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LHC Successfully Cools To 1.9K In Lead-Up To Restart
Smelly Jeffrey writes "The BBC is reporting that the LHC has had all eight of its sectors cooled to 1.9 Kelvin. Their tagline is that it is now 'colder than deep space,' referring to the CMB. LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent the 'quench' condition that caused the LHC to be down for warming, repairs, and re-cooling over the last year. The LHC is now cold enough to begin colliding particles in search of the Higgs Boson. High power collisions won't be started until late December, or perhaps early January. However, a low-power beam through parts of the collider could be tested as early as next week!"
Time for my friends and I to throw yet another end-of-the-world party!
They're doing low-power test runs. I managed in my brilliance not to notice either that paragraph in the article or the tagline at the end of the summary. /hangs head in shame.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If they do find the Higgs in January, they want to have a LOT of jello shots on hand.
When every government balance sheet is dripping red, why are we doing this again ?
Your not. . . the LHC is localed in Geneva, and was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The monetary numbers were just converted to USD because the article is written/targeted to a US audience.
*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
We need to get rid of all these extra hadrons that have been piling up since the accident.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Has the LHC destroyed the Earth yet?
NO
Good. Carry on.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
the work done at LHC is about the only type of thing governments do that adds any value anyway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'll keep an eye out for Doc Brown and his Delorean
"LHC engineers have spent nearly $40,000,000 USD on a new system to prevent quenching condition that ..."
No,
1. it is not to prevent quenching, it is to allow helium to escape properly. Superconductors will at some point in their life quench or lose superconductivity. This happens for various reasons though most are due to insufficient cooling, like the last case.
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
40 million is pretty cheap considering the US government doled out 600 billion in bailouts not long ago. Billion is the new million.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Mini blackholes will suck up the deficits.
Table-ized A.I.
The Large Hardon Collider is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. “It’s nothing that cosmic rays don’t do all the time all over the place,” reassured a particularly buff scientist. “It’s perfectly right and natural.”
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. “They’re the same polarity!” said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch last September, but this has been delayed due to inexplicable and ill-timed failure to get a beam up. “I’m so sorry,” stammered a scientist, “this has never happened to us before.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
You mean they're spending like there's no tomorrow? Hmmmm.
Table-ized A.I.
Government balance sheets aren't "in the red" due to a lack of money, it's due to a lack of restraint. "Oh hey let's attack a country.. Oh hey let's attack another.. Let's give money to the banks with the stupidest management.. Let's give people money to not grow food.. Let's give people money to buy new cars.." and then when the budget problems come up "If this spending bill doesn't pass, we have no choice but to shut down libraries and fire departments!"
>*Knock Knock* Hi, its the rest of the world here at your door, we'd love for you to come out and visit sometime!
But whenever we do, you guys tell us to go home! Is that because of our obsession for things that go boom, or some other issue?
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Because cooling a 27 kilometer long object to 1.9 K takes a lot of time. You can't just keep heating it up and cooling it back down again. You cool it down once, and keep it cooled permanently.
Part of the reason this whole thing took so long in the first place was that it had to be heated up and cooled down again.
At least with a black hole, if you're smart enough to stay away from the event horizon you'll be OK. We, on the other hand, are surely screwed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Because the food those people eat is produced using fertilizers, steel structures, engines based on petroleum combustion, transit networks, irrigation systems, computers and, ultimately, a market for the food - all of which come about because of technological advances (computers wouldn't work today if we didn't know about quantum mechanics - modern PC's are affected by quantum-scale artefacts), most of which were funded by military investment (Internet, etc.) or academic institutions, designed and implemented by people that went to university to study something other than fertilizer, using mathematics from previously theoretical subjects that they found could apply to modern physics, using even vaster ranges of technology to achieve their goals.
