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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."
birth pang
n.
1. One of the repetitive pains occurring in childbirth. Often used in the plural.
2. birth pangs Difficulty or turmoil associated with a development or transition
is also usually hard to do
the setbacks are part and parcel of such a complicated effort
keep up the hard work, you are broadening mankind's knowledge, the expense and the hard work are as valid an endeavour as any other that can be proposed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
...that's what happen when you hire the low bidder?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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!!!"
...now I know. They haven't actually flipped the switch yet.
Okay, back to work. Maybe a Vogon constructor fleet will get here first.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
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.
I don't blame it. If I were a Large Hadron Collider, I would probably struggle too.
After I invested my entire 401(k) in crowbars???
Yes, you can store energy in strained magnetic fields -- so-called "spin batteries". But it's poor energy density. Magnetic "batteries" are still trying to get up to the energy density of supercapacitors, which are in turn still trying to get up to the density of lead-acid batteries, which have been left in the dust by techs like lithium ion batteries. But it's a very new tech, so we'll have to see where it goes.
Aeris Died For Your Sins.
1. once an effective way to control time travel is discovered, said method will be able to exist at all times.
2. no method has yet been discovered.
therefore,
3. the method cannot be discovered.
and finally,
4. any device which will allow its discovery cannot ever be operational.
it's in the manual, dummies.
... best of what's still around. I've noticed a distinct decline in the quality of professional services in the last decade. In the midwest and the New England region of the US, at least. Based on this story, maybe the same is happening in Europe. In the past 2 years, I've had electricians, plumbers, painters, carpenters and landscapers at the house to execute various jobs I have needed. In most cases, I have had to fix problems myself after the "professional tradesman" declared the job finished, wrote up an invoice for his/her expensive services and departed. In almost all cases, I could have done the job more carefully and better myself if only I had the time. Ironically, everyone to a man was extremely skilled at the invoicing and billing process. When it comes to getting paid, everyone is a genius. Pride in the work? Not so much. This story about the LHC sounds eerily familiar. Assuming the work was done by the local (or imported) tradesmen, is it possible that the work was sub-par?
So I says, "Super collider? I just met her!" And then they built the super collider. Thank you, you've been a great audience.
Aeris Died For Your Sins.
I hope they don't settle for running at a lower energy just to avoid criticism about the start date. There is too much potential for what we could discover using the collider's full capacity.
If it is at all feasible to get this running at or near 100%, it's worth it to put in the time now to fix it. I'd rather wait another year now, then wait 30+ years for the next accelerator to be built.
Sounds like they need to get the Milliard Gargantubrain or the Googleplex Star Thinker working on a solution, and fast!
That's interesting. Here in Arizona, it's a little different. Most of the contractors like you mention are either illegals, or meth-heads. The meth-heads can't return phone calls, can't show up on time, are flaky and unreliable. The illegals are cheap, but frequently don't know what the hell they're doing and do substandard work as a result. Non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors are extremely rare around here.
Sure, some science gets done at both. But at the cost of constructing these facilities?
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
Both of your stories are a result of our society telling teenagers that if they want to get ahead, they should go to college, even if their academic skills are no better than average and their trade skills are above average.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Ouch, only 4 times the energy in 25 years. I'd hate to be in that game.
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
Not in all the parallel universes. If you travel back in time and change one fact in the past, you'll create another universe where that event actually happened.
They know if the thing is turned on it will create "red matter" and suck the whole Earth into it. (Sounds like a movie plot)
if it isn't able to exist at all times, it isn't an effective way to control time travel.
recursive.
I have long wondered how it is that physicists can create ONE monstrous detector, and be completely certain that it works within spec... and within the design precisoin and accuracy.
;-) Their bugs go undetected until production. I've done spacecraft component testing where a valve passes 1,000,000 times but fails on the next (or on orbit!)
BUT chip makers, SSD hard drive makers, space telescope mirror makers and rocket engine companies can have test runs in the zillions... and they still fail. Either catastrophically, or just bad math answers
Can anyone explain how the physicists get the good manufacturing karma?
I've lived in the Southwest. Not that different, really. Most of the 'state-licensed' contractors here in Connecticut (my home for the last 2 years) haven't returned phone calls, shown up on time and are flaky or unreliable. They are decidedly NOT illegals - these are people that I've picked out of the available pool *because* they actually have a license to operate within the state. I shudder to think what havok the "illegal" population would wreak. Actually, they could not do much worse than the so-called professionals. The explanation from the long time locals used to be that "they have more work than they can handle". Surprisingly, nobody seems to be eager for work now that the economy is down. And I'm not talking "I''ll pay you half your normal rate because you need the money and have no work" - I *still* can't get people to return my calls. I have no idea WTF they are doing to earn money. I'm not sure they want to. People just seem to put their houses up for sale and disappear. But back to the original story - I'm still not sure whether the requirements of the LHC were just too close to the cutting edge, or whether they just could not find competent people to do good work. I have all the respect in the world for competent tradesmen, but I loathe the incompetents. I am happy to pay for good work, but I can't abide shoddy work.
