Slashdot Mirror
Short Circuit In LHC Could Delay Restart By Weeks
hypnosec writes: On March 21 CERN detected an intermittent short circuit to ground in one of the LHC's magnet circuits. Repairs could delay the restart by anywhere between a few days and several weeks. CERN revealed that the short circuit affected one of LHC's powerful electromagnets, thereby delaying preparations in sector 4-5 of the machine. They confirmed that seven of the machine's eight sectors have been successfully commissioned to 6.5 TeV per beam, but they won't be circulating a beam in the LHC this week. Though the short circuit issue is well understood, resolving it will take time, since it's in a cold section of the machine and repairs may therefore require warming and re-cooling.
That's how many weeks we have more to live before being crunched in a black hole.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Now would probably be a good time to stalk up on crowbars and prepare for unforeseen consequences, right?
It doesn't want its secrets revealed ;)
If your car won't start, how can you prove that any other places in the world exist?
What if my car has a short-circuit or other flaw that prevents me from going as fast as it could, so I conclude that all engines everywhere are underpowered?
I don't think works as you think it does.
If you point your goggles to a spot and see a lion eating a gazelle, finding afterwards that your goggles had a dent won't make you doubt of the existence of that lion.
Or, in other words, short circuits don't conjure results that coincide with decades of theory.
Nooo stop work on LHC Stephanie. Stephanie reassemble?
http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/
No, that just means you bought a GM car.
"short circuits don't conjure results that coincide with decades of theory."
They easily can if you use a "null" hypothesis, and take any non-null result as coinciding with your theory.
Experiment result : "A squirrel fell on the azidoazide azide magnetic container, leveling the lab and leaving a 23 feet deep crater where the Dean's office used to be."
Conclusion : "Higgs Boson!"
Didn't they also generate so much data they had to filter it to only look at promising results? That would make it harder to notice any artifacts even if they were only looking in a narrower range.
There is a reason why rejecting the null hypothesis is the favorite pastime of all those fields that can only replicate 1-20% of the findings. Any time you mess up the experiment, the null is false and you get "results".
I have no idea if it is an issue in this case. I could imagine that they expected a certain signal at each energy level and some malfunction could result in recording the incorrect energy level. Result: Signal in the range you expect due to artifact.
Is that a possibility here?
You realize that the sun/moon size thing is just a temporary condition, right? The moon's been receding from Earth and will continue to do so, so in a few hundred million years it'll be noticeably smaller than the sun and we will have no more total solar eclipses.
And the dinosaurs probably got to enjoy more eclipses because the moon was closer then.
Given that, it's hard for me to read anything into the sun/moon size thing other than that it's a coincidence.
--PM
There are actually certain physical phenomenon that would confirm that we are in a simulation, just from the mathematical constraints.
Here is a link to the actual paper.
Something dropped out of someone's pocket.
This would never happen if they forbade pockets, you know.
If this is the only startup failure of the LHC after such a massive upgrade, that is indeed a miracle! My hat is off to the boffins at Cern, Fermi Lab, and all the other collaborators on this project. Disclaimer: my wife is a staff physicist at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. They have done a lot of the work on the superconducting magnets used on the LHC project.
you double-check that you don't have solder bridges. Use only what you need, and make sure those joints are bright and shiny!
Short cuts make long delays.
You should maybe look into how calculations and data analysis are actually done in experimental particle physics. They tend to have some of the best, most rigid use of statistics, unlike a lot of medical research.
In particular, while there are filters on what data gets stored, there are also a large amount of data allowed to randomly bypass the filters to check the filters are working as expected and that there is not some bias or missed data. Also, analysis is pretty good about avoiding issues with fishing for "results" by only running initial tests on a small subset of data to confirm it works, then, after much thought, collaboration, and double checking, allowing an analysis to be performed on the full data set.
"You should maybe look into how calculations and data analysis are actually done in experimental particle physics"
I would be very interested. Any papers, or even blogs, discussing this in detail?
Another fucking crow with a baguette?