Is it more than 1.21 gigawatts?
That's like asking if a liter is more than a meter. They measure two different things. Watts are a unit of power, the amount of energy applied or delivered per unit time. An electron volt is a unit of energy. And no, sorry,
Alpha Geek, but it's not the same thing as a volt, which is a unit of potential, the difference of energy between two things. An electron volt is the amount of energy gained by an electron as it's accelerated through a potential difference of one volt. So 1.18 TeV is what you'd get if one electron were accelerated with 1.18 trillion volts, or if a trillion electrons were accelerated with 1.18 volts, or whatever.
An electron volt is 1.6 x 10^-19 joules, so 1.18 x 10^12 eV is only 0.00000019 joules. To borrow
CERN's own analogy, it's about the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito. We're not talking about enormous amounts of energy here (which is one of the many reasons why the whole "destroy the world" panic is such complete and utter nonsense). What's significant about the LHC is the energy
density it can achieve. The total amount of energy in the collisions it creates is small in absolute terms -- we are, after all, talking about streams of tiny subatomic particles being collided, not trucks -- but it's packed into a very small volume over a very brief time, and that allows for the creation of unusual high-energy particles that generally aren't found in nature, and that can teach us a lot about the physics of the universe, particularly what it was like close to the Big Bang, when energy density like that was commonplace.
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