Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Her last name is "09" and she is a "concentrator?" Who wrote this?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
She just made her career, and rightfully so.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
if it moves, it's biology. If it doesn't work, it's physics.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
They are calling her "Gordon" and are scheming to get her to be the guinea pig in the resonance cascade scenario test.
I would have to say that this student will not have a problem finding a job after graduation.
CERN: Now Xiaohang, Sherry is going to show you around the place. She can answer any questions you might have about fringe benefits or dress codes or anything and I'll see you back upstairs when you're done, okay? Sherry, take good care of this young lady. She's one of the ten finest minds kin the country.
XIAOHANG: Someday I hope to be two of them.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
A Princeton senior has found a bug in the hardware design for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The bug was in the algorithm analyzing at the data from the CMS and not the hardware.
Once again: if there were any chance that LHC could produce earth-swallowing black holes, we'd be dead long ago, because Earth is regularly hit by much more powerful events than anything the LHC will be able to produce.
until enough people / scientists are SURE nothing bad will happen.
The only way to know that is if they know exactly what will happen. And if you know exactly what will happen, what's the point?
You are ignorant; the universe is already conducting high-energy physics experiments. They are called cosmic rays, and some of them are billions of times more powerful than the LHC. Yet the earth is still here. And your notion that we delay until we completely understand the laws of physics is comical. What do you think the LHC is for? It's to help us understand the laws of physics! You don't discover laws of physics by just thinking deeply. You discover them by experimentation.
Some universities call it concentrating on a subject rather than majoring.
That's because years ago, teachers found out most students don't concentrate on anything.
But this girl is definitely the exception, she's obviously concentrating very hard.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
via hardware verification with ACL2.
I hope this helps the LHC Experiment so it doesn't cause
a black hole to destroy THE UNIVERSE.
Yours In Physics,
Kilgore Trout
Yeah, no more research until we understand everything. Good idea.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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!
It all depends on where you work.
I've seen businesses make decisions on thousands of lines of code in meetings after meetings, where they don't actually bring a computer, nor a line of code in. They theorize. They ponder. They wonder. They question. Then they come out of the meeting, and tell the developer how he screwed up. The theory and the reality very rarely coincide.
I like to throw them, by giving them a dozen different yet plausible theories as quickly as I can. Different people will pick up on various ideas that I threw out to them. Then some will try to converge on a single idea, and fail miserably. It would be funnier if you could just slide a few swords across the table, and watch them have at it.
Of course, none of the theories I threw out in the meeting had any basis in reality, they were just fun to watch people fight over.
Solar flares.
Years ago, I actually proved to management, that solar radiation made one server crash, and didn't touch the hundreds around it. That was regardless of the fact that there was a 10 story building above it, and it was 30 feet underground, in a hardened bunker, surrounded by well grounded metal. It was the end result of a micro solar flare. I think we were lucky no one was standing there when it happened.
I'm a firm believer that theory is like being a lawyer. If you can convince enough people (or the right people) of it, it must be true.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Just delays us nearer to 2012?
until you are SURE you have a better handle on the issues.
Maybe you should wait until you completely understand the basics of physics before you talk about man-made black holes wiping out our solar system?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I've seen this happen too much professionally to think of it as a trend.
I've seen this sort of anecdotal nonsense too much on Slashdot to think of it as statistically significant.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
She'd also find all those bugs crawling around.
I think you want to say that if the answer was found, the universe would cease to exist and be replaced with something even more inexplicable.
FreeBSD bounties
Sorry, I meant to say 'NOT representative', the mistake in doing that is, of course, representative, therefore, I was correct either way. Ha! Next, I shall go on to prove black is white.
Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second, to take from four days to four years to complete. Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2-6 years. It does not decay, but undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes, not to mention multiple oxymorons. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. That hypothetical quantity might normally be called 'critical mass' but, in this unique case it is known as 'critical mess'. When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium (Am), another just-discovered element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
its not really a design flaw. Basically its a minor bug in the algorithms (if I'm reading it right, the article is very confused to say the least) which allow physicists to reconstruct the energies of hadronised partons. Now we can do it a bit better and make slightly better measurements. This software we know isnt optimal, it requires a great deal of knowledge to write and to be honest a major part of the effort in the earily days of an experiment is improving the reconstruction software with fixes such as this. And there will be many more such improvements. Bugs here do not pose any danger because the software is run *after* the event has occured so it cant effect the event, just our understand of what actually happened.
Also just to make clear that the LHC and CMS are very different things. The LHC is the accelerator and its what makes the particles go very fast. CMS is a detector, it just sits there and records what happens in the collision. CMS is built and designed by a completely different set of people to the LHC. CMS doesnt need the LHC to function and the LHC doesnt need CMS to function but they are a bit pointless without the other.
It's little-known that Bush also found some critical errors in Fermilab calculations.
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that there's already black holes slowly destroying THE UNIVERSE. They're going to the whole thing eventually; there's a giant one busily destroying THE GALAXY right now. Maybe you're more concerned with the microscopically small part of THE UNIVERSE that is necessary to sustain your own life?
Yours in Pedantry,
Ekhben
Yep, the universe is conducting huge physics experiments, but very VERY far away from where we are, not in the middle of Europe.
The earth is constantly being bombarded with high-energy radiation. Some of that bombardment happens above Europe. The ionosphere is about 50km-1000km away from the earth's surface. What exactly do you mean by very VERY far away?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Maybe it doesn't turn into a big black hole, but it can explode and/or cause any other tragedy.
More likely is that any power plant you name could explode and cause a tragedy.
I know, let's shut down every single power station in existence!
At least that would have the side effect of downing the internet and we wouldn't have to listen to any more of your nonsensical tripe.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Humans have been breathing for thousands of years, but nobody has ever yet simultaneously breathed and thought about twelve thousand four hundred and ninety-six books about fruit all connected together by friendship bracelets.
I had to hold my breath while writing about that just now in order to be able to think about it without risking the entire universe imploding into a singularity.
Let me know if you manage to think about it and breathe at the same time. If we can get away with that, I think we can safely turn on the LHC (as you can surely agree that the whole universe imploding is a substantially worse risk than a single black hole or explosion).
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Once again: my buddy got shot by one of those high velocity armour piercing rounds; it went straight through him, hardly any damage at all. So there's no chance at all anyone'd be hurt by one of those namby-pamby pistol rounds. They'd probably bounce right off or something.
Did he also get shot at billions of times per second for 4.5 billion years?
No, no. you got it all wrong. Black holes suck. Now geology, that rocks.
"If you haven't done anything in physics by the time you're 21, you never will."
I've been told this quote comes from Heisenberg, and at the time I heard it, I thought it was a load of crap. However, the idea is correct. If you want to be a physicist, you have to be able and willing to jump into research right at the beginning (as an undergraduate), or you'll probably never do real research. Of course, most undergraduates don't end up finding bugs in code which has been checked by dozens of postdocs and grad students.