New 3D tours of the LHC released

[n2doc]

Valerie Jamieson, deputy features editor

Photographer Peter McCready has produced some new "virtual reality tours" of the world's largest particle accelerator. They're 3D panoramas you can explore online, spinning the view around and zooming in to see details.
I was thrilled to come across his work last year because his photographs beautifully capture the vastness of the experiments built to study what happens at when protons smash head on at the Large Hadron Collider.
McCready's latest photos are from last August, just a few days before physicists circulated the first protons around the 27-kilometre ring. It is the closest you can get to experiencing the sight of the 12,000-tonne CMS detector without actually being there. Drag your mouse around and you'll get a sense of just how big the detector is.

see link for more....

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/03/capturing-scientific-sights-in.html

[earthboundmisfit]

1. Cool! The LHC was a topic of conversation at a meetup of old chums

last Saturday. Thanks for the awesome link, n2doc! Will pass it along!

[Occulus]

2. LOL, here's something amusing

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=how-long-would-it-take-the-lhc-to-d-2008-09-10

According to an old Cosmic Variance post, the power of one of the LHC's proton beams at full energy is 10 trillion watts (TW). (A watt is a joule of energy per second.) A household microwave produces 500 to 1000 watts of power. Let's call it 700 watts. And defrosting a frozen pizza takes about six minutes*. So that's

700 joules/sec x 360 sec = 252,000 joules of energy needed to defrost a pizza

Therefore:

252,000 joules / 10^13 joules per second = 3x10^-8 second for the LHC to defrost a pizza

That's 30 nanoseconds (billionths of a second).

*SOURCE: DiGiorno's Microwave Rising Crust Four-Cheese Pizza

:D