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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."
This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again.
History might not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.
As someone on the LHC/CMS experiment team, let me be the first to say "Argh."
I predict the collider turns on in 2012.
Why oh why must you abhor a vacuum???
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.
Long live the BSD license
... soon they won't be able to stop them. It will be a hazardous vacuum spill, endangering all the surroundings of the LHC!!
...the delay will mean the world lives on for 2 more months ;=)
;)
Ofcourse, A(H1N1)v will prevent the startup alltogether, as key personnel falls sick at the critical time
Then again, the sudden reappearance of sunspots on the sun probably means the super nova will come before even that happens
Oh no, I forgot to take my pills !
This is the USA that you're talking about, right? To the extent this physics knowledge is in the Bible, such efforts are unnecessary expenses. To the extent the knowledge is not in the Bible, such efforts are forbidden.
The scientists blame the engineers. But let's see who gets "credit" for the Galactic Darwin Award.
Table-ized A.I.
Real physicists have already worked out the equations and have anticipated the results of the experiments at CERN.
Experimental lab techs are the ones who are having setbacks here.
Don't worry your little monkey brain too much. Humans are progressing just fine.
I had a vacuum leak once and in less than 5 seconds my house, instead of just smelling like dog hair smelled like stale month old dog hair in a vacuum bag. I also learned to empty the bag more often.
More music, fewer hits
Particle interactions with more energy than LHC can produce happen in the Earth's atmosphere every day. But outside of a carefully controlled environment with extensive sensor equipment, they can't be studied. The LHC is not about creating energies never before seen on Earth-- it won't do that. It's about doing so in an extremely controlled manner than can be measured and investigated.
E pluribus unum
I want to know where they hid the working LHC at.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That sucks.
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.
To paraphrase, this guy is in the middle of a flooding city. He repeatedly refuses attempts of others to rescue him, claiming God will save him. He drowns, winds up in Heaven, and asks God why he didn't save him. "I sent you a two boats and a helicopter..."
So I can see God now using his mighty and flagellant tendrils to tinker with the LHC's inner workings and yet we still press on, thwarting his every attempt to save the planet Earth and the life he created. I'm certain this will all end with a, "Okay, power it up!", followed by a surprisingly brief sucking sound as the world is drawn into a black hole of its own making.
I can just see the look on his face...
If you start a small firework rocket, you can't predict how far up it will fly and when exactly it will blow up in a shiny and entertaining explosion. But you know the limits of that rocket, e.g. it won't fly up more than 200 feet, the light of the explosion won't last longer than 10 seconds and it won't get hotter than 150 degrees celsius in the center of the explosion (numbers completely made up by me).
The scientists know that the black hole and anything else that may come from LHC won't destroy the world. They also have clear expectations about what they will see, based on what they know about science. But they can't predict 100% what exactly will happen and what new particles will be created, just like a fireworks producer won't be able to tell you how exactly the explosion of the firework will look, just stuff like "it will look like a red heart".
Shooting that firework rocket may point out weekness in design or understanding of explosives involved, just like the LHC may point out flaws in the understanding of physics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide
I admit it's silly, but I can't shut up the thought in the back of my head that maybe the earth only continues to exist in branches where the start up of the LHC is delayed.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?
That's because of a number of factors.
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
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
More importantly, Gordon Freeman is apparently an engineer at CERN.
No worries though, he has a crowbar now.
eclecti.cc
It's now what, a year behind the schedule they'd set after the explosion? CERN is looking worse and worse.
Oh, come on, man, it's not CERN's fault that the anthropic principle limits us to observing universes that haven't ended our existence by creating black holes in a hadron collider!
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
The explosion happened last September, so it can't be a year behind the new schedule; it hasn't even been a year since the explosion! The schedule set after the explosion was to run again the following September, so it's now predicted to be 2 months behind that schedule
And it's really not too bad, since the SSC was far more overbudget than the LHC has ever been and was being footed solely by the US (whereas the LHC is international). And we're not really losing anything from even a one-year delay. Also, consider the fact that experimental particle physics is but a single aspect of physics, one side of a multifaceted subject.