Did you know that the Moon missions visibly pushed scientific advancement for *decades* before and after they occurred? Did you know that previous "waste of time", purely-theoretical, large-scale, cutting-edge technology now powers most of the world, the world's satellites, thus world communications, thus enable people to even *find* those people, let alone help them?
How about that computer you just posted this troll on? Have you any idea how many man-hours it takes to build that? Considering your attitude, I should take it back, leave those raw materials in the ground and give someone a job instead... that makes sense, no? Or how about you *think* for a second about where those people are going to get their houses, pharmaceuticals, food, warmth, clothing, how they'll be found and helped and their progress tracked by your government to ensure they show up as a statistic at least?
Eighty years ago, the highest-level scientific research of splitting the "unsplittable" atom helped discover and then (50 years ago) harness the most destructive force held by man, culled from the annals of scientific research and weaponry, and now makes it power most of your country, provide pharmaceuticals, medical scanners and countless other innovations. Now think what'll happen in another 80 years when the tech discovered, manufactured and researched based on the findings of the LHC hits your country.
Other than you tactfully left out the word corruption, that's the best and most succinct description of the situation I've yet read.
In such a description you necessarily have to leave out things like leaders demonizing the people they are about to attack in order to keep themselves in power and so on (I'm protecting you from those awful sub-human evil fill_in_the blank, so you need me to stay in, and increase, my power), corporations that are now more powerful than all single countries and most coalitions of them and a few other things. But it's truly an inspiring and great beginning. Hope someone else reads it.
We're let these turkeys play us too long by far.
It's been estimated that most of the world's economy is the result of basic quantum mechanics research. The money put into QM research has been an absolutely incredible investment. Perhaps they're hoping that it will continue to be so.
I'm actually very curious to know more about this - have you got a link, article, citation anything for further reading?
because cooling down a 31km long ultra high vacuum apparatus isn't like making ice cubes. You need to go section by section, sealing it off, baking and pumping it to remove contaminates, then slowly cooling it to temperature. My groups apparatus takes up only half of a room and it took us weeks to bake and bring to temperature.
I've seen various estimates, but Leon Lederman (Nobel prize winner in physics) discusses it in his book "The God Particle." I think it was even in a similar context - why spend so much money doing high energy physics?
Sorry it's not a link, but the book is well worth reading. It's about the history of particle physics research, from an inside perspective, culminating with a discussion of the Higgs boson.
Doesn't seem very cool to me, in any commonly used temperature scale!
Actually, WE (as in the US) have been one of the largest contributor countries, even though we aren't officially a part of the CERN treaty group. The US has nearly 1000 scientists involved in the various LHC experiments, and has directly contributed nearly $600M to the construction of the ATLAS and CMS experiments. Plus, it will contribute to construction of ALICE and LHCb, and many millions more in grants to US based research groups for operations and upgrades. And it has built two Tier 1 LHC computing centers (at Brookhaven and Fermilab), dozens of Tier 2 centers, and as well as a fully equipped remote operations center. So, I date say "yes", the US is slightly involved with this project....
You delivered your argument well, but you could say something similar about any scientific goal, for absolutely any amount of money. Will the LHC lead to practical technology in 80 years? You think so, but how plausible is that really and why? What if I think we should spend $20B to study the mating habits of snails and promise some huge breakthrough in 80 years, will you also think that's a good investment?
I don't know whether the LHC is worth it, so I don't necessarily disagree with you, but simply citing successful past sponsored work (and ignoring failures) isn't very convincing. Furthermore, it's of absolutely no help if we are deciding between two mutually exclusive scientific research projects.
I wouldn't instantly dismiss spending $20B on studying mating habits of snails. Given that snails are very helpful to farmers, and given that farmers received 10 times that in aid ($258B) in a single year and the total market is about $1.5 trillion, spending a 10% of the given aid on studying how to produce better snails could provide significant returns in the long run.
If the study resulted in just a 0.1% increase in crop production, it would pay for itself in a single year!
... ATLAS ... CMS ... ALICE ... LHCb ...
