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LHC Shut Down By Transformer Malfunction
Ortega-Starfire writes "A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online. No one at CERN reported any problems, and they only released this data once the Associated Press sent people to investigate rumors of problems. I guess it's hard to just sweep a 30-ton transformer breaking under the rug."
More than meets the eye! I guess the Decepticons don't want us to advance our knowledge!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I bet it was Omegatron!
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
I TOLD YOU! Why wouldn't anyone listen? See what happens when the LHC opened a warp hole to Cybertron? Now they'll come back for vengeance, and they won't care if they're autobot or decepticon, for this dispicable act. They'll know that I stood against the LHC, and they'll ensure that I have a place in rounding up you for work in their salt mines. I for one welcome our robotic overlords.
God spoke to me.
Gordon, what have you done?!?!?!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
It's a big, complicated machine - shit breaks. It gets fixed. I wouldn't worry about it unless you're waiting for beam time.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
yet. Now I have another chance to try all of those world ending pickup lines! Actually, I really should get religious. If I were religious, I could celebrate an end-of-the-world day every day!
Can one of you physicists tell me how 4.5 Kelvin is different from 2 Kelvin, operationally?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
BZZZZZT! BAM! Crackle...
Merd!
Sig this!
It would be hard to sweep a 30-ton transformer under a rug, unless there is a black hole under said rug.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
several to go.
Well ALICE, let's see how deep the budget hole goes...
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Everybody knows that GoBots are better than Transformers.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Just in case anyone else misread the headline, there's a vas deferens between the Large Hadron Collider and the Large Hardon Collider.
...and I didn't realize the standard measurement for transformers had been changed to tons. Must be a European measurement?
I think kVA or MVA would be a better statistic.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
They knew this was a hazard going in (temp rising), they talked about the possibility before the first trials and they successfully designed systems to shutdown before causing damage. This is just part of the sea trials of the particle pirate's new ship.
What with, you know, most of the world's population thinking that day was the critical "black-hole" day.
Whilst I'm sure that is beneficial for CERN in the context that most people will be completely unaware on the day that full speed collisions are truly started, I do not for one moment think the media had that intention. A publicised failure would only serve to increase people's prejudice.
I record my sleeptalking
After it was started up Sept. 10, scientists circled a beam of protons in a clockwise direction at the speed of light. They shut that down, then turned on a counterclockwise beam.
Now, accelerating a proton to the speed of light seems to me impossible, given that they are in a vacuum. But if they can do that, then the other interpretation is possible. It was the scientists who were circling at the speed of light, round say, a little beaker of protons. I'd like to commend whoever shut them down, then anti-beamed them to restore reality.
Well that's great that you have that degree, but not everyone does. To people who aren't too familiar with that area of study or work, saying "30 tons" paints a much better picture in the reader's minds.
If you read TFA, you discover that it, but not the provided summary on /., says it was news to nobody in the field that something broke. What's not said here, but said in TFA and far more worthy of mention, is that they replaced it and were running again the next day, well before AP even inquired. Falling prey to the cheap journalistic gimmick of awfulism, are we?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
True, but if they're real scientists they'd figure out it's easier to sweep the black hole under the 30-ton transformer. When done, cover up with rug.
I used to come to slashdot for the summaries. Then the community grew and it was the comments that drew me here. But now, I just come for the tags.
You folks crack me up.
Carry on.
I don't know how you do it. It never works for me.
I could've sworn I left my favorite rug on top of the black hole in the living room the other day but, crazy as it sounds, it seems to have just disappeared. I'd swear on a stack of bibles that's where I left the dang thing and you know it didn't just grow legs and walk out of the house.
I don't get it ... we have beam, how can the LHC be "shut down" ? who cares if there was a short downtime
Thank God it wasn't a blackhole malfunction.
Or rather, thank the God particle.
..he just assumed that something which might be involved with cooling must be rated in the amount of ice it can create in a day.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Transformers are usually considered very stable electrical equipment, given that they have no moving parts. The only way a transformer that passed factory inspection should fail is if there was a short circuit and the current in the windings exceeded the temporary overload rating. Of course any number of errors COULD have ocrrured, but the most obvious (insufficient electrical clearance, insufficient cooling, cracked power bushings, etc.) should have been found before it left the manufacturer. Maybe the contractor didn't size the unit properly?
