Akis Kritsinelis, a fellow Greek, holds the PowerBall World Record for achieving 16317 RPMs using a gyroscope! Amazing video of how he made it. I think I’ll buy one and start playing with it as well!
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We continue our journey to the world of Particle Physics and after the first general introduction let’s go and look the beast named Large Hadron Collider at more detail. The LHC will be accelerating protons at energies of 7 TeV. The protons will need 89 microseconds to make one turn in the accelerator’s 27 km (17 mi) circular tunnel and their speeds will be amazingly close to the speed of light. How close? Well at full speed they’ll have 0.999999991 times the speed of light!
That beam of protons will carry a massive 362 MJ of energy. That’s almost 77.5 kg of TNT or a car traveling at 1700 km/hr!!! Another common example that is being used is that 7 TeV is approximately the energy of a flying mosquito. Mosquitoes weigh about 2 to 2.5 mg (thousands of a gram). Now imagine the same amount of energy being compressed on a single proton (they weigh 1.673E-24 grams!). This is more than 20 orders of magnitude difference!
The LHC will be built at the same old ring of the previous accelerator LEP. Have a look:
Chicago
