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Photos of the Damage To the Large Hadron Collider
holy_calamity writes "CERN have released images of the damage done to the world's most powerful machine, the Large Hadron Collider, when an electrical fault caused a helium leak. New Scientist has posted them, along with explanations of what you can see. The sudden burst of gas shifted some of the huge superconducting magnets by half a meter, causing at least $21 million in damage."
Odd... articles on Slashdot aren't usually read.
I'm conCERNed that this think may never stay functional long enough to destroy the earth.
On an unrelated note, if there's two things I love, one is pointless, likely redundant puns, and the other is shouting "the sky is falling!"
This is too important to worry about some loose change (in the grand scheme of the LHC) the most important aspect is the lost time.
:-)
The sooner they get back on track (geddit) the better
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Ok. Sounds like a good bet to me. If you win, the world is destroyed and I cant' pay you anything because the world is over. If it starts before then and it destroys the earth, I don't get paid cause the world is over. If, however it starts after then, You have to pay me and I can enjoy my remaining days in comfortable style.
Of course the only was I have to pay is if by some miracle it doesn't destroy the earth, but does start working on that date. So, I just need come up with a back up plan to destroy the earth.
Ah, through the "wisdom" of the US Congress, the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) was killed over a mere $12 Billion cost savings (which was well under construction just south of Dallas, TX). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
Some say it was largely due to infighting with 'higher educational interests' back East and in the Chicago area, - but really the answer most likely due to nothing more than Greed and Money.
TO think that The US Federal Government will give taxpayer money to banks et al to the tune of $2 Trillion with NIL oversight and NIL public disclosure is extremely dangerous and shortsighted. ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=home&sid=aXNaCKxb.oIs )
We (in the US) could have had something MORE POWERFUL than the LHC here in the US. (As I try not to think about the high-energy physicist brain-drain to France/Switzerland)...
Once upon a time, the US took pride in having the best and coolest toys the world over... (/sigh)
This is actually pretty cool... and I'll tell you why I feel that way.
If it just worked, I'd be amazed at the results, follow the discoveries. But there's something about it NOT working that reminds me this is the cuttingf edge of the cutting edge. Thi is when the rocket launch explodes on the pad, this is when the systems fail... and it shouts "humanity is working outside its limits, and we're pushing those limits every time we do something like this". I dig it when the REALLY REALLY smart people have issues with something... usually thats very cool stuff.
I should say when they have trouble with 'technical/physics/electronics' kind of stuff. Not with women. We know they have trouble there already.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I preferred the description of the damage that was released a couple of days ago on CNET-
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10120215-76.html
"A resistive zone developed in one of the electrical connections, creating an electrical arc that punctured one of the helium enclosures around a magnet, according to an analysis by CERN. The warming helium expanded in the vacuum enclosure of the central subsector of the pipe, damaging the vacuum barriers separating the central subsector from the neighboring subsectors."
Geordi La Forge couldn't have said it better.
not safe for work http://lpmuds.net/lhc_NSFW.jpg
Anyone who has been following these developments closely knows that the "helium leak" is just a cover story for the out of control mini black hole they created when they turned it on. Those magnets were shifted when they were finally able to collapse down the black hole, it went out with a massive gravitation burst (measured by seismographs as far away as the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory) that damaged a lot more equipment then they are letting on. Now that they know how dangerous it is, I wouldn't count on them ever turning on the Large Hardon Collider again.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The Large Hardon Collider is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. "It's nothing that cosmic rays don't do all the time all over the place," reassured a particularly buff scientist. "It's perfectly right and natural."
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. "They're the same polarity!" said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
After a premature ejaculation of gas, the Large Hardon Collider has been delayed until July 2009. "I'm so sorry," stammered a scientist, "this has never happened to us before."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Clearly this was an act of Divine Intervention...
We don't need to rewire the whole system, only a small batch of magnets that received the bad soldering job. The rest are fine, and we now have better ways of checking the soldering points remotely (ie without having to heat up the other 7 sectors of the LHC).
The $21M covers all repair costs, including replacing some of the wiring in a batch of magnets in a particular sector. Actually, part of the plan is to use backup magnets (obviously double checked for this flaw) so as to save some time, but we don't have enough backup magnets to replace all of the ones that need to be fixed.
That's not a feature, that's a side effect. Some types of failure cause the liquid helium to warm up until the magnet is no longer at superconducting temperatures. This causes a sudden resistance, which can damage the magnet, heats the whole system up (boiling off the coolant), et cetera. MRI systems generally have an emergency shutoff feature, the side effect of which is magnet quenching.
In this case, a quench is what happened -- resistance in the circuit caused helium boiloff, which destroyed superconductivity. They have many safeguards for this, as this was well-known before the first MRI or superconducting collider was built. Release valves allow the boiling helium to escape, and resistor banks are used to draw off electrical energy from the system. However, their system wasn't sufficient to handle the level of failure that occured.
"Well there's your problem!"
Thanks for letting us in on the details so quickly.[/sarcasm]
I think you mean 12/21/2012.
Actually, I'm really quite disappointed in the computer games community, that they haven't used a revamped SSC as a fictional location for a racing game. I mean, you have nice tubular tunnels which means that cars can loop-the-loop and do all sorts of cool things ... at maximum speed, the driving view would be at ~90 degrees to horizontal in the bends ... just needs some section colour coding, a bunch of floating camera pods and some bolt-on gadgetry (viewing stations, etc) for the cars to avoid. Maybe some rocket launchers.
"SSC Racer". Cooool. If anyone wants to write it, give me a credit somewhere ...
Eric Baird