Vacuum Leaks Lead To Another LHC Delay

suraj.sun tips this story at ZDNet about a new problem with the LHC. Quoting: "The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment. The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to a CERN press statement. The project had been expected to start again in October. To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as 'floats,' while the remainder of the surrounding sectors will be kept at 80K, CERN said in the statement. The repair work will not have an impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe. CERN has pushed back the restart a number of times, as repair work has continued. To begin with, scientists said the LHC experiment would restart in April 2009. In May, CERN [said] that the restarted experiment could run through the winter to make up some of the lost time."

Comments

Re:Worrisome

[thenextstevejobs]

What's worrisome is that these same scientists who can't seem to build this thing without some fatal flaw are the same scientists telling us there's nothing to worry about when they create a black hole.

Sorry if I'm missing intended humor in your post but that just doesn't make any sense.

These are construction flaws. The fact that the black holes they may be able to create are not a threat has nothing to do with any sort of special containment. It's simply that the size and level of energy is no where near enough to last even nanoseconds.

The ignorance about the dangers of particle accelerators is disconcerting.

By the way, if you want a good look at modern physics, read Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos". Really good read.

The delay is not big for such an experiment...

[master_p]

For an experiment of such magnitude, a delay of a few years is not very important...it's way more important to make the experiment in a good way, above anything else.

Re:Is that first thing we need ?

[mcgrew]

Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?

That's because of a number of factors.

1. There may in fact not be any; it's possible that life (and the conditions that cause it) is so rare in the universe that only one in a hundred galaxies has produced it
2. It's too far away to talk to. No other civilizations farther than a little more than 100 light years away would have been able to pick up any EMF we transmitted
3. The signals we/they transmit are likely too weak to detect
4. It's possible that we haven't discovered their form of communication, while they haven't discovered ours
5. They may have seen our violent history (or their own) and are afraid to communicate with us. If I was them, I'd be scared, too.
6. They may not even realize we are alive (their form of life is likely to be more bozarre than we can imagine)
7. Our own hubris - many (most?) people don't realize that other species on our planet do in fact think, feel, and communicate. It's only recently that science has discovered that other species do in fact communicate
8. They may be so advanced that we're just not interesting to them

If present science are so sure about all possible consequences of creating black holes using Large Hadron Collider or any collider that size, than why any expirements needed ?

Because for a hypothesis to become a theory, it must be tested. That's how science works.

How people that are not "against science" can guarantee any HollyDolly mother, that she's childs are in safe place

There is no such thing as absolute safety. Your "1%" chance enormously overestimates the chances of a black hole swallowing the earth. We're not talking about a pea sized black hole (which would have a mass as great as a mountain), but an infinitessimal mass measuring the same as a few atoms, at most.

Information can enter black hole but can't escape.

See, the problem is calling these tiny singularities "black holes". Wikipedia's definition of "black holes" excludes these things. There is a vast difference between a gnat and an elephant, even though both are animals. There's no magic about black holes swallowing light; in space an object must have enough mass to collapse on itself to create a black hole, if I remember correctly it's about the mass of a thousand suns.

You have far more dangerous things to worry about, driving your kids to the store for instance.

Further reading about black holes. Further reading about the LHC. Further reading about Micro black holes

Re:ZOMG,

[nametaken]

"This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again."

Hopefully Hubble. Plagued up front, hugely successful later on.

Re:Bit off more than they could chew

[Kjella]

This is why movies have producers. It's to keep the artists in check. Someone should have kept the brains in check when they designed this thing. Instead of being smaller and useful, it's just a gigantic waste of money -- the Waterworld of the scientific community.

Yes, and we should dismantle Hubble and replace it with an army of hobbyist astronomers with a 100$ telescope. They won't find anything new except maybe a few near-earth asteroids, certainly no exoplanets and all the other interesting stuff happening. Same with LHC, if you wanted any particle accelerator I think we had an electron one in high school science class. We could play with it forever but I doubt we'd ever get any more results on the standard model and the higgs particle. Experimental science of this kind is all about building the most sensitive equipment you can - it's complex, expensive, obsoleted by the next generation but it's the only way to do science and not guesswork.

Re:Worrisome

[radtea]

What's worrisome is that these same scientists who can't seem to build this thing without some fatal flaw are the same scientists telling us there's nothing to worry about when they create a black hole.

No, what's worrisome is that the murderous idiocy of self-serving show-offs is so persistent.

How many people do you have to kill before you'll stop promulgating this stuff?

An emotionally unstable teenage girl in India killed herself because she was so terrified that the world was going to end when the LHC turned on. I assume you're extremely pleased with that outcome, as it is the only concrete effect that the efforts of people like you to propagate this vicious nonsense has had.

Proud of yourself?