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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 !
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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).