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Princeton Student Finds Bug In LHC Experiment
An anonymous reader writes "A Princeton senior has found a bug in the hardware design for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the hardware used to record and capture events in the LHC, she discovered errors that were leading to the appearances of double images because of particle streams known as jets. 'Xiaohang Quan '09 was working on her senior thesis when she found a miscalculation in the hardware of the world's largest particle accelerator. Quan, a physics concentrator, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last week with physics professors Christopher Tully GS '98, Jim Olsen and Daniel Marlow for the annual meeting of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). This year, however, they also came to discuss Quan's discovery with the designers of the hardware for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which, as part of the Large Hadron Collider, has the potential to revolutionize particle physics.'"
This story makes me fall in love with science even more. Smart people think of ways to understand the world better, other smart people review it, find errors and discuss their finding with other scientists.
They have a discussion like adults, they look at the math, one side is correct and they correct their experiment and thank them for the contribution.
This is what the world is supposed to be like. Not like these fucking religois nutjobs, screaming at each other, arguning who has the cooler imaginary friend, without having even a halfway decent argument. They're just like "You're stupid!". "No, you are!". "No you!"
Science for the fucking win!