Woah, woah, that's a tad too many scientific buzzwords! I'm all dizzy around here!
Cue the LHC Rap ...
"Restraint" implies something desired, but totally unnecessary.
When you go deeply in debt paying for college, it's not a "lack of restraint" that put you in that bad situation, but an investment, which may or may not pay off.
So why is the government so roundly critized for similarly trying to get the education dollars remotely back up to where they were (per-capita) 30+ years ago?
I guess NASA represents a lack of restraint as well.
Roads, too. As well as all forms of public transit.
The government exists specifically to pay for all those things which we all find beneficial to society, and would be impractical to do individually, or otherwise piecemeal.
And even those areas of flagrant fraud and waste, while requiring a fix, won't come close to making up the national deficit. The bailout money, while significant this year, will barely be noticeable average over the decades between major bailouts, AND would presumably end up costing everyone far more money, if that money wasn't spent where and when it was needed.
It's only on /. that the rabid libertarian sentiment doesn't get you laughed out of the room. It's idiotic on it's face.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Actually, the whole system is getting close to 1.8K, but some magnets aren't quite down there yet. About 2/3 of the ring has cyro authorization (cold enough to power up the magnets) but the magnets haven't been energized yet. All the magnets have to be powered up. Then comes low power beam testing and alignment. Then maybe they can do some science.
There are supposed to be two big fixes in place now. First, the quench protection system now covers not just the magnets, but the connections to them. (The basic idea is that if a superconducting magnet ceases to be superconductive at some hot spot (in which case all the energy in the magnet comes out as heat), the system dumps the energy into resistive loads, and heats up the entire magnet quickly to make it resistive, so that the energy is dumped throughout the magnet, not just at the hot spot. Last time, a hot spot developed at a welded splice. Second, the venting system for dealing with the gaseous helium released after a quench has been improved, with bigger rupture discs. Last time, the vents weren't big enough, and there was substantial damage to the cryogenic plumbing.
None of this has anything to do with the physics. It's all plumbing and DC power control.
The original design documents say a quench is supposed to be recoverable within three hours. That was rather optimistic.
Interesting.
Let's try a list!
- Roads.. maybe you don't use them?
- Well regulated skies so the plane you're landing in doesn't have an unexpected conjoining with another one taking off
- A nationwide electrical grid
- Required emergency care, regardless of ability to pay (that comes out of a similar source as medicare/medicaid - without it, no pay, no treatment.. got hit by a car walking down the street? No insurance? Tough luck, bub)
- Regulated banking sys...ok. bad example.
Government may do a lot wrong, but most people take for granted the stuff they do right, that they use every day. That's a small list, but not anywhere near complete. Almost every mass transit system in the US wouldn't exist if not for public funds, and often public involvement in their yearly operations.
Mind you, most of the actual politicians need their brains washed out with lye, and lobbyists should be sequestered 20,000 leauges under the sea, and there's billions in waste every year, but if not for those governments, I doubt you'd be online right now saying how little they do. LHC is one great example of where they really shine, it's true.
How is it costing us LESS money to keep the banks afloat so that housing prices can stay artificially inflated, maintaining an artificial bubble at great expense? How is it costing us LESS to spend resources on WAR, which is not an investment but money tossed in to a blackhole never to be recovered? How is it costing us LESS to pay people NOT to do things? None of those things are an investment. They're all tossing money at buying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and maintaining poorly run countries and businesses at great taxpayer expense.
Your rant set up a bunch of strawmen the GP post didn't even propose, then knocked them down leaving his original complaints completely unharmed. And you're calling his comments idiotic on their face? Then people mod you insightful? What the fuck? Is it opposite day around here?
This begs for an "except for , what did the governments ever did for us" joke.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The web is not the Internet.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Do they throw in a chair with that one ?
no, they just throw a chair...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Here's what Hawking said when giving his Michelson-Morley award lecture: