Science And Tech | Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward

It was a pleasure…

In exactly 72 hours a group of scientists from many different countries will turn on the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator ever built by men. It is the longest: it has a 27 kilometers long tunnel between 50 and 175 meters underground and crosses the frontier between France and Switzerland. It is also the most powerful: using over 1,600 magnets that weigh around 27 tons each, it keeps two proton beams moving in circles at 99.99% of the speed of light and then make them collide. Before being launched, the protons are “charged” in linear accelerators and in the Proton Synchrotron Booster. To operate it needs to be at a temperature of 1.9°K (-271°C).

When the collisions take place, the local temperature will raise to be 100,000 hotter than the Sun’s core.

Posted by Santiago B. at 07 Sep 08 | Leave your comment

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On the internet no battle is ever lost

I remember several years ago, when Yahoo had emerged as the clear cut winner from the many search engines available early on. Left behind were others such as Altavista, Infoseek and many others. I also remember the day when I read about this new start up called Google, which had just launched another search engine . Yahoo was already publicly traded at the Nasdaq, had tons of money, the best engineers and an extremely high share of all the searches in the planet. At that time I thought: “It’s absurd. No one can challenge the Yahoo supremacy among search engines”.

Posted by Santiago B. at 03 Sep 08 | Leave your comment

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