ISBN: 9798172982880 - the large hadron collider: the biggest machine ever built: how it was built, how it works, and why ten thousand scientists spent thirty years chasing ... of a second (machines that run the world) (1 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - At 1.9 kelvin, the ring under the Swiss-French border is colder than the empty space between the stars. At 8.33 tesla, its magnets pull harder than a hospital MRI multiplied five times over. And at the center of it, on July 4, 2012, two experiments that had spent eighteen years watching for it finally saw a particle that lives for about a ten-billionth of a trillionth of a second, then vanishes before light can cross a single atom.Other books about the Large Hadron Collider tell you it happened. This one explains how: 136 figures built for it, 87 of them diagrams, charts, and maps drawn from CERN's own published numbers, across a machine explained mechanism by mechanism, with no equation in the text.Inside, you'll find: - The ring, measured honestly. 26,659 meters around, bored mostly for a different, older machine, holding 1,232 dipole magnets that alone account for 69 percent of its length.- The cold, explained. 1.9 kelvin, reached with 120 metric tons of liquid helium, so the magnets can carry current with no resistance at all -- and so a bent beam does not simply melt its own pipe.- The bill, given honestly. CERN's own documents give three different figures for what the machine cost -- 4.332 billion Swiss francs by one accounting, 4.7 billion by another, close to 6 billion with every experiment included. This book states which is which and why they differ, rather than picking the one number that sounds cleanest.- The accident nobody hides. On September 19, 2008, nine days after first beam, a single bad electrical splice took the machine down for fourteen months. The book tells you what failed, what it cost, and what changed afterward.- The discovery, and what it actually took. Five sigma, a one-in-3.5-million chance of a false alarm, reached only after sifting through quadrillions of collisions for a particle that keeps almost none of itself around long enough to be seen directly.This book assumes no physics. It assumes you have heard 'Higgs boson' often enough to feel a little embarrassed not knowing what it means, and it starts from there.Ten thousand scientists. Thirty years, counted from the idea rather than the vote. One machine, still running.…