Slashdot Mirror
LHC Will Be Shut Down In 2011 Because of "Mistake"
astroengine follows up to a story about the LHC shutting down that seems to have hit all the news replicators today. "It's to be expected when pushing the frontiers of physics, but the LHC's epic 'will it or won't it' saga continues. Due to an unforeseen construction mistake, the LHC will cease experiments for a year (starting around late-2011) so repairs and upgrades can be carried out. For now, accelerated particles will have a maximum energy of 7TeV (half the power of the LHC's design maximum), which is ample for at least 18 months of experiments before shutdown."
... the article linked in the story starts off by debunking the submission.
This is good news to me because I like job security and the longer Fermi is rocking, the longer I am rocking.
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
That Higgs Boson is finding more and more creative ways... Seems this time it went so far back as to flaw the LHC's design.
How long do we have before it goes further back and destroys humanity?
The plan for a while now was always to have a period of running at lower power/luminosity then a long shutdown to completely fix the error that caused the incident in 2008. Last december the plan was for a 5 month run this year and a year long shutdown, and they changed that in early february to a 18-24 month run and year long shutdown.
-Bucky
I, for one, think they are just scared of being blamed for 2012. :-)
...at least according to the article at the end of the supplied link. Quoting a Prof. Brian Cox, "ALL particle accelerators have 6 - 12 month regular shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how complex machines are operated!"
Now, I know slashdot readers don't read the articles, and I've become accustomed to the editors not reading the articles, but this situation implies that even the submitter of the article didn't read the article.
How is that even possible?
Sounds like one of those recursive quantum anomalies the LHC is designed to unravel...
What this really means is that after scheduled maintenance of 2011 (which now includes bolstering against quench damage), the LHC will be slowly brought to full power in 2012. Reaching full power at the end of 2012. December 2012. Need I say more?
As the linked article points out, this so-called news is just lazy journalism of a long-ago announced planned shutdown for routine maintenance and upgrading.
This should never have made it to the front page here. Is it too much to ask that the editors at Slashdot at least GLANCE at the linked articles?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
the usual saboteurs from the future, trying to preserving their pathetic little doomed timeline
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Now we need someone to pipe up that if they used Agile Methodology when building the LHC, none of the design issues would have happened.
it were a foreseen construction mistake.
quite frankly i'm so sick of people critisising the LHC, especially the people at fermilab. firstly most people don;t know a damn thing about particle physics (this includes me but I have a relative expert on hand to answer my queries) unless you have some knowledge of beyond degree level particle physics or know someone who does quite well. KEEP YOUR OPINION TO YOURSELF.
for those people (probablly americans) stop critising the LHC becuase its bigger than the accelerator at fermilab. thats like kids arguing over who has a better skateboard. NOT IMPORTANT
It's one of the world's most ambitious projects. Not surprisingly, its construction and operation can be problematic from time to time.
I hear that a level in the next Duke Nukem will take place in LHC facility. A PS3/360 trophy/achievement will be rewarded for finding the secret door to the main ring, repairing damage caused by mutated aliens, and escaping through a black hole created by incompetent CERN scientists.
prevented this thing from blowing up the universe again? Man, this is worse than last night's "Lost" episode.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Resonance Cascade.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
""The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype," Dr. Steve Myers, director of the particle smasher, told the BBC today.
"Due to an unforeseen construction mistake"...
Wind it up to 11, guys! What could possibly go wrong?
"Now we need someone to pipe up that if they used Agile Methodology when building the LHC, none of the design issues would have happened."
If they'd have used the Agile Methodology it'd be working, but the particles would travel at 60 miles per hour, and the collisions would be recorded by a police sketch artist. Improvements would be scheduled for a future sprint.
It will be late 2012 before the LHC gets to full power? Hmmmmmmmm.... Awfully forboding to me.
It may be due to semantics, but the headline is still inappropriate. I interpreted "shut down" as "dismantling," as if it were used in "shut down the NASA space program." The summary clarifies the issue without sadisticly making you RTFA for it, but the heart attack has already happened.
Well, news sources normally do this. It's just important to remember to never take anything as real unless you've read it AND cross referenced it thoroughly. Coming to slashdot does not count as a control-making space: cross-references usually mean talking with people who have the same belief, unless you're browsing at low thresholds or some dissenter post is modded insightful by luck.
Once again, the timestream moves to protect itself. If they continue attempting to create Higgs-Boson particles at the LHC, we will find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly unlikely reality. Construction accidents, birds dropping baguettes into the particle beam, anything can happen to prevent this.
Mark my word, something improbable will happen to the LHC near the end of this repair work.
We should harness this power to direct the future time stream and create a drive that uses these disturbed probabilities. We can call it the 'improbability drive'.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Then it will never stop.
That means 18 months of experiments at the highest particle accelerator power ever! Isn't that exciting?
Who is most likely to find the Higgs boson then? The LHC, or the Tevatron?
For now, accelerated particles will have a maximum energy of 7TeV (half the power of the LHC's design maximum)
The design energy for LHC particles is 7TeV, which means 17TeV energy in center of mass during collision. The planned particles energy is 3.5TeV until 2011 which make 7TeV in center of mass.
Apparently by making the LHC work we will cause some disaster so time travelers from an alternate future make sure it stays broken so the disaster will not happen. That or God just doesn't want to be found.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My kingdom for a mod point.
After submitting the story, refresh /. and seeing an abortion of a summary on the same story because the /. editors just picked the first one with an exciting headline.
That's media for you. Keep it exciting and facts be damned!