If the time travel method needs some pre-existing infrastructure at the destination time, you can't travel back beyond the time that infrastructure is built.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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."
Seriously, I'm a troll?
This is some pretty difficult, complex work. As a sibling post pointed out, there are very highly stressed systems. Whoever bid this - and, no, I don't know anything about how it was bid but I have my suspicions - probably didn't decide to go hire a crack team of the best assemblers in Europe. They figured their standard labor for guys (and gals) who wire up buildings, telecom, and other lab environments. I work with these types of people sometimes, and they're not always focused on the end product (to put it nicely). QA for a project like this can only be so rigorous until the QA dwarfs the scope and cost of the actual construction. Sometimes it's a conscious decision (Hubble), sometimes it's a matter of budget or politics. Regardless, it only takes a moderate percentage of not-quite-perfect workmanship to really foul things up when you push a system to its limits.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That's how I read that. Sort of a European sci fi porn movie.
The aim is still to go to 7TeV/beam this is only a temporary reduction in energy. In addition all the evidence so far points to a low mass higgs, not up at the hard ~1TeV/c2 limit where the energy is actually important. This is not unprecedented - the Tevatron which was supposed to be 1TeV/beam ran at 0.8 TeV for the first run and increased it to 0.96 TeV for the second run.
However, That being said it was never really the case that would would turn the machine on and the Higgs would magically pop out of the ether for all to see. The most likely scenario is a low mass Higgs which decays to b-quarks. Unfortunately the LHC will be EXTREMELY good at producing b quarks from known physic processes (there is even a entire experiment devoted to studying them - LHCb). The result is that a lot of hard, painstaking work will be needed before we can spot the b quarks from a Higgs from background "ordinary" b quarks. Of course there is still a chance that the Higgs might have enough mass to decay to two Z bosons which would be very easy to see early on but, if the Standard Model Higgs exists, the chance looks slim.
aside from huge expense and huge technical complication, the negatives of the three gorges dam are completely unlike the negatives of the large... hardon
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just because it's "cutting edge" doesn't mean it must fail the first time they try to run it for real.... having so many bad joints as part of the reason for failure is a sign of poor workmanship and quality control given the multi-billion dollar budget. It's not a bunch of mad scientists working in their garage on their own dime, it's a bunch of *highly paid* mad scientists using scads of public funds.
;-)
I'd give them the "cutting edge" argument if the physics didn't turn out as expected, but bad joints... give me a break.
So much for swiss workmanship.
No, here the non-illegals are the ones who are flaky and unreliable. I'm pretty sure most of them are on meth. You wonder what they do to earn money since they can't be bothered to return phone calls? I imagine meth has something to do with it.
The illegals, on the other hand, are actually very reliable and punctual. They show up early in the morning when they're supposed to. They really make the "licensed contractors" look bad. For things they're good at, they generally do a decent to good job. But they're just not that skilled at many things, and it shows in their quality of work, so you have to be careful what you hire them for: landscaping, moving, etc. you'll have few problems, but anything requiring more skills (like plumbing), don't do it. Communications is also a big problem since so many don't speak English.
Generally, for anything where quality is important, I've found it's best to just make the time and do it myself rather than 1) pay someone to screw it up, or 2) spend tons of time chasing around a meth-head contractor.
Why did I read the title 'Large Hardon Collider Struggling'? Christ, I must be at home here.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
...and yet the Run II of the Tevatron was similarly delayed and that was for a machine which was only upgraded. So having established that 5 weeks of holiday a year does not seem to affect the outcome perhaps "sensible" would be a better description.
Oi, I'd like to remind you that this thing is located in Geneva, which is in the French speaking part of Switzerland. The rest of us don't like being confused with FRENCH speaking people ;).
Seriously, though, I'm only half joking. The French have a very interesting work ethic and while our French Fries don't like being confused with real French people, one has to admit that they are close together from a mentality standpoint.
I know I'm pretty bigoted here, but unfortunately, I also speak from experience.
Then again, even Swiss German work ethics are going down the drain since we have this overwhelming influx of German and French managers who, incidentally, learnt their 'tricks' from the USA.
Ok, I'm officially depressed. Or maybe elated, since my penchant for "do it myself" has been validated. We're in danger of totally hijacking this story on a non-relevant tangent, so I don't want to add fuel to the fire any more. Please - no more posts on the specifics of the above posts. The original premise still stands, however. I'll restate it as follows: Are the bad electrical connections of the LHC the result of shoddy workmanship as a result of the decline in professional ethics? I'd really like to hear from people in the region. Are the tradesmen of Europe declining as they are here in North America? Do folks in the area surrounding the LHC have trouble finding competent tradesmen? Could your own experiences as a private citizen shed light on why a major (and extremely expensive) scientific endeavor is having trouble? If this is a general trend, those of us in a position to do something about it (by influencing the next generation) will at least have a reason for being obnoxious pains-in-the-asses. In good times, I find that annoying character traits such as expecting quality services for payment rendered tends to place me in the position of "difficult and demanding elitist" rather than "conventional recipient of value recieved for value given". I'll pay you well for good work, if you are capable of providing it ...
... best of what's still around. I've noticed a distinct decline in the quality of professional services in the last decade.
