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!
Just delays us nearer to 2012?
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.
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.
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.