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LHC Fully Documented Online
Physicser writes "Want to read every single technical detail of the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors? The whole shebang — seven reports totaling 1600 pages, 115 MB, with contributions from 8000 scientists and engineers — has been published electronically by the Journal of Instrumentation, free to read without a subscription."
Not particularly.
This is something to download, store away, and reminisce some 30 years later.
It would be a great read if I was one of the ten people on the face of the planet who could actually understand every detail. Oh, sorry, that's the people who wrote it.
I know it's going to get downloaded a ton of times and probably deleted before most readers ever get to the 3rd page, if it's even read at all.
Save them poor guys some bandwidth, torrent it. Too many people are going to be wasting their resources with no serious intentions of reading the contents.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
From TFA:
Just kidding, tldr.
If you need me, I'll be in my basement.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Now I can build my own the planet is DOOMED!
...1600 pages for every detail of the making of a LHC, 6546 pages in the specs for OOXML and it's still not enough detail to let you open and create OOXML documents. Obviously the LHC is not adequately complex.
TL;DR
This rather witty, clever. And not extremely obvious signature is precisely one hundred and twenty characters in length.
Don't you mean your parent's basement?
No sig for you!!
I recall hitting numerous sections of the site that were protected. One was a log of superconducting magnet quenches. I guess that openness doesn't extend to embarrassing operational problems...
Please help metamoderate.
... at least /something/ about it is "online."
Okay, then, want to build a Large Hadron Collider? Or are you one of those people who think Hadrons should be left alone?
Excellent... off to the hardware store to start picking up parts this weekend. I wonder if my local electric company is going to mind the extra drain... no matter, the black hole in my back yard will swallow them soon enough. ;)
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
I am very much looking forward to what comes out of the LHC. It's been wonderful to watch its construction and that's only a fraction of the satisfaction its discoveries will provide.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
At sixteen hundred pages, it can only create about a fourth of the suckiness of the OOXML standard. Since that hasn't generated a black hole - except for maybe a few terabytes of lost data here and there - we should be safe.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This story would only be important if we had all been devoured in a black hole.
I have actually done some theoretical calculations based upon other people/scientist's "crazy" theories, and it is possible that an explosion the equivalent to a 3 gigaton TNT explosion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent ) to be created. Depending on where is happens, it might create a crater or hump ( http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Effects/UndergroundEffects.html ), but probably a crater between 10 kilometers to 18 kilometers wide. This explosion would probably create an earthquake between 8.5 and 10.5 on the ritcher scale ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale ) that is felt in Geneve, Switzerland, and an earth quake between 7 and 8.5 felt in Paris, France. The fun thing is that the amplitude of the quake would be very large, and the ground might not even shake more than twice due to the size of the whole thing.
Please note that these calculations assume that all the equipment works perfectly (, or a error of less than a thousandth of a percent). I did account for error in the calculations, especially how practical large/nuclear explosions tend to have caused slightly larger earthquakes than calculated ( http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0617181 ).
Other notes: There exists a chance that a huge explosion would just create a big crater with a small tunnel going toward the center of the earth. If you have trouble visualizing this, try visualizing the Death Star.
Is anyone else putting their aluminum foil hats on and thinking that these scientists are absolutely mad?! And why did these mad scientists get to have a chance to destroy the world before me?
I can recommend the document at the bottom, "LHC Machine"... while I only understand a tiny little bit of what they're talking about in terms of apparatus, and roughly none of the physics, parts of "LHC Machine" talk about the control systems, middleware, J2EE components, and other stuff like that: more ordinary hardware/software geek stuff. It was actually very interesting. I didn't try to read any of the others yet...
In other news, sales of Nytol declined sharply.
- T
It's time I applied for my personalized Capital One credit card.
With sharks.
And lasers.
And maybe some ninja midgets.
And warkittens.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
It's a hobby, I'm way outside of the brainpower to do the math.
So I found some videos and articles to help me out: YouTube to the rescue Warning there's some crap with bird in there.
Finding the Higg's Boson is the big prize, if they find it it will help with this which disrupts the notion of black holes as "singularities" and raises some philosophical, and religious questions... largely if the theorized particle is not found.
Also interesting is the evaporating black hole theory, which is all but proven so don't worry (Cough CNN).
