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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!
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!
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);}
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.
2. Couldn't this say $40,000,000 USD (FORTY MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) to be more dramatic?
It's European, not Nigerian.
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!"
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.
And couldn't they tell us the cost in euro? I mean, that's the unit in which the LHC is budgeted. Why convert into some volatile foreign currency? Let us know the actual figure, and if we live outside the eurozone then we'll convert into our own local currency by ourselves, thanks.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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.
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....
"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.
Here's what Hawking said when giving his Michelson-Morley award lecture: