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Large Hadron Collider Struggling
Writing in the NY Times, Dennis Overbye covers the birthing pangs and the prospects for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (which we have discussed numerous times). "The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. [And] many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine [Fermilab's Tevatron] across the ocean. ... Technicians have spent most of the last year cleaning up and inspecting thousands of splices in the collider. About 5,000 will have to be redone... Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy [of 7 TeV]. Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 [TeV]. 'We could be doing physics at the end of November,' he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks. 'It's not the design energy of the machine, but it's 4 times higher than the Tevatron,' he said."
High school physics students will tell you that physics experiments are doomed from the start.
If it smells, it's Chemistry.
If it squirms, it's Biology.
If it doesn't work, it's Physics.
Just how they managed to suck billions of dollars from governments is beyond me, unless political "science" isn't really a science at all!
PS: for the humor impaired: This is a joke.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For now, it will only be able to collide small and medium Hadrons...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Anyone ever think that Fermilab is paying Cern employees to sabotage their collider? Each setback adds 6-8 months to the life of Fermilab...
moox. for a new generation.
FTFA:
"scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength"
Looking more and more likely that a Dec 2012 full-power test could be on the cards.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
This makes me think back to when I used to play World of Warcraft.
There was a character running around named: "Drphillip" and I thought to myself, "huh, interesting name he has." And then all of a sudden, he started shouting in town:
"OH NOES. teh large hardon collider is turning onz0rz!!!"
I'd give them 3 years, 4.5 months to get it up and running correctly. But that's just me.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Maybe if you weren't taking those 5 weeks a year of vacation time and working more than 35 hours a week, you could get it done on time! ;-)
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
After I invested my entire 401(k) in crowbars???
is also usually hard to do
the setbacks are part and parcel of such a complicated effort
True. But could there be additional complications? To compare it to another grandiose project, the Three Gorges Dam. For starters, it's a prestige project so the Party cannot allow it to fail without losing much face. Second, if there are any technical shortcomings in the design, they will be covered up due to the pressure from on-high. Third, there's theft by contractors in the substitution of inferior materials, allegations of defective workmanship, and so forth. And again, these issues would be covered up to prevent embarrassment of the national government which is funny in funny-uh-oh way because tearing things up and fixing the problem now would be less costly and embarrassing and lethal than finishing the dam, flaws and all, and letting it fail years later during a quake with a full head of water in the reservoir.
So, what's the Hardon's problem? (Yeah, I keep calling it the Large Hardon Collider. It's funny.) Anything worth doing is going to be complicated. That's the one I'm hoping for. Is the design sound? Are there defects in workmanship? Any corruption from subcontractors?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Sounds like they need to get the Milliard Gargantubrain or the Googleplex Star Thinker working on a solution, and fast!
1. once an effective way to control time travel is discovered, said method will be able to exist at all times.
CITATION NEEDED
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Don't worry, the Vogons will not be here until 2012.
You know that famous Maya calendar? Well, actually it's the timing diagram for the final phase of Earth's computer program.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
otherwise, I might think that God really does hate scientists like the fundamentalists claim.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Real clever of those Tevatron people to masquerade as electricians during the LHC construction. They'll have the God Particle safely in the bag while those upstart Europeans are still chasing their tail.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's how I read that. Sort of a European sci fi porn movie.
Why did I read the title 'Large Hardon Collider Struggling'? Christ, I must be at home here.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Given the reduced energy: Re, the Higgs Boson (that's the one that everybody talks about): Is that still the one sure thing that this machine will sort out? If the Higgs exists, will they still see it right away, and if it doesn't, will the scientists still finally say, "There is no Higgs, we need new physics to account for why; things have mass, something in our standard model went awry"?
No, it won't. Actually God keeps breaking the LHC. You didn't think (s)he'd let a bunch of monkeys have h(er/is) particle do you?
Yeah I wonder where from? Must be one of those B-Movies, red matter doesnt sound to well thought out or explained. Maybe Rambaldi was behind it somehow.
Now I just have a picture in my head of the whole thing not working because somebody tripped over the cable connecting the whole thing to the standard wall outlet..
I knew I should have read my copy of Forrest Mims's "Getting Started in Electronics" more carefully before working on the Large Hadron Collider!
Bow-ties are cool.
In recent upgrades to the LHC, the collider has been equipped to smash large amounts of money together and observe its annihilation:
"We start with a 50 Euro note and a 50 USD note," Dr. Grotzy explained. "We accelerate them to near the speed of light- interesting things can happen when the velocity of money gets this high. When the beams of Euros and USDs collide - thousands of notes per minute- we get some interesting reactions.
"This is a photograph of one such collision- an annihilation as you can see," Grotzy said, pointing at the annotated diagram. "The buck stops here."
"Out of it you can see these spiraling particles. Given the $50 is one of the ingredient particles, we call this 'Grant money going down the drain'.
"The experiment is actually quite easy to run. If the beams start to wane you just go up to the generator and throw more money at it.
"To keep busy we'll be adding more projects. With with a little more funding from the Brits, we can test out a heating system powered by burning cash. Convert a pound's mass into energy.
"Some people are concerned this collider will produce economic black holes that will destroy the worldwide economy. I can assure you this is nothing but uninformed rumor.
My webcomic
What you need is the UK Home ministry to install more cameras, so that you can catch this "God" person (thingie?) red-handed.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The cost/benefit curve has a very clear kink in it.
Well then figure out what its kink is, and hire it an open-minded hooker or something to straighten it out. Geeze, do I have to think of everything?
The enemies of Democracy are
Here's what's going on: in every universe that the LHC works, the earth immediately disappears in a giant black hole, so, by the entropic principle, we must always be in one of the failures. The project will be plagued with failure until they give up! It's proof positive that we live in a multiverse!
What the article is saying is that they're having a hard time getting it up.
My Hadron is fading away...
Nonsense. Mathematics isn't a science!
Smaller black-holes? That outta buy humanity another few months.
Table-ized A.I.
4 [TeV] should be enough to bring about doomsday, just get on with it.
I have a family reunion in december I need to get out of, and a rogue singularity orbiting the core of the earth is a nice excuse not to go.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
"unforseen consequences"
Great. Now I _AM_ going to stock up on crowbars.
But the LHC uses helium, so that problem should be solved.
This is why: http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/194396/930771.png
"Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies."
Two thoughts:
* It's probably not a problem, probably
* 4 TeV ought to be enough for anybody.