Unrelated. The LHC failures have all been caused by unforeseen consequences of standard techniques applied in completely unique situations or new techniques developed to suit the situation. When you are doing something that has literally never, ever been done before things like this are common. Prior experience can only take you so far after that you are learning how to do the thing because you are the first person to ever do it. This is a far cry from installing a sink or rewiring a house which has been done thousands of times before and for which the ways in which it can fail are well known and can be avoided.
The people involved in the work are not just a few plumbers and electricians that were called up from the local yellow pages (or Pages Jaunes at CERN) but are either CERN employees or employers of contractors. My experience has been that while they are extremely "union" orientated (they are very particular about their breaks, starting/stopping work etc) they are also extremely professional to the point where they have come and shown be the right way to do something so it did not make their work look unprofessional!
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.
Then again, even Swiss German work ethics are going down the drain since we have this overwhelming influx of German and French managers who, incidentally, learnt their 'tricks' from the USA.
Kinda like South Africa with Apartheid huh? I'm beginning to see a pattern of epic failures for countries that think they can do things on par with, and have similar outcomes as their American counter-parts.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
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
You can't quit on such an expensive project because of a few setbacks. This could change the world, the stakes are much higher. This is the last project that should be abandoned on such a quick whim. We're treading on uncharted territory, we can't expect perfection.
If the time travel method needs some pre-existing infrastructure
Like a really hot cup of tea ?
Squirrel!
Non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors are extremely rare around here.
It's probably because the "non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors" were constantly underbid and thus driven out of business by people that would rather save a buck than have it done right.
I'm getting tired of waiting, it's like they're NEVER going to get around to imploding the world.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
Let me see you design a five trillion electron volts connection. From a bottom line perspective your right. But you would be truly dim witted to compare this to the wiring of your local strip mall. Most new designs are exactly that new designs, thus it is feasible that a coupling may fail in practice where it may have worked in theory.
the LHC could still be awesome.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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...
I seriously doubt it. More likely, it's because no one goes into these professions unless they're at the bottom of the barrel. Anyone who would do well in this line of work was pressured by our society to go to college instead, where they got a worthless degree in liberal arts and are now working as a middle manager somewhere doing nothing really useful. Face it: our society pushes everyone to go to college, even if they're really not college material, because no parent wants to believe their little Johnny isn't the most special kid in every way.
Meanwhile, the meth-heads love contracting because it means not having a boss, not having to keep a regular schedule, pretty good pay (when they do manage to work), and it's usually in cash so they don't have to pay taxes, and can use their pay to buy more meth.
Smaller black-holes? That outta buy humanity another few months.
Table-ized A.I.
WTF?
You really think that non-abelian Q and you mixing and matching the two inverses and then when Q is not enough you do a Cayley extension to get something not quite O which is not even associative and just barely well defined and mix and match those where ever you please waving your hands saying that's Nature simply because reinterpreting Maxwell's equations in Q was so much fun, that that that well garbage makes more sense than SU3?
Take your meds.
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.
I was struck by the craftsmanship and pride that went into trivial things in Germany. For instance, the asphalt on the road doesn't simply get slopped over the concrete curb like in the US... they left a perfect little gap, rarely getting any asphalt at all on the concrete. Then, the tar guy would seal the gap, carefully getting tar only into the gap and very little, if any, on the curb. In the US, they ladle it out without any concern whatsoever about aesthetics.
Of course it was charming, but completely pointless. Nevertheless, it's good to see people take such pride in their craft, and it makes me feel pretty good about other German products.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
CERN management did not want to undertake any significant low power testing and consequently suffered a major failure. In addition, as it now seems clear, the overall oversight left something to be desired. I'm not saying people did not work very hard but it is difficult to believe corners were not cut in a race to get running before the Tevatron could start accumulating enough statistics to allow them to spot and claim the Higgs (though still not likely at the 5 sigma level.)
If we ever are to control things like gravity and other exotic properties of spacetime it will be with insight and knowledge gained through particle physics theory and experimentation. Sometimes I wonder what discoveries we turned our backs on by cancelling the Superconducting Supercollider that was to be built in Texas. It was cancelled in 1993 in the face of cost overruns. When you look at the history of that project, however, it's clear that it NEEDED to be cancelled. It had become a black hole for money because of design and construction cost overruns. It was more out of control than any strange particles it might have produced. I hope the Large Hadron Collider doesn't suffer the same fate, but it doesn't bode well for the future when the overall design and QC on the manufactured components are now being called into question. Sad. When ambitious projects such as these founder it's usually their own fault.
5000 connections are a lot of connections and statistically significant. It probably wasn't lack of insight or effort; in fact, it being so consistently prone to a certain error it's reasonable to assume the design fault is mankind's general experience with a voltage high enough to literally high enough to power a lightbulb on the other side of the planet regardless of voltage drop.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Maybe you need to learn how to hire a proper tradesman?
I suggest looking for any local government sponsored seminars about contractors and your rights.
I have always been very specific in what I need and what they pay when they don't meet the contract.
Usually I demand 100 off the bill for every business day they are late.