Who put Homer Simpson in the power control room?
For those who only read the "summary" (I use this term loosely) and aren't familiar with the LHC you may be surprised to learn that:
this is not a major failure
there is no sinister cover-up
no one was ever in any danger
Thanks for some more fear-mongering doomsday garbage "news" Slashdot. The purpose of editors, at least for non-tabloid news sources, is to filter factually inaccurate and inflammatory nonsense, not seek it out.
Being able to MacGyver that thing at all without a DHD is impressive, let's not be so hard on them.
Shh, nobody's supposed to know about the Roomba Death Star
I hope it was under warranty. "Fedex? I've got a package for you..."
Copper is getting expensive enough these days without a 30 ton xformer blowing every time they turn that beast on. ;-/
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
+1 informative.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I can't remember the details, but didn't Fermilab or some outfit on this side of the pond screw up when they produced one or two of the large magnets needed for the LHC about a year back? Wikipedia to the rescue, it was Fermilab and KEK[1] More details here
Not to knock too hard on Fermilab, they do a lot of great work, it's just too funny that they screwed up on an important part for a rival's project. Uh, yeah, we, uh, can't believe we did that.
I was thinking that the problem wasn't sweeping te transformer under the rug, but rather smoothing the rug down once you're done. I think that the black hole solution might actually do the job (as long as you can keep the rug from being sucked in too).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Boy, howdy! Talk about the Uncanny Valley -- his eyes totally give me the creeps!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Overhead transformers to one-oh-five percent...
It's probably nothing... probably... but I'm seeing a small discrepancy in the readings...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
i know michael bay is trying to get some good pr for transformers 2 next year, but there was no need to a stage a mock decepticon attack on a real human technological installation
why couldn't you leave the transformer devastation on the movie screen mr. bay? do you really think this will make people want to watch your movie?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder when we're going to hear about the alien that escaped?! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433883/
Ryan
It's Cosmic Censorship, man! A super intelligence from the future has come back to ensure the Large Hadron Collider can't create a naked singularity. OMG Xeelee!
I know you're joking, but I can just see someone taking you seriously.
For reference, the black holes it may create will evaporate almost instantly and are so tiny they won't small much of anything before disappearing. Well... thats theory as I understand it anyway.
And no, the joke didn't whoosh me, I got it :) I just can see many people whooshing :)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The LHC may very well bring about the end of the world, but it won't be until 2012, just ask any Mayan :D
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
"A 30-ton transformer in the Large Hadron Collider malfunctioned, requiring complete replacement on the day the LHC came online."
This news must have traveled in time - because the LHC doesn't come online until sometime next summer. Right now, its in the middle stages of a months long startup and calibration sequence.
Not to mention that stuff breaks during the startup of complex machinery, doubly so for one of a kind complex machinery.
The super collider super exploded.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
You're very clever young man, very clever. But I'm afraid it's rugs all the way down.
They have day-to-day log of the activities at https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/dailynews/index.htm I didn't have any problems finding this logs at the LHC website.
Transformer outage and cryogenics breakdown is logged on September 13. They were not 'rumors'.
I refuse to use
What a shame, it really tied the room together.
The used superconductors are good well above 4K (although with decreased maximum saturation).
The main point is that they want their helium to be superfluidic, as otherwise it would be impossible to direct the heat over the many km needed (if their were bubble formation in the dewars).
With superfluidic helium, heat resistance also drops nearly to zero(as we are in the real world, it cannot be zero. But heat conductivity increases by many magnitudes, and bubble formation is eliminated). That way, they can keep heat gradients along the whole ring well below 1K.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
you have to admit its prety embarassing for stuff to start going bad less than 2 weeks after it goes live though. but thats what happens when you buy stuff from china.
The webcam is a great source of information on CMS :), but if you want to know the status of the LHC, check the following links:
The current status of the beam can always be viewed here
All other status informations are linked from here
So maybe they didn't make a press release, but perhaps journalists should be smart enough to find these pages instead of claiming conspiracies?
