Massive Machinery: Part 4

Massive Machinery: Part 4

Science Edition!

Over the course of this series, we’ve looked at all kinds of ridiculous machinery, from giant drills to super-sized dump trucks. In the fourth part of this series, we look at three giant pieces of machinery that we have the world of science to thank for! Whether you have or haven’t heard of these machines, you should be totally wowed by their sheer enormity.

National Ignition Facility

This piece of mega machinery is like something straight out of a Bond villain’s fantasies. It’s the world’s biggest laser. The purpose of ‘NIF’ is to heat and compress hydrogen fuel to achieve nuclear fusion, a scientific activity that creates high amounts of energy, and is directly related to nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapon research also takes place at NIF, further supporting our suggestion that a Bond villain may enjoy this place.

Construction of the laser machinery facility took five years longer than expected, at four times the cost. We are thinking ‘one million dollars’ was not enough to cut the mustard, and the project would have cost in the billions. In terms of the future energy crisis, it will likely prove a wise investment.

The pulse of energy fired from the laser lasts for just 23 billionths of a second, yet it generates 411 trillion watts of power, the most powerful laser blast in human history.

To better understand the laser, watch this video (complete with suspenseful music)

The IceCube

As well as being one of the biggest pieces of machinery on the planet, the IceCube is also probably the coolest thing you will find at the south pole.. The IceCube is a Neutrino Telescope (also the largest one of those in the world, of course) and so its job is to detect neutrinos passing through the Earth. It’s buried 1.6 miles deep, which makes it the second largest man made hole on the planet.

Neutrinos are very scientific, and something we won’t attempt to explain, but the reason IceCube is buried so deep into the earth is so that other things aren’t disrupting their data, like radio waves, microwaves etc.

The IceCube website describes itself as “Encompassing a cubic kilometer of ice, IceCube searches for nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos. These high-energy astronomical messengers provide information to probe the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars.”

This Youtube video should simplify things…

And now, ladies and gentlemen, the main event, the one you’ve been waiting for. Fighting out of Geneva, Switzerland, it’s…

The Large Hadron Collider!

In some ways it sounds like a wrestling move, but in reality, it is the largest piece of machinery ever made by humans. It’s so large in fact, that it doesn’t have a recorded total weight, but to put it into perspective, just one central part, called the ‘CMS’ weighs more than the second largest machine on the planet.

You will probably remember the Large Hadron Collider from some panicky news broadcasts a few years ago suggesting that the machine was going to destroy the planet in its search for ‘The God Particle’. The LHC also contains the most sophisticated supercomputer in the world, which produces so much data it fills around 300 dual layer DVDs each day!

Again, science is better explained by the professionals.