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LHC Knocked Out By Another Power Failure

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the future-gremlins-are-watching dept.

known_ID writes "The Large Hadron Collider — the most puissant particle-punisher ever assembled by the human race — has suffered another major power failure, knocking not only the atom smasher itself but even its associated websites offline."

6 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Future doesn't want to be discovered? by vvaduva · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone remember this?

    1. Re:Future doesn't want to be discovered? by dido · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, extremely high-energy collisions, of the order of 100 million TeV, have been directly observed. Such events involve particles eight orders of magnitude more energetic than any produced by the LHC at its maximum design potential. The first such ultra-high energy event was observed at a cosmic ray observatory at New Mexico in 1962, and there have been a few since, but they are understandably rare. More information here. So no, I don't think there is any other explanation why the LHC appears to be getting hit by so many problems other than the fact that it is among the most complex devices ever built by humankind. Natural processes already make particles with vastly higher energies than the LHC could even dream of reaching, so if a planet-destroying event was possible at the levels of energy it can achieve, then we wouldn't be here to build the LHC to begin with.

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  2. Re:I'm writing this comment from 2017 by Bombcar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Then why does your user name have 2009 in it?

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    Fellowship 9/11
  3. I hope it's true by AlphaBit · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm not sure how much the LHC has actually ended up costing.
    I don't know if it's possible to prove this time-travelling higgs theory without attempting to build several more LHC scale colliders.

    But if it's true, the cost has/will have been worth it. Maybe it's not in the list of breakthrough discoveries we were hoping for, but wouldn't it be mind-bogglingly amazing anyway? I don't think pure science gets much better.

  4. Re:Take it easy people ... by geekoid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's the most complicated and precise piece of engineering ever created. Yeah, it's touchy.

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  5. Is this a good thing to happen now? by halcyon1234 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have to wonder, is it better that these glitches and outages are happening now rather than later?

    What would happen if the LHC gets up to full capacity, THEN has a system-killing power outage? Does the LHC shut down gracefully, or could it be a disaster waiting to happen?

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