Personally I've always been facinated by Virtual particles and am curious about the implication of examining non-singularity black holes.
Enjoy it, it's gonna be cool as hell!
The LEGO Mindstorm version will be released any day now!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
On page 867, there's mention of a two-meter-wide thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The exhaust shaft leads directly to the reactor system, and a precise hit would start a chain reaction which should destroy the LHC.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
...they forgot to carry the 7.
We're all DOOMED!
What?
That's a european "1"?
Never mind.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I thought that there will be no 30 years later after they turn on the machine...
...and due to every Slashdot user printing it out, the majority of Earth's forests are destroyed.
The rate of global warming increases tenfold.
With the combined mass of all the printouts no longer evenly distributed, small black holes form in several metropolitan areas.
Global warming is no longer an issue.
Fools! Now I can build my own.
I especially like appendix B, or "Build Your Own Large Hadron Collider"
I totally have a project for this weekend!
Home Depot has extra large superconducting electromagnets, right?
...now we have to worry about random third-world countries building weapons of mass-collision.
Now every Joe Schmo with hundreds of acres of land, hundreds of construction workers and engineers, and a lot of raw materials can make his own black hole in his backyard!
Come on, don't you remember the slashdot article about it?
Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground
Designed with mind to send protons around
A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance
Two beams of protons swing round, through the ring they ride
Til in the hearts of the detectors, theyre made to collide
And all that energy packed in such a tiny bit of room
Becomes mass, particles created from the vacuum
And then
LHCb sees where the antimatters gone
ALICE looks at collisions of lead ions
CMS and ATLAS are two of a kind
Theyre looking for whatever new particles they can find.
The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead
And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.
Come on, let's drop some particle physics in the club!
Rock Us, Dukakis.
I was expected at least a mirror and placeholder wiki at openlhc.org by now.
I don't think that it is illegitimate for me to say:
TLDR
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You're bound to screw up and end up sliding anyway. We've seen it all happen before.
I had thought that NIM (Nuclear Instrumentation & Methods, owned by Elsevier) was the only game in town, but it's good to see that there's another journal for this sort of stuff.
(five minutes of browsing later) The Symmetry mag article has a link to the SLAC "blue book", which looks substantially more approachable.
Plus, given how slow my download is going, JINST is being slashdotted. ;)
If anyone ever needs a reason to wallop copyright, let this quote from the article be that reason;
Most copies of The Blue Book had vanished from the SLAC Library, and the librarians wanted to make it available electronically. But they ran into a snag: No one could figure out who owned the copyright, so there was no one to give permission to put it on the Web.
"It's an orphan work," SLAC archivist Jean Deken told me Friday. The original publisher was bought by another, which was bought by another, and so on. Finally, with the help of an expert from Stanford Law School, librarian Abraham Wheeler tracked down the current owner of the copyright-which said that since it could not find any documentation on the book, it could not grant permission to reproduce it.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
So the full technical specification has been posted online to our enemies? They want to hand this kind of technology to the terrorists? They want to make nukes, tehy could use the colliding hadrons like the exploding fission atom used in a atom bomb! Or worse find the fundamental secrets of the universe first!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Just finished. Report #3 was particularly good, though 4 and 5 could have been a little more concise (IMHO).
Now, back to chapter 2 of Gravity's Rainbow.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Are they mad? The work of thousands of scientists published on line for all to see. A reasonable generic copyright license. All downloadable.
What about the poor deserving lawyers? Where is the DRM? The commercial propaganda about "IP"? The hundred page license? The attempts by assorted hangers on to profit at other people's expense?
I think the lawyers should form a class action lawsuit for loss of income. It's just not right that somebody should be able to do something without numerous lawyers attached.
how will I build one when I have no more money for doomsday devices? I put all of my money into Enron, and you see where that got me!
There's a mistake on page 1471.
Brett
Where's the stuff about how they'll turn the world into a black hole? Hopefully that won't happen. It would suck. Like a vacuum cleaner. But with gravity instead of vacuum. :-(
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Now at last I can build my own Large Hadron Collider, with hookers! and blackjack!
In fact, forget the LHC!
