Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!!!"
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???
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.
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!
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
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."
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.
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.
Why did I read the title 'Large Hardon Collider Struggling'? Christ, I must be at home here.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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.
... 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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
I see, you have never been in Switzerland. Then: Europe is not a country AND: Switzerland is not part of Europe
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
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
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.
"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/
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.