And to be redundant, I also tell them I am a pain in the ass.
Then I ask for a bid. All the crappy ones leave at that point.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not based on rates I have seen.
BTW, the peopel I know that do contruction work right along side illegals making the same money.
Do you know why they are working next to illegals? because so few people will work those jobs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can't help but wonder if these failures aren't a coincidence.
Causation can cause correlation
Let me see you design a five trillion electron volts connection.
Electron volt is not a measure of electric 'volts' but of the kinetic energy of two particles colliding with each other
If I understand TFA correctly, the dodgy joints are between the superconducting coils of the electromagnets.
When I last worked in a lab (it's been a while) there was no such thing as superconducting welding material; maybe making these joins to spec is very difficult?
I see, you have never been in Switzerland. Then: Europe is not a country AND: Switzerland is not part of Europe
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fermilab will remain on line decades, just as the colliders it surpassed are still running.
For some experiments done at the LHC, Fermilab will be the only collider capable of verifying results.
I think what he was saying is that American managers are crooked and incompetent, and now his managers, who are imitating American managers, are now also crooked and incompetent. I don't believe that it was the complement you thought it was.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
U(1) is Abelian, usually taught to people who accept what they are given as a normalized complex number. Note that q/|q| exp(q - q*) = exp(q - q*) q/|q| because the normalized quaternion commutes with its exponential. Hello electroweak symmetry.
Take two of these, multiply them together, and you get another element of the group because that is group theory. Toss in a conjugate operator, that changes the multiplication table, but the norm stays the same. Eight numbers go in, something with a norm of 1 comes out. Sounds like a way to represent SU(3). You are so right, it ain't associative, a huge pain, but that is how the strong force behaves.
The road to gravity will not be paved with quaternions. It requires the hypercomplex numbers. Drop that into a Maxwell-like action, and out pops a version of Newton's law that has a time dependent term, and thus no need for general relativity. It is gauge invariant in only one special case: for a massless particle. Otherwise it will politely break gauge symmetry without messing up the U(1), SU(2), and SU(3) symmetries that appear when using quaternions in the action. No Higgs mechanism needed.
For the record, I refused to take my meds while certified.
Doug
visualphysics.org
hoping to animate any expression in mathematical physics
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Why does the NYTimes article say things that are out of date, inaccurate and in some cases flat out wrong ? The interview with Myers is dated 2 July but this article from CERN itself dates from the 15th and does not specify any figures for the number of bad connections. They have to run the tests before they know how many bad connections there are, and that hasn't been completed.
So basically this is a fluff piece that takes various peoples statements out of context and tries to promote a problem that CERN itself does not support. Yes it's late, yes there are issues, but the title LHC struggles is hardly warranted.
Plus you need a connection that can function down at liquid helium temperatures but doesn't get destroyed when it is brought to room temperature for maintenance. Add to that the massive amount of power going through these connections and you have a very severe environment you have to deal with.
By the way, when I did some work with electrical connections at liquid helium temps we used indium based solder.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What on earth are you talking about?
Clever signature text goes here.
Interesting, I visited Fribourg a year or two ago and it was a very interesting place. Fascinating to me how Bern / Fribourg / Geneva can feel so different, even to a foreigner with extremely limited language (ironically my limited Turkish helped me more than my even more limited French!)
I have to say though, I'm curious about other intra-Swiss stereotypes--what about the Italians? The Romansch? :-P
The original proposal was to build the SSC at Fermilab so that the Tevatron could be used to feed the SSC, thereby saving money. Then some morons in congress decided that it would be a good idea to waste huge amounts of taxpayer money in order to appease Republican by building a totally separate facility in Texas.
The added cost of building an entire new facility pretty much spelled doom for the SSC project.
The phrase, "pay every franc and mark", should obviously have been "pay every euro".
Of course they would go to Fermilab, what else is a particle physicist going to do?
After spending all that money reprinting their stationary to "MHC", the committee decided to rename it "Kinda Large Hadron Collider". That way if they ever get it working full, they only have to cut the "K" off of "KLHC" instead of order new stationary.
Unfortunately, they had some difficulty making the switch... When the person in charge of replacing the old material with the new was asked why he had not completed the job, he said simply, "I can't move that. It's stationary."
Bow-ties are cool.
If good elecrical connections sufficient to meet the needs of the LHC are within the realm of what is known by humans, then I'll cry "incompetence".
I can see your point of view but what you need to know is that these are vastly different from ordinary electrical connections. The "wire" consists of a superconducting metal core which is surrounded by copper. The copper is there so that in the case of a quench (which happens extremely rapidly since it is a phase change) the copper can carry the almost 10kA current for long enough that it can be dumped into a resistor which is the size of a small room which gets very hot. This design is needed because copper is not a superconductor but has a far lower resistivity than things which do superconduct (obviously only when they are not in their superconducting! phase!). The problems were caused by the splicing process between lengths of this "wire" during assembly which caused the layers to separate near the join.
Perhaps this sheds a little light onto why it is so complex? We are not talking about soldering two wires together we are talking about the safety backup system for a 27km long power bar that carries almost 10kA of current at a temperature of 2K (for reference outer space is warmer at 2.7K). Superconductivity itself was only discovered in 1911 and, as recently at 1962, people were winning Nobel prizes for making theoretical predictions about its behaviour at junctions.
So in reality this is a relatively new bit of technology that has never been applied on this scale before. Testing was done in advance - considerable testing - but a lot of the problems were either not visible in short scale tests or were only present when large sections were assembled. In addition, even if you do completely understand the physics involved in building something it is not always possible to predict all possible outcomes. Even today planes still crash for understandable, but unpredicted, reasons. Of course as we gain experience we learn how they fail and build them so they don't fail in the same way again but, practically speaking, you will never be able to predict all the ways that a complex bit of machinery can fail.
The primary aim of the upgrade is to increase luminosity, not energy (although in some respects the two are very similar). Increasing to 7TeV would not be an upgrade - it is intended as a fix that will be applied when we can have sufficient down time. For the moment it was deemed that it was better for the physics to get some data now, even if only at 10TeV.
Are you saying CERN is like FEMA, or more like congressional pork? Or did I just describe the Office of Homeland Security?
moox. for a new generation.
They're now all scrabbling like spiders to 'just make it work' to 'justify the use of public funds' so now you all can say it's a doom machine but it will probably just be doom to the machine.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
This is why: http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/194396/930771.png
Rictig!
Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts.
They don't understand... When you're looking for the god particle, you need 7 TeV!
It wasn't a complement, It was a rational assessment that most American MBA's are stupid assholes, and are almost as bad as their law school brothers, and far too many European Managers _DO_ copy their tricks, which means that you can not trust the quality or integrity of anything they touch. Eg Apple exploding batteries!
The implication of that is that you create __TWO__ huge bureaucracies, one in industry, to provide compliance data, and another, in government, to process it. THAT is why the US healthcare system sucks.
This leads to BIG GOVERNMENT, which is already hopelessly corrupt, and for which there is no real check since the pols and media can always fix the result and there is no real limit to government power.
In contrast, the idea of The Good Swiss, who does his job, properly, the first time, on his own, is still strong here. It is like that because people think that is (C) The Right Thing To Do.
One, very obvious, consequence is TAX, in Kanton Zuerich we pay ~ 13% employment tax and 7.6% sales tax, most Kantons are cheaper.
One pass, haul ass, do it RIGHT the first time (a) works, (b) explains the Swiss attitude to quality.
Plus you need to solve this problem before you actualy go out and build a LHC with it. Doing it the other way around is just not smart.
Unfortunaltly it is exactly the way you keep project managers happy, as their value it very important to meet deadlines.
"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.
The connections are between copper bus bars. Superconducting material is typically clad in copper and it's the copper that gets soldered together. The joints need to have a resistance of less than 25 nano-Ohms, which seems to be the difficult part.
http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/energy-vs-power-vs-heat-vs-oh-no/
It may be a waste of a few hundred billion dollars, but if it never gets working properly, I'm not concerned. It won't be the end of the world if large hadrons never collide on this planet.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"The most likely scenario is..." a black hole that will swallow everything that isn't nailed down!
Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts.
I doubt that.
You're telling me there's a difference between electromotive force pushing electrons through conductors and what is discussed here?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
This is not the first time superconductors have been used for a science project, so there are people out there with experience who know what works and what doesn't. Whether they worked on this project or not is a different matter.
Oh come on, It's getting that America is like the Jews of the turn of the century. If some worker or manager in Europe is lazy, incompetent, or simply makes an honest mistake (albeit 5000 honest mistakes is kind of a lot) is it really somehow the evil plotting American's fault? Give us all a break. It's called taking personal responsibility for your actions.
I was struck by the craftsmanship and pride that went into trivial things in Germany. For instance, the asphalt on the road doesn't simply get slopped over the concrete curb like in the US... they left a perfect little gap, rarely getting any asphalt at all on the concrete. Then, the tar guy would seal the gap, carefully getting tar only into the gap and very little, if any, on the curb. In the US, they ladle it out without any concern whatsoever about aesthetics.
Interestingly enough that's part of the reason why they lost the war. The typical German design for equipment was overly-engineered, overly-complicated and overly-expensive. Compare their armored vehicle designs to those of the Americans and Soviets. They were arguably more advanced but they pushed the engineering technology of the day to the point that they were more prone to breakdown, harder to maintain and harder to mass produce.
The Sherman wasn't a match for most German tanks one-on-one but that didn't matter -- it was easier to maintain in the field, easier to mass produce and was coupled with tactics (air power and tank destroyers) that more than offset it's disadvantages. It was good enough for the job it had to perform and when all factors are taken into account was arguably better than the German designs.
Then there's the modern day examples. Ever own a Volkswagen? Repairs on them will typically cost you 200% to 300% more than they would on the equivalent Japanese or American automobile. Whether that's because of over-engineering or other factors (proprietary parts) is open to debate but the fact remains that the American or Japanese model is going to be cheaper to keep on the road. In the end that's the most important factor for a lot of people.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yeah. Been there, done that. At some point I realized that my time was worth more than what it would take to do what you describe. Paying someone to do most of the job while I observe and ask questions, then take a few minutes or hours to fix what didn't get done right is still cheaper than days or weeks of wrangling. Once I realized I was paying for my own education rather than getting the job done exactly right, the way to maximize my investment was a lot clearer. I'll still pay for physical labor I don't want to do myself, but hiring skilled tradesmen is now a way to learn what I need to carry out a task myself.
There is always a reliability / cost tradeoff. If they had inspected all of the joints they would not have had this problem - easy to say in hindsight. If they had double-checked everything that went into building the machine it would have been too expensive to build.
in effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality
Running the LHC at full power would kill us all, therefore we will forever experience it breaking. Duh.
What about a time machine which cannot go back in time any farther than the moment of it's invention?
Then there's the modern day examples. Ever own a Volkswagen? Repairs on them will typically cost you 200% to 300% more than they would on the equivalent Japanese or American automobile. Whether that's because of over-engineering or other factors (proprietary parts) is open to debate but the fact remains that the American or Japanese model is going to be cheaper to keep on the road. In the end that's the most important factor for a lot of people.
I have no idea if any of your assertions have any basis in truth, but the notion that an American car is cheaper on the road than anything else is completely laughable. Where I live, "American" is a synonym for "you will not be able to afford enough gas to get it home in the first place".
It's probably because the "non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors" were constantly underbid and thus driven out of business by people that would rather save a buck than have it done right.
We hear over and over again how the LHC cost too much (while forgetting that the quoted numbers are the accumulated cost over 15+ years).
Now the idea is that too few was spent? /puzzled/
Yes. It is used here as a unit of energy that *one* particle carries. Take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_volt The proton weighs 1GeV. 7TeV (Terra electron volts) which the LHC should run at, means that a poor proton will be so energetic that it will have 7000 times the energy that is it's mass. The higher energy a particle, the higher the magnetic field needs to be to curve it around the 27km ring. If the magnets can not handle the design current than that limits the magnetic field, which in turn limits the energy of the particles that you can accelerate. Incidentally, a 7TeV proton has about the same kinetic energy as a mosquito. But imagine that all the energy is being carried by *one* proton. Now, there are 100 billion protons in a beam bunch and 2000 of these bunches running around the LHC, according to the design and in the end, the total kinetic energy comes close to that of an aircraft carrier going at some reasonable speed, I am told... ps. I am not the AC who posted earlier.
Now that was an awesome comment!
Correction: Switzerland is a part of Europe. It is, however, not a part of the European Union.
it's a bunch of *highly paid* mad scientists using scads of public funds.
CITATION REQUIRED
A recent episode of the National Geographic Channel's series, "World's Toughest Fixes", covered the repair of some of these magnet connections.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/worlds-toughest-fixes/all/Overview/02#tab-Photos/9
-Eric
Don't mention the war!
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
I can totally vouch for Doug's stance on taking his meds, as a witness to his certification back in the day. He's way beyond needing meds at this point. Just don't mess with his quaternions, man.
Sure, he might need a little help with math here and there, but at least he doesn't have a problem with rambling run-on sentences.
--
One-time LHC blogger
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.
Interestingly enough that's part of the reason why they lost the war. The typical German design for equipment was overly-engineered, overly-complicated and overly-expensive. Compare their armored vehicle designs to those of the Americans and Soviets. They were arguably more advanced but they pushed the engineering technology of the day to the point that they were more prone to breakdown, harder to maintain and harder to mass produce.
The Sherman wasn't a match for most German tanks one-on-one but that didn't matter -- it was easier to maintain in the field, easier to mass produce and was coupled with tactics (air power and tank destroyers) that more than offset it's disadvantages. It was good enough for the job it had to perform and when all factors are taken into account was arguably better than the German designs.
Do you have some authoritative sources for that? I thought the orthodox opinion was that the German production lagged because after 1942 the Allies had about ~5-10 times the manpower, ~4 times the GDP and access to material like oil and rubber that the boxed-in Axis didn't have...
You use concrete on roads? oh my! in my country, asphalt is slopped over plain dirt!!!
perhaps it isn't completely pointless, maybe those gaps are designed to accommodate material expansion due to temperature variations?
It's entirely possible... but when is the last time you saw a road that needed to be replaced because it wore out at the edges :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's only the trucks. I had a Saturn with stick shift that got nearly 40 MPG.
It was a piece of crap, and I had to get stupid little things repaired all the time, but that was reflected in the cost of the car. Fuel efficiency was not one of my criticisms...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Turn it to 11.
I think you are right... the Sherman tank was an absolute disaster for the allies. It was a failed tactical experiment. The main gun couldn't penetrate the armor of the heavy German tanks, even at close range. They had to rush Frankenstein Sherman tanks with heavier guns to the German front, since losses with the original armored were horrendous. Even then, they needed to get very close and they were outclassed. The Brits got fed up and fit their own gun to the tank.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I think you are right... the Sherman tank was an absolute disaster for the allies. It was a failed tactical experiment. The main gun couldn't penetrate the armor of the heavy German tanks, even at close range
So what? American tactics didn't call for tank on tank engagements. They called for using tank destroyers to engage and destroy enemy tanks. Later in the war it was also realized that air power was an effective way to deal with enemy armor. There weren't too many pitched battles with large numbers of tank-on-tank engagements on the Western front (the Eastern front is another matter of course) so this bit of criticism seems to miss the mark.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So what? American tactics didn't call for tank on tank engagements.
I'm not arguing that it was critical to the outcome of the war, but there is little question that the Sherman was unsuited to the role it was asked to play. It did fine in Africa and the Pacific - but the German's wiped the floor with it in Europe.
Anyway, if a tank wasn't an important part of the Allied strategy on the Western front, then why all the scrambling to get an upgraded model fielded? The British in particular were motivated to stick their new gun on it, despite the gun being reserved for their own new tank.
And as another sign that it was considered to be a debacle by the military, after the war the Americans spent considerably more time on heavy tanks. Rather than basing new tank designs on the Sherman, they chose the larger Pershing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
One pass, haul ass, do it RIGHT the first time (a) works, (b) explains the Swiss attitude to quality.
Right, like how the LHC turned out. Oh wait, that was the Americans' fault; teaching our 'dirty tricks' to Europeans. Look, when you mess up, 'fess up. Don't pass the buck across the ocean. I also like your 'rational assessments.' Bigoted ethnocentric moron.
Of course it was charming, but completely pointless.
I don't know about completely pointless. This kind of attention to detail can prevent all sorts of problems. Even in this particular case, where it's just aesthetics, having roads that look a little neater is nice. Less roads would be nicer, but that's another story.
Here in the U.K., people seem to have the same slipshod attitude you ascribe to your fellow Americans. This is a gross generalisation of course, but rarely in this country do I come across anyone who seems to take pride in what they do. The attitude is always "do what I have to do to keep my job, and nothing more".
I'd always assumed this attitude was endemic in the modern world, so it's interesting to hear that it's less prevalent in some other countries.
It did fine in Africa and the Pacific - but the German's wiped the floor with it in Europe.
They wiped the floor with it in all those engagements they lost?
Anyway, if a tank wasn't an important part of the Allied strategy on the Western front
Where did I say it wasn't an important part of Allied strategy? All I said was that American tactics of the day didn't place an emphasis on tank-on-tank engagements. Enemy armor was intended to be dealt with using tank destroyers, field guns and air support. The Sherman was never designed with the intention of taking on enemy tanks. It was designed to attack fortifications and support the infantry. In those roles it excelled.
And as another sign that it was considered to be a debacle by the military, after the war the Americans spent considerably more time on heavy tanks. Rather than basing new tank designs on the Sherman, they chose the larger Pershing.
After the war tactics were changed, based on experiences learned from the war and reduced post-war budgets. I would still maintain that the Sherman was good enough for the job it was asked to perform and that when all factors (ease of maintenance, ease of production) are considered that it was a better design than anything fielded by the Germans. The best tank design in the world doesn't help you if it spends the majority of it's time off the line for repair and is so expensive that you can't produce them in large enough numbers to keep your forces equipped.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I'd counter your argument by pointing out that the Soviet T-34 was superior to the Sherman (and possibly anything German), yet produced in similar numbers. The Germans lost air superiority, which is what doomed their tanks. The Shermans were no match for the heavy German armor. The US could have chosen to produce a tank more like the T-34 and still had superior numbers, but lost a lot fewer tank crews.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Let me guess; union electricians, right?
];)
Regards;
And yet the T-34 fared rather poorly when it went up against Shermans in Korea......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I think what he was saying is that American managers are crooked and incompetent, and now his managers, who are imitating American managers, are now also crooked and incompetent. I don't believe that it was the complement you thought it was.
I can't see how, from my comment, that you came to the conclusion I thought that was a complement. Anyway, maybe I read too much history, you see, the US Federal government setup plots of the most useless land in the country. They called these plots "Indian Reservations" and forcefully moved all Native American peoples onto these reservations. South Africa looked at that model and attempted to apply it, and it failed them.
So since you missed it, my point was this: America has made mistakes. Mistakes that ironically have lead to some of its successes. Foreign governments shouldn't look to America's successes and assume that they will arrive at the same conclusions simply by following the American model.
We are a tough and resilient people, we have endured many hardships in our brief existence. We've been through the crucible time and time again, and each pass refines our beliefs, traditions, and culture. Foreign cultures should not be envious of our success, rather, they should be wary of following in our footsteps. Our path is a difficult one.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
That's true, but the crews were rather poorly trained. Also, the Shermans fielded in Korea were the upgraded variety - not the same tank that fought in WW2. For that matter, the T-34s were also more modern. So in Korea, it was very much a "he who hits first wins" contest, since neither tank's armor could withstand a hit from the other's gun. Training was very important. Also, the terrain was very different in Korea and this may have favored the skinny, lighter Sherman. Indeed the US had to pull out it's heavier tanks. Still, IIRC, airpower once again was the real advantage in Korea - most of the T-34s killed were via aircraft.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
First is bullshit. Americans are, by objective testing, fatter and stupider than Europeans.