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
There's a big mistake on page 987: The neutrino coupling in the diagram is connected backwards and will cause ripples in the vortex when it reaches 57 MeV.
I'm trying to call them to abort the project but I'm in a different time zone. Let's hope they read this before it's too late!
No sig today...
I am not in TOTEM (other side of the ring) but I understand the abstract just fine and consider it an immensely valuable contribution to the physics programme of the LHC.
These weren't written to be read end to end by the layman. They were meant as reference publications for professionals. I don't know how I would have gotten through my ph.d. without publications like these. Where else do I get the exact layout of the ATLAS semi-conductor tracker? Where else do I look for the muon momentum resolution of CMS vs. ATLAS? I am sorry if you think that renders them incomprehensible but this is what we need.
Extremely cool document. Thanks for the (indirect) link. 88 MB, but it downloads in a couple of minutes.
Allow me to translate:
...to pursue its own physics programme and at a later stage together with CMS for a common physics programme. This article gives a description of the TOTEM apparatus and its performance."
The TOTEM Experiment will measure the total pp cross-section with the luminosity-independent method and study elastic and diffractive scattering at the LHC.
> We will be really disappointed if we don't blow stuff up with this thing. We like bright things.
To achieve optimum forward coverage for charged particles emitted by the pp collisions in the interaction point IP5, two tracking telescopes, T1 and T2, will be installed on each side in the pseudorapidity region 3.1 || 6.5, and Roman Pot stations will be placed at distances of ±147 m and ±220 m from IP5.
> We've already determined that our faked fast area is just outside the event horizon of the bag-azz black hole that is bound to occur.
Being an independent experiment but technically integrated into CMS, TOTEM will first operate in standalone mode...
> We're not stupid. We know this thing will blow, in grand style, and we plan on being far away when it does.
> We're hoping that people will fall for the phrase 'common physics programme' and overlook the fact that the biggest risk with this entire project is that we've decided to use Vista 'Provisional'.
Help to save the world from being destroyed by a black hole! The specs to the LHC (Large Hole Creator) are available. Create a detailed proof showing that the LHC will create a planet-destroying black hole when it is switched on. Send the proof, with your $75 entry fee, directly to me. The person submitting the first valid proof will be awarded a prize of $50 Million, to be awarded on Sept 12th.
Isn't it funny that the entire LHC spec is 1.600 pages, while the OOXML documentation, as submitted by Microsoft, is a full 6.000 pages.
Does this reflect a difference in complexity, or is it a sign of something else?
Now *THAT* is the observation of the month.
Don't get carried away though, there are only a few day of August left :-)
Insert
It seems to be missing one.
And a support line in case it fails to re-create the Big Bang, Black Holes, or Higgs Boson as advertised?
"Fully Documented" indeed...
Oh no, he's our parent and he's already in the basement.
I am a theoretical physicist unaffiliated with LHC, too. The abstract is perfectly reasonable.
You should know that everything but deep inelastic scattering will result in very small deflection angles, that is, high pseudorapidity. This is hard to measure since you can't put the detector in the beam line. Hence TOTEM needs some gadgets (tracking telescopes, roman pots) to measure the scattered particles.
To analyse the data, one needs essentially two geometric data about the detector: The pseudorapidity region covered, and the distance from the interaction point. These are in the abstract since they are the numbers that most scientists will be interested in. Only very few people will want to know the location of every nut and bolt inside.
The specification for Office Open XML has 6000 pages. And is missing some important stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-bytes-of-the-week-lhc-gets-its-own-rap-song
can build their own end of the world device.
WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)
WMC (Weapons of Mass Collision)
WMB (Weapons of Mass Bullying)
WMA (Windows Media Audio)
There you have it, folks! WMA is the pinnacle of EVIL!
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
Pfft, some of us own or rent our own basements. In fact, there's a free basement above me at the moment, in case you want to rent it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, first of all, some of us have better taste than to wear a loincloth. A robe and wizard hat, for example, is much more stylish and comfortable for the aspiring sorcerer or warlock. A toga picta works too, for the aspiring Emperor. Well, at least until mom catches wind that you dyed one of her bedsheets purple ;)
But a loincloth? Ugh. We're civilized people, not some barbarians.
Second, some of us have our own basement to defend, thank you very much. I mean, have you tried taking over the world from your mom's basement? Ooer, talk about frustrating. It would go sorta like this.
Me: "Now we open the prayer books to the dark invocation psalm and..."
Mom (poking her head in): "Anyone want milk and cookies?"
Cultist 1: "I'll have some, please."
Cultist 2: "Me too."
Me: "Mooom!!"
Mom: "Oh, hush. Nice dress, by the way."
Me: "Mom, it's a robe."
Mom: "Sure it is. I just want you to know me and dad support your lifestyle choices."
Cultist 3: "Told you it looks gay."
Cultist 1: "Yeah."
Me: "Mom, you're interrupting our invocation!"
Mom: "Oh, hush, I'm your mom, I'm allowed to. What are you guys playing anyway? Dungeons and Dragons?"
Me: "No, it's serious. And you can start calling me High Overlord Moraelin the First."
Mom: "High, huh? Well, you know me and dad don't approve of _that_, but I guess it would explain a few things."
Cultist 4: "Heh!"
Me: "*sigh* Where are the sacrificial dagger and the sacred chalice anyway?"
Mom: "You mean our kitchen knife? I put it in the dishwasher, together with that plastic cup you had there. They were getting ridiculously dirty, and it's just not healthy."
Cultist 3: "Told ya."
A trip to the kitchen later:
Group chanting: "Nigrae legiones, ferus imperator, sinus occultus, fatum terminatum"
Mom (poking nose in again): "By the way, I'm going to sleep. Try to keep the noise down, please."
Me: "Ok, mom."
Mom: "By the way is that the chorus from Das Omen?"
Me: "No, it's an ancient and sacred invocation.."
Cultist 2: "Nah, I googled it, it's E Nomine."
Cultist 1: "Owned."
Cultist 4: "I thought you said you only listened to metal?"
Me: "Gah! Fine by me, chant Dies Irae if it makes you feel any better."
Cultist 3: "Why do we have to chant in Latin anyway?"
Me: "Because we're summoning an arsehole of a demon, and he wants it that way."
Mom: "Anyway, keep it down and turn off the lights when you're done, ok?"
Me: "Ok, mom. Now where were we?"
Cultist 3: "You know, screw this. Let's skip the henchman and work for the real overlord. Do you happen to need some accolytes, Mrs?"
Cultist 1: "Seconded."
Cultist 2: "No kidding."
Cultist 4: "Actually, I'm out of here. I promised mom I'll be home by eleven anyway."
(Disclaimer: it's fiction.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Jayysus! the design is clearly flawed as in our company individual access to simple things like file share require 2756 pages of documentation, on average.
Oh, I see what they're up to! These "Roman Pot Stations" are just another secretive way for scientists to get high. And they get all this funding to cover it up and make it look legit. Ingenious!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Okay, I did not read the whole thing, but does that summary really say 1600 pages?
"Want to read every single technical detail of the design and construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its six detectors? The whole shebang - seven reports totaling 1600 pages, ... "
I have read user guides for recent SOCs that total more than 1600 pages, and I am sure they are far less complex than the LHC.
Every single technical detail? I think not....
I thought AlpineKat already taught us all about the LHC.
Do not print out the whole set of documentation - that much highly dense paper in one place could collapse into a small black hole, endangering the planet.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is exactingly what the Internet was invented/developed for. For the shearing of information, not just news.
Just for the record, that is a diagram of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), not the Large Hadron Collider.
However, the ITER is being perhaps as impressively documented, and a lot of that is also online. Keep in mind that the ITER design is not complete, but the overall architecture shouldn't change much. In addition to a huge amount of data on the operating theory and conditions, if you dig around through the site, you can even find animations of the mechanical parts (which are primarily for maintenance) in action.
Hardcore Nerd Stuff:
ITER Design
They this online because they are afraid that every other country will spend 2 billon dollars in doing the same thing :-S
Z is better known as Zero, even though his real name is Lelouch Vi Britania. He has a geas that lets him order people around.
He's sort of like W, but far more competent.
No time to read but I wish the first 100 pages are not a listing of the 8000+ contributors' names and credential while the last 500 pages list the citations of their publications.
Now that the specs have been published, the open source community can step up and make a clone.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Ooooh. Wormstrom!