As for cost, the total LHC cost after 10 years of running is expected to be less than $10 billion total, and that includes the full design phase (greater than 10 years). That means the cost/year is less than $500 million, a drop in the bucket for any modern nation and certainly no problem for CERN's 20 member states and six observer states.
You're sort of incorrect here. Yes, we built the LHC to probe a new energy regime. However, much MUCH higher energy collisions occur in the atmosphere every day. If we could place multimillion dollar particle detectors like ATLAS and CMS in the atmosphere, we would.
So you could say that we know what definitely will not happen; the world will not be destroyed. I have proof: we're here today to discuss the subject. Since the Earth has been around for some billions of years and these types of events are fairly regular, I'd suggest that there is no chance of the LHC destroying the world.
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?
Prime Directive
at least if we believe Walter Wagner: TheDailyShow - LHC
His comments and criticisms reveal only that he knows very little about particle physics. For instance,
"Obviously, a elementary particle has a predefined shape and size that cannot be adjusted and that leads to an issue with an efficient packing arrangement to create a micro-blackhole"
This makes no sense from any perspective.
His harshest criticism is that we're not certain what the equivalent cosmic ray energy would have to be in order to produce the same center of mass energy as the LHC. He's completely wrong. This is an elementary number that any grad student would be able to calculate given the same conditions.
More fun quotes
"'(d) cosmic rays are incapable of producing micro-blackholes due to the distribution of forces during collision', or '(e) relativistic particles striking non-relativistic particles do not exhibit the same behavior as relativisitic only collisions. "
(d) Wrong, because you can always perform your calculations in the rest frame of either proton and get the same answers. Also, Newtonian physics don't work at these length scales
(e) Wrong again for the same reasons. The difference between fixed target experiments (we've built several) and colliders (LHC) are well understood, and at the energies we're discussing the mechanics are nearly identical. The real difference, that the particles are produced closer to rest in the LHC, is already mentioned in the LHC design documents
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?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Yes, right now the tevatron at Fermilab is superior to the LHC, and it's half as big as your 12 km and most likely as complex as the LHC. It may in fact be years before the LHC comes on line, but I have no doubt that it will come on line.
The LHC will tell us things that the Tevatron can't when it does come on line. It will be well worth the wait.
Free Martian Whores!
Were you saying something similar from 1961 through 1968?
One thing I've never understood about this explanation is that it doesn't explain why it's always the anti-particle that falls into the black hole. Wouldn't chance dictate that half the time it will be the particle, causing the black hole to take on the extra mass?
(I'm sure the answer to this question is somehow related to a similar question that I've always had... and that is: why is the universe composed almost entirely out of matter rather than being a mix? and why aren't there any anti-matter black holes?)
They're attempting to create black holes. There aren't "controlled circumstances" for that outside of "We'll keep it really cold and we'll only make little ones."
No, they're not. And "Controlled" means an environment where they know that the only collisions are the one they create, and where the impact occurs in a vacuum surrounded by large amounts of highly sensitive detectors. The "uncontrolled" version happens constantly, yet here we are. Hard to comprehend, I know, but not surprising for someone who probably thinks that keeping it cold is related only making small black holes instead of huge ones.
The spirit of Stanley Milgram lives on very strongly in the LHC community. Not only are you all worshipping the ignorant as "knowing what they're doing" but you're arrogant about it as well. They're hypotheses include extra dimensions! How much more proof do you need that they aren't operating on "well-tested, documented, and understood physics"?
How much more proof do I need that you have no idea what you're talking about? None. The Higgs Boson that they're looking for is predicted by the Standard Model, for your information, not that this factoid would mean anything to you.
Like I said, I DON'T think they'll destroy the world. My bet is that they'll see the effects of a neutron bomb inside the LHC -- but I'm not pretending to KNOW what the odds are when I run a physics experiment that's strung up on metaphysical mathematics.
