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Hadron Collider Relaunch Delayed

SpuriousLogic writes "There's been another delay in the schedule announced for getting the Large Hadron Collider switched back on — now it's September 2009, a year after it shut down due to a malfunction. Scientists had said they expected the $5.4B machine to be repaired by November 2008, but then pushed the date back to June 2009, before the latest delay."

41 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Incredible by StupiderThanYou · · Score: 5, Funny

    It was only on a few days, and already they've achieved time travel.

    1. Re:Incredible by saintm · · Score: 2, Funny

      I've never seen one before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a white hole.

    2. Re:Incredible by daniel_newby · · Score: 2, Funny

      Heavy? What is this obsession with mass?

    3. Re:Incredible by Aceticon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually traveling to the future is extremely easy.

      The hard part is getting there faster than one second a second.

  2. Its 2009, not 2008 by chfriley · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just fyi. And last year was 2008, not 2007.

    ---
    SpuriousLogic writes
    "There's been another delay in the schedule announced for getting the Large Hadron Collider switched back on -- now it's September 2008, a year after it shut down due to a malfunction. Scientists had said they expected the $5.4B machine to be repaired by November 2007, but then pushed the date back to June 2008, before the latest delay."
      technologytimesummarywrongsummary

  3. Fast! by bablefisk · · Score: 5, Funny

    November 2007 was a bit optimistic, but september 2008 is still a really fast fix!

  4. That's more than just a typo... by Arancaytar · · Score: 4, Funny

    That entire news item is outdated. :P

  5. Confusion about Dates by Zephiris · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The article apparently fails to contain any full dates, and no years.

    See? This is why you always have to use four-digit years when specifying any date, even months, otherwise the 'software', *eyes original poster*, gets confused.

    --

    "A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
    1. Re:Confusion about Dates by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's not like anything happened in 2009BC. Well, not in Geneva

      As a resident, I can assure you that unless you have very deep pockets or actually work for CERN (and even then...), nothing happens here anyway. It's the Indianapolis of Europe.

  6. 2012 is fast approaching by VMaN · · Score: 4, Funny

    I have a sneaking suspicion the repairs won't be done till 2012... :| Making the prophecy come true after all.

    1. Re:2012 is fast approaching by aliquis · · Score: 5, Funny

      Mark my words, 2009 will be the year of atleast one prophecy!

  7. Re:NO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    September 2008? Its 2009 you fucking idiots.

    No, the Large Hadron Collider already provoke a Time-Space anomaly.

  8. Re:NO by harry666t · · Score: 4, Funny

    > by November 2007, but then pushed the date back to June 2008

    They're living backwards in time, dude. They think that the year of Linux on the Desktop was^H^H^Hwill be 1972.

  9. Re:NO by aliquis · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hard to notice the years passing by in the cellar.

    Damn, yet another year as virgin!

    (I to was wondering if it happened to be an old article which some idiot had posted, but LHC isn't that old I thought... But well, turned out it was just an idiot who wrote the dates.)

  10. Just to clarify by Shrike82 · · Score: 4, Informative
    This seems to be a case of a poor article summary, rather than an actual year old story somehow making it onto /.

    TFA actually mentions no years, just "this year" and "last year".

    --
    You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
  11. Re:Every night by OolimPhon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd rather the EU was spending my tax euros on something... like a new generation of nuclear reactors

    And don't you suppose the additional knowledge the LHC might provide would help us build better, more efficient reactors?

  12. Re:Every night by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With an attitude like that, we'd still be using coal to heat our homes. Seriously, the money's already been spent, the staff is already on the payroll. The annual operating costs are a fraction of the construction costs. This being Slashdot, let's use a car analogy - you just bought a brand new Lexus for some serious, serious coin, but on the way home, you got a flat tire. Are you really not going to fix it in the interest of "saving money"?

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  13. Re:NO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm really slipping, I wrote 1908 on a check today, instead of 1909.

  14. He said fucking idiots, so not modded up? by Alarindris · · Score: 2, Funny

    You fucking idiots, that's a blatant and stupid error in the summary, give this guy some love.

  15. Re:Every night by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actually, a good businessman knows that money spent in the past is gone. There is nothing you can do about that. What happened in the past shouldn't dictate the decisions you are making right now.

    If we discovered right now that continuing with the LHC would be fruitless, then we should stop the project and stop spending money on it, regardless of how much it has cost us in the past.

    Of course this is not the case, and I agree that not performing research using the LHC would be extremely silly.

  16. Re:NO by mcfatboy93 · · Score: 3, Funny

    stop yelling at them... I still mess up the whole 2008/2009 thing.Its only febuary

    --
    Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
  17. When a quote isn't a quote by Lionfire · · Score: 4, Informative

    It would seem that SpuriousLogic didn't actually say that. Not only is there no mention of years in his/her summary, but there are other minor differences. Slashdot editors: putting those little quotation marks around something and attributing it to someone else is fine, just so long as you don't change it.

    1. Re:When a quote isn't a quote by 1u3hr · · Score: 5, Informative

      The original submission:

      SpuriousLogic writes
      "The Large Hadron Collider could be switched back on in September a year after it shut down due to a malfunction and several months later than expected.
      Scientists had said they expected the £3.6bn ($5.4bn) machine to be repaired by November, but then pushed the date back to June, before the latest delay."

      So we can thank kdawson for fucking it up and attributing his/her errors to someone else.

  18. Re:Every night by iamangry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When Faraday was asked what his findings about induction could possibly be useful for, he replied "Of what use is a child?". The theoretical physics of today is the engineering of tomorrow. Also, it's not just your money, most of the world is contributing to this project, its just located at the old CERN site because its the biggest synchotron structure built to date. Stop being shortsighted.

  19. Analysis from the Washington Post by wiredog · · Score: 4, Funny

    Here:

    'CERN* management today confirmed the restart schedule [translation: announced another delay] for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resulting from the recommendations from last week's Chamonix workshop. The new schedule foresees [not that you'd want to bet your life on it] first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October. A short technical stop has also been foreseen over the Christmas period. The LHC will then run through to autumn next year, ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010. The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010.

    'This new schedule represents a delay of six weeks with respect to the previous schedule, which foresaw the LHC "cold [sic?????] at the beginning of July". The cause of this delay is due to several factors such as implementation of a new enhanced protection system for the busbar and magnet splices; installation of new pressure-relief valves to reduce the collateral damage in case of a repeat [explosion] incident; application of more stringent safety constraints [no more drinking contests in the tunnel]; and scheduling constraints associated with helium transfer [because the scientists can't resist making their voices sound funny] and storage.'

  20. Launch?! by Sockatume · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm all for moving it to a less controversial, orbital location, but this feature creep is getting ridiculous.

    --
    No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
  21. Re:NO by Rogerborg · · Score: 4, Funny

    September 2008? Its 2009 you fucking idiots.

    Please mind your language. What you meant to say was: "It's 2009 you fucking idiot." (singular). kdawson is indeed a fucking idiot; the other "editors" aren't necessarily fucking idiots by extension.

    I mean, they are, but we have to retain some sense of relative scale. They employ kdawson in much the same way that a bunch of plain girls always take a really fat, ugly one out with them to make them look better by comparison.

    --
    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  22. Mod parent up by kdawson+(3715) · · Score: 5, Funny

    This one made me laugh. Honestly.

    Listen pal, it ain't as easy as you would think to do things as they are done here. You people keep whining about us not reviewing the submissions before they come in, and so we finally get around to doing it, and you troll about it. So what if it took five months to review the submission? That's a LOT better than not reviewing it at all, right?

    Sheesh!