No. Transformers are mostly iron. Iron is heavy -- 7.87 g/cm^3. 30 tons of iron is only 3.5 m^3 (think of a cube 1.5 meters in each direction).
http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/the-twat-o-tron/
Squirrel!
Even dumb-ass big iron transformers know enough to not want to die. Give them religion and they'll fall in line.
You didn't put the stack of bibles on the rug, did you?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I think that makes good sense, more than people readily accept. Since any cheapo meccano accelerator achieves particle speeds close to lightspeed, it becomes kind of silly to describe LHC speeds as "close to lightspeed". So "at lightspeed" is technically wrong but practically fine. Energy or mass is a much better way to point out the difference.
It broke, so far no news, but they ordered a replacement from a catalog which was lying around, some company called Electronic Services Unit 16.
The replacement arrived in a small padded envelope, and they've spent the intervening time running tests on it.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
No - it's being commissioned at the moment. You know stuff is going to go wrong - that's why you put it through commissioning first rather than just pressing "ON"
The transformer malfunction was inevitable, due to the anthropic principle. In every possible universe in which the transformer didn't malfunction, the LHC destroyed the world and we couldn't observe that it didn't malfunction. :p
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I could've sworn I left my favorite rug on top of the black hole in the living room... crazy as it sounds, it seems to have just disappeared.
That's a real shame dude... that rug really tied the room together
What on earth do you have to do to a 30 ton transformer that requires complete replacement?
The magnets use NbTi (niobium titanium) alloy superconductor which has a critical temperature of ~9K. Current capability of a superconductor is a function of the local magnetic field and the temperature. The greater the ratio of critical temperature (9K) to operating temperature, the greater the current that can be carried. 9/4.5=2 while 9/2 =4.5. It's not linear, but one can get to higher fields at the lower temperature, and therefore greater beam energies in the same tunnel. The Tevatron operates at 4.5K, BTW.
If Fermilab had handled the public relations better before the SSC site decision, the locals might not have opposed it, sending it to Texas. Had the Tevatron been used as the injector for the SSC, as the CERN complex does for the LHC, the cost would have been much less. The SSC might have been running for a decade in this scenario.
Fermilab set up a local committee to discuss the possible siting of the International Linear Collider, a proposed follow-on to LHC which will cost about the same. The lab learned from the SSC mistake. The ILC would be 30-50 miles long but the most complicated stuff, including the detectors, would fit on the Fermilab site of ~6400 acres. The rest goes in a couple of long, deep tunnels.
Or you just have a REALLY bug rug and a REALLY big broom to sweep it with. *ba-doom TSSHHH*
"...unless there is a black hole under said rug." Come on now, lets be realistic here: that black hole could only exist if the LHC didn't break down right away. Well, that or your infinite improbability machine is functioning (properly or otherwise).
oh man, I just messed up the rule for the day.
Karma: NaN
The magnets are only for keeping the particles inside, for keeping them from flying in a straight line. For accelleration an electrostatic approach is normally used. True, making things fly in a circle also is a form of accelleration, but without the speeding up part.
Why grandparent mentions vacuum I can't imagine..
The point about lightspeed is, it is the relativistic equivalent of infinite speed. You can't go faster than infinite, but you can still keep accellerating. You can keep accelerating close to lightspeed, and while speed only changes a tiny bit, the particle can still accumulate all the momentum you want to put in to cause a big bang on impact. So momentum and energy keep growing to infinity just like you would expect, as you're pumping in energy, only speed creeps along and never gets beyond lightspeed.
You know, my first thought was to check the transformer for any teeny tiny holes (probably vertical) boring out the bottom. If they found one ... be afraid, be very afraid ...
Conversation on the phone went something like this:
LHC: Uh...had a slight transformer malfunction. But, uh, everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
AP: We're sending a squad up.
LHC: Uh, uh, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak...very dangerous.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
And you know when they throw a champagne bottle at a ship once the ship construction is complete? It's a waste of a perfectly good bottle, the ship doesn't need things to be banged against it like that and the fishes don't really appreciate the glass that much.
