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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!
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
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()!
Just in case anyone else misread the headline, there's a vas deferens between the Large Hadron Collider and the Large Hardon Collider.
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.
http://www.shacknews.com/images/image-o-matic.x?/images/sshots/Screenshot/10698/10698_48c7161254f4d.jpg
http://i35.tinypic.com/256fu4g.jpg
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 have been bestowed with mod points almost continuously for the past month(5 or 6 times anyways). Sadly, since I don't mod down, I have barely used them since the comment quality is nearing that of digg... Someone say something insightful PLEASE!
Something insightful.
something insightful PLEASE
It's a fairly standard measurement for mass, though. Transformers have mass, so it's perfectly applicable, especially when you are trying to underscore the massiveness of the piece of equipment in question, rather than its functional capability. If the person writing the article/summary wanted to underscore the cost of the unit, he might have measured it in US dollars. That's what journalists do: describe things in terms their readers might understand or care about. And most of their readers aren't pedantic electrical engineers.
Can one of you physicists tell me how 4.5 Kelvin is different from 2 Kelvin, operationally?
The magnets they use to shape and steer the beam require about 12,000 amps, so they use superconductors. Between 2K and 4.5K, the superconductor undergoes a phase change and becomes non-superconducting, and the resistance goes from zero to not zero all of a sudden. The 12,000 amps suddenly produces an incredible amount of heat (P=I^2R) which drastically increases the pressure from the liquid He. That much pressure means the He needs to escape (violently), causing all sorts of trouble. It's called a 'quench.'
The maximum magnetic field you can put on a superconductor depends on temperature. You can operate a superconducting magnet with a stronger magnetic field at 2 Kelven instead of 4.5 kelvin. Also, below 2.17 degrees kelvin, helium becomes super-fluid and has better heat conductivity - this is important in some applications. For alternating fields (like microwaves) superconductors are not perfectly superconducting, they have a bit if residual resistance. This resistance decreases as the temperature goes 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
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?
I mean this as no insult to digg, but the comments on the articles (and most of the articles themselves) are absolute shit. Most of the people commenting are - by their own admission - highschoolers and young college kids. With Slashdot, at least there's some pretense of being accurate and factual in the comments - users who troll or make ill-informed posts are usually modded down or corrected by other users.
In summary, I submit to you a summary of the current digg RSS feed as evidence of article and community quality on digg -
The above is but a small sample of the typical digg feed. Oddly, there aren't any "Marijuana will cure everything and it's 'big pharma' keeping it illegal maaaaaan" articles in the feed, but I'm sure those will trickle in as the day goes on.
:-)
Seriously. Digg is fucking retarded. Hang out there for a week and tell me Slashdot has approached that level of stupidity or redundancy.
No offense to digg or the OP, BTW
"You and your third dimension."