    1. Re:Mod parent up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You do, of course, realise that the user with the name "kdawson (3715)" and the user id 1344097 is not the same as the user (and editor) with the name "kdawson" and the user id 3715...

    2. Re:Mod parent up by dotancohen · · Score: 2, Funny

      Perhaps you could elaborate? Many of us do difficult jobs and still know what year it is.

      See that big shiny thing outside your window that keeps track of days and months and years? People in their parent's basement don't have that luxury.

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    3. Re:Mod parent up by Legion_SB · · Score: 3, Funny

      I think they should both be sacked, just to be sure.

      ... despite poor economy.

      --
      'a';DROP TABLE users; SELECT * FROM DATA WHERE name LIKE '%'... if you're reading this, it didn't work.
  23. Re:NO by Shakrai · · Score: 2, Funny

    No, the Large Hadron Collider already provoke a Time-Space anomaly.

    So that's what John de Lancie has been up to since Stargate SG-1 ended. I always knew the human race would be judged for our barbarism.

    --
    I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
    We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
  24. One extra year... by wvmarle · · Score: 2, Funny
    ...for us to live until the earth is swallowed by a black hole that accidentally did not collapse.

    I have stopped paying my life insurance already because in a year I may be dead but there will also be no-one left behind to pay out the policy.

    Or to receive it for that matter.

  25. Interesting reaction, but wrong by Kupfernigk · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Well, yes, I do still use coal. Owing to the design of my house and my use of an efficient, modern stove and ducting, I actually get better efficiency out of it than I do out of a gas boiler. So let's dispense with that argument.

    Now let's dispense with your other analogy. I know the (mostly under 30s) posting on Slashdot don't like my argument (troll? I think not) but I have actually had P&L responsibility for some serious manufacturing plant, and I think I know more about this than you do.

    Your analogy is completely flawed, because the LHC is nothing like a Lexus. A Lexus is a Toyota with a big price ticket, but we know what it does. You can read how fast it goes, how long it will last, you can test drive it. So it throws a tire. You know how much a new tire costs and it is didly squit compared to the cost of the Lexus.

    Now take a realistic analogy. Up till now all anybody has ever built is a small car. Now a load of engineers propose to build a racing truck. It will be larger, faster, heavier and more expensive than anything built to date. They can't actually tell you for certain whether it will work. They roll out the prototype, and it promptly breaks. They tell you it will be easy to fix...months turns into a year and you start to suspect that won't be the end of it. Did it break because the design was flawed? They can't tell you. Will it break again the same way? They can't tell you.

    If you were the VP engineering, you'd look at the other projects around that really could do with some attention, and you'd say "Why are we building this thing?"

    The argument below about Faraday is equally misguided (incidentally, I was once a member of the RI, and the alternative version of that story is that he told Wellington, asked what use it was "I know not, but I warrant your Government will tax it". Faraday was doing basic research that needed little more than blacksmith skills. If, in the Napoleonic Wars, he had suggested getting the best blacksmiths in England to work on a really big electromagnet, taking years, how far would he have got? Not very.

    --
    From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
  26. Re:Every night by bodan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, yeah, but they didn't build the LHC accidentally.

    They still need an accelerator bigger than the ones already running for the same reason they did before it broke. Just as someone who, presumably, wasn't driving (or owning) a car by accident when they got a flat tire. And the cheapest way to achieve those goals (better understanding of particle physics) is to fix the LHC.

    And anyway, you don't need to drive, you can just walk, or take a bus, or ride a bicycle. Which is the analogous physical alternative to not using the LHC.

    --
    "I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
  27. So, you're angry by Kupfernigk · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I don't think anybody is silly enough to think that the theoretical physics of today is the engineering of tomorrow. The timescales are much bigger than that. For how many years have workable fusion power sources been 20 years in the future? Since the 60s. (The hydrogen bomb dates back to the physics of the 1940s.) The really big successes of physics recently have all been in the field of small things - lasers, semiconductors, magnetic storage, imaging, radio,new states of matter. I doubt you can point me to a single piece of current engineering that has emerged from any particle collider research done in the last 40 years. Colliders are not conterminous with physics, you know. Some of the most exciting current research into things like condensed matter and slow light are basically table top.