You can't handle the truth.
They're going to use the LHC to make energon cubes.
There, fixed that for you. Also, turn in your geen badge.
That's harsh... The geen badge is the one that lets you control pokemon up to level 50, and lets you use "fly" outside of combat...
Well, looks like you're hoofin' it then...
Bow-ties are cool.
This is sensationalist reporting at its best. An electrical component broke and got quickly replaced, whoopty-doo. Yes, it takes big transformers to cool a 27 km long collider. Yes, they breakdown. It's not a scandal or coverup, it's experimental science.
If the science AP writers would actually write about science instead of failed transformers and beer cans in the tunnel, the general public might actually learn something useful. But then I guess they'd have raise the level of all of their articles.
The god particle finally hit something critical. Where is the Omega cube now?
Obligatory: LHC webcam.
I don't know anything about the LHC but i'd like to comment on Slashdot's newly redesigned system. It's made the screen of my computer appear much larger than it was before. And it seems to be affecting everything in my room too. Fix this, please!
Wasn't their a pair of scientists that predicted the possibility that all parallel universes in which the LHC successfully ran would be destroyed, so we would always exist in the universes in which id didn't run? If there are a few more failures, I think they might be on to something...
I think the thing that keeps Slashdot Slashdot and Digg Digg is the comment moderation systems.
Here, comment scores are limited to the range [-1:5], so you can filter to your level of interest. There are plenty of stupid comments, but they're easy to mute so that the more sophisticated readers can still hear each other.
On Digg the comment scores are in the range [-N:N], where N is the number of people seeing the article summary. If you filter through [0:N] then the best comments will still be swimming in a sea of just-barely-not-terrible comments. If you filter through some arbitrary cutoff [M:N] then you might see nothing or another sea of garbage, depending on how N for that story compares to your M. Since N varies wildly, you have no reliable way of skimming the cream of the crop.
Since good comments are hard to find, there's not much incentive to write them. The best you can do is write a popular comment and get recognition that way. So Slashdot appeals to people who value recognition as insightful, informative, or interesting. Digg appeals to people who value recognition as popular.
before the LHC swept all "fixed-this-for-you-fixes" under it's blackholed rug!
These fixes are available in the alternate universal editions 1, 2 and 3.
(I can't imagine I've ever said blackholed .. sounds nastier than goatse!)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I think the new OS that LHAC uses, the "Geneva Logical A.I. Disk Operating System", or G.L.a.D.O.S. would be better at controlling power than than letting the scientists control it manually.
The Eggheads were responsible for making the transformer blow as it was trying to power up the LHAC to make an Ad-hoc Eistein-Rosen Bridge.
I say they need to automate it and let the G.L.a.D.O.S control the power levels and the security systems.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The transformers that have developed trouble are the ones that were recycled from the LEP experiment. The positron and electron collider which resided the LHC tunnel during the 90s . Since they are always reclycling equipment, it makes things a bit more less stable. Cheers, A
So is this post informative or is it funny?
They're not trying to cover up a broken transformer - they're trying to cover up the tiny black hole that formed in the transformers, and is growing exponentially.
Well that explains it, wondered how a transformer the size of a grapefruit could weigh 35 tons! :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
heh, b/c building a 27km underground tunnel is generally considered "practical".
Orbiting a detector might mean you get to observe one such interaction close enough to observe in perhaps a few thousand years or so.
Building a small tunnel means you get to do so, on demand, whenever the mood strikes you.
Which is less practical again? A programmer would realize time was better spent optimizing the thing you want to do a few million times in a loop even if it takes a bit of effort up front.
Also a tunnel just sits there where anything put into space needs to be maintained and monitored and prevented from falling on you. It's like the difference between launching a popular website on Windows vs. Linux.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After all, if the media is report 2 months minimum then it falls into November when they have to shutdown anyhow to provide Geneva enough energy to heat the city til spring. I suppose they don't want to publicly admit that since they like the attention and press coverage. Sadly, we won't see much data from them for a while then = (