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.
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.
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.
"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.
Then it will never stop.
My kingdom for a mod point.
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
I see right through this. They don't want LHC running when the Mayan calendar ends...
Dont worry. The Fermi works very well and will continue to work
However, I cant see why would you deem "secure" a work envirnoment that subjects you to gigantic and powerful electromagnetic fields plus you are confined quite in the same location as some really interesting radioactive material.
For a physic, barring actual spacewalking, its about as hardcore as it gets.
NO SIG
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.
-
The LHC hits.
The LHC hits.
The LHC hits.
Universe, your life force is running out.
The LHC hits.
The LHC hits.
You die...
Do you want your posessions identified?
Goodbye Universe the universe...
You died in the Multiverse of Doom after 13700000000000 moves, killed by a grid bug named LHC.
You were level 300000000000000000000000000 with a maximum of infinity hit points when you died.
That's not how it works at all - we only experience the realities in which the LHC hasn't destroyed reality. All other realities have been destroyed, so we're not around to experience them. No timestream editing required.
That's also why you aren't dead - you are not around to experience all of the realities in which you are dead, so you never will.
On a more rational note: in order for unlikely events to happen, you need time and space. The more space you have, the less time it takes for something unlikely to happen in that space. The LHC is an incredibly delicate, incredibly closely monitored, extremely large thing (there's 17 miles of some of the highest tech stuff ever in there). Of course weird stuff is going to happen to it.