The invasion by giant ants from another dimension opened by a gateway created by a particle accelerator is prevented once again. Such is the plot of Einstein's Bridge by John Cramer. Luckily the SSC was never built. West Texas has enough problems with fire ants without the giant alien kind.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
From the Author's Website: (follow the link that is the author's name)
So we already know this lune does not know how to read, and that he just posts to flame-bait. Could it be that he also is a slanderous, wretched, troll who seeks to dishonour the nerds we covet. I would prefer to think that then to think that the creator of this website is in fact an illiterate fabulist.
If the above quote is false, I say /. should sue the poster. If the above quote is true I say we should all boycott that which has been mutated by its own author beyond recognition.
As a physicist, all I can say is we've been asking for this kind of press.
When you hype the bejeezus out of the shiny new multi-billion dollar tool, it's reasonable for the people who paid for it to expect results. It is jarring when people hear for over a decade about the great results that will come out of an experiment, and then later hear that we have to spend ~50% of the time doing maintenance on the equipment, and the first few years just testing it. I know this is the way things work, this is the way my (much, much smaller) experiments work. This is not a complaint about the science, or being careful. This is a complaint about politics, funding structures and a lack of ability across fields to communicate effectively with the general public. We can't keep doing this to ourselves if we want the public to trust us. We have to manage the media better.
To begin with, the great achievement of the LHC *is* the LHC, not the search for the Higgs boson. It's enough that this is the most complicated, impressive, advanced piece of technology on the planet, and that it required input at the cutting edge from nearly every major field of physics. Just like the point of going to the moon was to go to the moon, not to bring back moon rocks.
Now there's a crew who know how to make an unstoppable accelerator!
JADBP
unforseen consequences
Is a four letter word around the LHC.
I see right through this. They don't want LHC running when the Mayan calendar ends...
It's pretty obvious that what's happening is that every time they start it up at full power, it collapses the false vacuum and instantly destroys the universe. So the only versions of the state vector we can observe are the ones in which the LHC never ramps up all the way, because we've been destroyed in the rest of them...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm sorry, I don't have references, but someone was explaining to me that the parts and construction for the LHC are excessively shoddy. He mentioned the size of the magnets and, I believe, mentioned that they weren't really tested before being put in place. His beef was that the whole thing is basically just a huge money sinkhole and may not ever produce the kinds of results it promises.
-
They must be filming the sequel to Howard the Duck during the year it's shut down. I'm pumped!
it seems a number of them were hijacked by some pirates who have been distributing them to would-be journalists.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Your sig contains a malapropism - the expression is "for all intents and purposes," not "intensive purposes." Perhaps it's part of the anti-grammar joke? If so, sorry for being humorless.
It does have to cost a lot of money and create a lot of crony jobs.
It does NOT have to provide a return on investment or tangible benefit of any kind.
If you don't agree with how the government spends you money, then you're just a flat-earth creationist cannibal child rapist who needs to STFU.
It's true that investors these days tend to reward short term profits, and that makes corporations tempted to pursue only short term gains at the expense of long term fundamentals. But that is another and bigger subject.
In the case of the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider, I think it was justifiably argued that you have to look at "bang for the buck." Fundamental physics is important, but so are a lot of other science projects competing for finite resources. Where do you put your money?
Maybe this is the doomsday machine! This error could be the only thing stopping our existance from ending. If we shut it down in late 2011, and send a year fixing bugs then re-start it in late 2012 - OMG the Mayans were right!
. .
Urm No. Even at half powed the LHC is more powerful than Fermilab. Sorry, my little jingoist.
Mr Freeman, prepare for unforeseen consequences.
Someone sees headline
They assume they know what is in the article, and in a panic frenzy to get slashdot cock waving rights, they just submit the story...probably by justs clicking on a button on the webpage.
How about:
Someone see headline, reads the article, decides this is important "news for nerds", and composes a Slashdot submission.
The submission works its way through the queue and eventually gets accepted and posted.
Before (or very shortly after) the Slashdot posting makes it through the queue, the original article draws comments and feedback and the author posts a correction at the top. Though the posting might have been dead-on on the basis of the uncorrected article, the correction aborts the original point of the submission and would make the submitter look foolish, IF he had seen it before submitting.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The LHC got built, right? It's functioning, right? Mission accomplished, my friend.
PR is not about being well-understood, it's about getting a desired, concrete result. The public is largely stupid and fickle. If you let little PR blips like this bother you, you'll never accomplish anything great. Ultimately if the LHC delivers new science, that is all anyone in future history will remember it for. It's aggravating to read bad press but most of it just doesn't matter over time.
The space race and moon landing projects had HUGE problems for years--rockets failing very publicly, shutdowns and delays, even the death of 3 astronauts. What is remembered now? While the deaths are remembered and regretted, the number one thing that people remember is that we walked on the fucking moon. How many people today could tell you how many failed launches the Saturn V had? Who cares?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Yesterday:
Tried to find the Higgs-Boson particles
Today:
Try to find the Higgs-Boson particles
Whats holding me up:
Higgs-Boson particles
so the movie 2012 was off by a year.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
It's shutdown -rF, fool!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Once you read an article about the LHC the state of the facts change.
-Eric
While good physics is important at one level it will not directly feed and heal those that need it.
It is true that some social issues are in the way but this blue marble is so understudied and so important to all of us.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Surely this should come from the "end of the end of the world as we know it dept."
I wonder if Areva is somehow involved with this project...
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sc=2052909
http://www.tvo.fi/www/page/2986/