it into existence. It is not based on production or earnings, and not backed by any commodity. It is solely based on trusting the government. Fiat money is exchanged in the economy as long as there is faith in the government that issues it.
Some are blaming the recent shakeup in the markets to "whining" or financial fear-mongering, which misses the whole point. History has shown that fiat money, or "faith-based currency" always fails, because when governments claim this power, they always behave irresponsibly.
When government has the ability to create and spend all the money it wants, priorities shift, and the concept of budgeting, as most Americans know it, loses all meaning. Hand a teenager a credit card, and tell him there is no limit and no accountability for what he spends, and the effect would be the same. You see, this problem is not unique to our government. It is a predictable outcome based on human nature, and we've seen variations of what we are experiencing now happen over and over throughout history. I didn't have a crystal ball or a fortune teller when I predicted this 3, 7, or even 30 years ago. Actions have logical consequences. The government becomes the reckless teenager with the credit card, and in the end, the taxpaying citizens get the bill. What happens after that is never pretty.
This is why our founding fathers considered, but decidedly rejected the creation of a national central bank. They understood that governments, even the best of governments, cannot control spending. Even the current administration, which promised strict fiscal responsibility, has had to increase the national debt limit by 65 percent to keep up with its spending sprees. Every dollar created and spent by government makes the dollars in your pocket worth less and less. Eventually any currency controlled by government will be debased to worthlessness, and will wipe out the savings of the citizens who put faith in that currency.
Hard currencies, on the other hand, force governments to remain in check, strictly limited to the revenues they can raise from the country's economic health. This is also an incentive for government to stay out of the way of productivity. The hyper-regulation in today's economy demonstrates that this is no longer the case.
What does it matter if the economy is crippled and the tax-base eroded, if government can create whatever dollars they need to keep the special interests happy?
We have been building economic castles on the sand, and the tide is coming in. The answer is not to bring in more sand, but to move to more solid foundation.
So yes, it is true that many are complaining about our economic trouble, but our economic trouble is not caused by their complaining. Many are being forced to wake up to the predictable troubles associated with faith-based currency. As more people notice the hardships, more will lose faith.
We are long overdue for a course correction and I can only hope that this awakening translates to a solid approach to currency reform.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 8) -- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) sent the following letter today to his colleagues in Congress:
July 8, 2008 WHEN THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF LIES TO GO TO WAR, HE MUST BE IMPEACHED A SINGLE ARTICLE OF IMPEACHMENT WILL BE BROUGHT TO THE FLOOR ON THURSDAY; PLEASE CO-SPONSOR
Dear Colleague,
During the Fourth of July holiday a WWII veteran stood ram-rod straight in his crisp dress uniform and saluted our flag as it passed in a parade. His silent reverential stance was a powerful reminder of the love of country that is reflected in our veterans of all generations and all services.
It is also a powerful reminder of the responsibilities of the President of the Untied States in his capacity as Commander in Chief.
It is worse than heartbreaking that George W. Bush, as Commander in Chief, caused this country to go to war based on information which was false, and which he knew to be false. The consequences for our troops have been devastating. We have lost 4,116 of our beloved servicemen and women since the war began, with over 30,000 physically wounded and countless others emotionally wounded. The toll on the service persons and their families will be felt throughout their lives.
There can be no greater responsibility of a Commander in Chief than to command based on facts on the ground, and to command in fact and in truth. There can be no greater offense of a Commander in Chief than to misrepresent a cause of war and to send our brave men and women into harm's way based on those misrepresentations.
There has been a breach of faith between the Commander in Chief and the troops. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or with Al Qaeda's role in 9/11. Iraq had neither the intention nor the capability of attacking the United States. Iraq did not have weapons of Mass of Destruction. Yet George W. Bush took our troops to war under all of these false assumptions. Given the profound and irreversible consequences to our troops, if his decision was the result of a mistake, he must be impeached. Since his decision was based on lies, impeachment as a remedy falls short, but represents at least some effort on our part to demonstrate our concern about the sacrifices our troops have made.
This Thursday evening I will bring a privileged resolution to the House with a single Article of Impeachment of President Bush for taking our nation and our troops to war based on lies. We owe it to our troops who even at this hour stand as sentinels of America because they love this country and will give their lives for it. What are we willing to do to match their valor and the valor of their successors? Are we at least willing to defend the Constitution from the comfort and security of our Washington, DC offices?
Sincerely,
Dennis J. Kucinich Member of Congress
Currently
listening
:
Modern Guilt
By
Beck
Release date: 2008-07-08
Interview with Senator Karen Johnson by Michael Wolsey
Current mood: relaxed
Category: News and Politics
You can check out/download an interview with patriot & Senator Karen Johnson by Michael Wolsey HERE. Feel free to drop him some kudos and add him as a friend.
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