That's delicious irony there. You don't pretend to know what the odds are, even though if you could follow some pretty simple logic you could at least upper-bound the odds as being exceptionally small. Yet you do pretend to have any clue whatsoever about the physics these guys are using when you are as ignorant as a newborn babe. And of course ignorance begets arrogance, and you think your lack of understanding qualifies you to say the scientists don't know what they're doing, and make better predictions of the outcome than they. Neutron bomb, heh. I'd love to see your reasoning, assuming it's any different than your guess that it might possibly produce ice cream, i.e. "When you don't know anything, anything is possible!"
So keep up the ironic trolling, it's hilarious.
The enemies of Democracy are
Are you that badly informed, or just that unfunny?
There are giant amounts of particles with way higher speeds colliding with our atmosphere all the time, creating the same type of black holes.
The type that is apparently so unstable, that all those particles did not create one single black hole that are us all.
Go figure.
And try to not get your "knowledge" from the loudest and dumbest of all people.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Think about what it takes to work on that thing. It's in a long underground tunnel of rather small diameter for what's in there. Fixing stuff in place is difficult and hazardous. Removing a magnet involves disconnecting everything (a big deal; some of the connections are welded and superconducting), lifting the magnet onto a narrow carrier that runs on the walkway (no idea how that's actually done) and inching the carrier for kilometers to one of the two big vertical shafts where it can be hoisted out vertically. As an underground maintenance job, this is not fun.
The canceled American SSC was designed with a larger tunnel diameter. The LHC was designed with the assumption that not much magnet maintenance would be required, which cut costs but turned out to be a bad assumption.
Masochistic is right. I just spent all of last week trying to find and fix a vacuum leak in my experiment. Luckily it was a (relatively) straightforward setup and after I got to the point where I wanted to strangle someone (or wreck the lab with a hammer - I'm not too fussy about my violent outbreaks :)) I just swore a terrible oath at the thing and machined a new one from scratch.
:)), but vacuum leaks can be seriously frustrating, especially the ones that show up with a delay so you have not the slightest farking clue where the damn thing is leaking.
:P), I'll let y'all in on just how one leak checks a vacuum chamber. The leak-checker is just a glorified pump that can pump down to really low pressures. The stuff coming out of the chamber is also directed into a mass spectrometer that is tuned to register and count (usually) helium atoms. You spray helium gas over the outside of the vacuum chamber and if there is a leak, some helium gets sucked in and registers on the spectrometer. The bigger the leak, the bigger the count and a simple calculation converts this into ccs of helium coming in per second with a pressure difference of 1 atmosphere across the leak (1 atm outside and ~0 inside) - that by the way is where the unit standard ccs per min (sccm) or standard cubic feet per min (scfm) comes from - you may have encountered these units in several diverse places (anywhere that gas flows are controlled through pipes). Of course, these days most of this is automated but we have this really cool leak-checker (Air Force surplus from the dawn of time :)) that is so freakin' awesome and not too automated. It's from the 60's and still works perfectly o.O
:P.
I'm not complaining about the work (it's sorta like having an irritating kid - no matter what, it's still your kid
Since I feel like venting (no pun intended
The bottom line is that finding a small leak* in a man-sized chamber is difficult to begin with. Imagine how insanely difficult it would be to do this in the frakking LHC! And there, since they deal with subatomic particles, they need even better vacua than I do. Gawd I'm glad I'm not the guy in charge of finding leaks - I'd probably start gibbering and running around in little circles if I had to deal with it
____________________
*Here, small usually means somewhere around 1E-9 std.cc/s - at this rate, it would take more than 25 thousand years for a vacuum chamber the size of a beer stein to fill up due to air bleeding in from the outside. Much more than that actually since the rate would go down when the pressure difference decreases but this will do for now. And yet, such small leak rates can wreak havoc in delicate experiments (for instance, in a recent one where I was trying to measure the flow conductance of nanoholes - very tiny flows and leaks can screw things to hell).