    So in the actual timescales of these things, taking maybe 10 years out to get people working on some stuff we really need - I suggested nuclear and solar power, but I'm sure there are others - is likely to make no difference at all to progress in physics, but could have many benefits in terms of energy security and climate change.

    So, you're angry. But which of us is being shortsighted - someone who thinks resources should be deployed to ensure that we have the energy generating capacity to run things like colliders, or someone who thinks that identifying the Higgs Boson will suddenly revolutionise engineering?

    As for Faraday - see my reply above.

    --
    From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
  28. Re:NO by mikesd81 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are you getting Star Trek: The Next Generation and Stargate SG-1 mixed up? The trials were by Q in the first and last episodes. de Lancie wasn't in SG1 that much...

    --
    That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
  29. Re:NO by noldrin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's true, agents from the future are disrupting the Large Hadron Collider in order to prevent a black hole from eating the earth.

  30. Re:NO by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, the Large Hadron Collider already provoke a Time-Space anomaly.

    A guy walked into the Chicago campus where the particle accelerator sits in December, 2001 and proclaimed he was from the future. "I'm here to warn you, we built a device called the Large Hadron Collider that's bigger than the one in Chicago. When we turned it on it momentarily generated a black hole and a spacetime anomoly, and I got caught in the anomoly. I have to give you some details to prevent the error."

    The fellow says "That's interesting but it's hard to believe. How could I tell you're from the future? What's going to happen in the next few years?"

    "Well, the next President will be a black man who went to a Muslim school as a child, and and his middle name is Hussein. In 2008 we'll not only still be at war in Afghanistan, but we'll be at war in Iraq too."

    "Look buddy, I can almost swallow that time travel stuff but the rest of it is unbelievable bullshit."

    ---

    (Not original, but I can't remember where I heard it.)

  31. Re:Dates back to the 1950s by bucky0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let's rock-

    Superconducting wires were a little-used oddity until the Tevatron (at Fermilab) caused enough demand to cause them to be commercially feasible to purchase a lot of it. After Tevatron got the wire it needed for magnets, GE (and others) used the newly developed manufacturing capacity to produce MRI machines. The research into superconducting wires and magnets has led to maglev trains and is being used to replace transmission lines in some instances (New York has a liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting transmission line). They're close to getting a formulation that doesn't use Yittrium (which is expensive). Considering ~half of the energy produced in a power plant (like your coal plants) are lost to resistive losses in transmission lines, it's good news for energy production.

    A number of accelerators use their beams for clinical applications. (Usually by bombarding patients with ridiculously high fluxes of neutrons). Many accelerators use their beams to activate radioactive materials which are then later used in cancer treatment.

    All the detectors used in high energy physics have _tons_ of uses ranging from medical applications to non-invasive scanning of cargo. Antineutrino detectors are used to verify that the cores of nuclear reactors haven't been tampered with.

    By using ultra-sensitive detectors looking at flourescent bubbles, we've been able to fix many errors in our ideas of fluid dynamics. These detectors would've been unfeasible without the research performed to produce an accelerator.

    Most of those things are things that were tangential to the actual goal of finding out the deeper mysteries of the universe, but just because people aren't going to build something out of the higgs boson, doesn't make the research worthless. If you looked at someone a while ago bombarding different metals with different wavelength X-Rays and called them an idiot, then you would've shut down the theory of electron bandgaps, the application of which is the foundation of all our modern conveniences.

    anyway, back to work.

    --

    -Bucky
  32. Re:NO by jscalbny · · Score: 2, Funny

    They think that the year of Linux on the Desktop was^H^H^Hwill be 1972

    Yes, but how would that properly be expressed in the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional form?

    .