Citation needed.
Second is hypocritical given your posts.
Sorry I should have made a separate post calling your post inflammatory, my mistake. Really, I'm hot a hypocrite.
Third is splitting a retarded hair.
Splitting hairs? Really?
"In 1955, ten years after entering the country, von Braun became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Von Braun worked on the American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program before joining NASA, where he served as director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon."
But apparently, I'm the troll, for pointing out how idiotic your mindless nationalism is. Oh well.
I can see how a European would confuse patriotism with nationalism. It's rather sad your supposedly superior educational system allowed you to make that confusion.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
That's true, but the crews were rather poorly trained.
So what? We can only compare outcomes from events that actually happened. If you get into playing the "what if" game then the whole conversation wanders off track and you can't draw any meaningful conclusions about the real world performance of the various vehicles. The T-34 was an amazing vehicle that saved the Soviet Union but it wasn't without it's drawbacks. The internal ergonomics were a nightmare, the vehicle was undermanned (the commander had to fire the main gun, which distracted him from commanding the vehicle) and the ammo storage system was cumbersome.
It was still better than the German designs though. It was easier to build and maintain, so the Soviets could produce more of them and had an easier time keeping them out of the repair shop and on the line. It wasn't as complicated to operate and thus required less training for the crew -- a huge advantage when you consider the fact that the Red Army was largely a peasant force. Like the Sherman it was good enough for the role it had to play.
Still, IIRC, airpower once again was the real advantage in Korea - most of the T-34s killed were via aircraft.
So were most of the German tanks that were destroyed by the Western Allies, so why does everybody beat on the poor performance of the Sherman in the anti-tank role? Particularly when it was never designed for that or intended to be used in that fashion. I also recall reading somewhere that the bulk of the Shermans that were lost in combat weren't lost to enemy tanks -- they were damaged/destroyed by mines. Only a small percentage were taken out by enemy armor.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So what? We can only compare outcomes from events that actually happened.
The crew is just as important as any other aspect of the weapon. If they ran out of gas, wouldn't you at least mention that? What if they happened to get some bad ammo?
But I'm not even the one who brought up Korea - you did! The tanks that squared off in Korea were very different from the ones in WW2. For instance, you say:
The internal ergonomics were a nightmare, the vehicle was undermanned (the commander had to fire the main gun, which distracted him from commanding the vehicle) and the ammo storage system was cumbersome.
While this was certainly true in WW2, the tank used in Korea (T-34/85) had a larger turret fitted with a larger gun and a larger crew.
Like the Sherman it was good enough for the role it had to play.
Since we won the war, it is obviously true that the Sherman was "good enough". Fortunately, that bar was pretty low... the Sherman was simply outclassed on the battlefield.
so why does everybody beat on the poor performance of the Sherman in the anti-tank role?
Because it killed a lot of tank crews who didn't need to die.
Particularly when it was never designed for that or intended to be used in that fashion.
That is, ultimately, where the criticism lies. There was a failure in tactics, and the poor Sherman was put into an anti-tank role more often than was supposed to happen. There is a fundamental problem when you are on the offensive and your tank can only kill enemy tanks from the side or rear.
At the risk of repeating myself, the tactics of WW2 were not retained because of the lessons learned in WW2. As a result, the Sherman was left behind and the Patton was based upon the beefier Pershing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's probably because the "non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors" were constantly underbid and thus driven out of business by people that would rather save a buck than have it done right.
We hear over and over again how the LHC cost too much (while forgetting that the quoted numbers are the accumulated cost over 15+ years).
Now the idea is that too few was spent? /puzzled/
While my comment was specifically in regards to the GP's comment about contractors in AZ, it does in some way apply to your comment as well.
FTS: "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"
Reading this I see two likely explanations, either the engineers that spec'd the splices didn't design them correctly for the purpose needed, or the builder cut corners and did not make the splices as spec'd. If that is the case that the builder cut corners, its probably because they underbid it, and did it cheaply. So in this case, spending more up front is less expensive than having to pay the techs to go back over it and fix it right the second, or third time.
That's assuming that the projects they had to pull money from because of SSC haven't contributed in the meanwhile. Yes, if money is unlimited in supply, we should fund every great thing on the planet and we would have a utopia. I worked at JPL at the time SSC was canceled, and all the senior scientists were relieved. Even my physics profs were relieved that a zillion other small physics experiments would not be cut.
If it is at all feasible to get this running at or near 100%, it's worth it to put in the time now to fix it. I'd rather wait another year now, then wait 30+ years for the next accelerator to be built.
Isn't it possible to get all the 4TeV science done now and give the model builders something to chew on while the electrical splices are re-done to get to 7TeV? Then run those experiments.
AIUI, a lot of people are waiting on LHC results to get on with their work.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You are much more stupid than I had imagined possible, the point I made was that a quality work ethic means that you do not need huge managemant overhead which is as true in middle America as it is in Switzerland, the difference is here, it still works.
If I have a problem, normally it is dealt with at the first level, more complex issue go to the geminde, only very rarely do we need to get into all the legal crap you love.
Unless you cannot travel back in time before the time machine was created.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil