Large Hadron Collider nearly ready
- Thread starter auric
- Start date
Mr Cat
Owner
he's posted on zerogain a couple of time recently...I guess he feels unwanted on here for some reason...
Eyebroughty
JohnC
I just thought they had mis-spelt it
Mr Cat
Owner
There are lots of problems with the LHC at the moment and a reworking of some parts will put the first proper attempt at 21st December 2012, so still over three years off. The results will be known by the 23rd December, two days later.
(I'm joking of course...gulp
haha...funny, but scaringly true...
No it isn't..that would be my ex Mother in Law..
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
How much to get your haemorrhoids zapped at Palo Alto these days?
http://www.aerialarchives.com/stock/img/AHLB2985.jpg
friend of mine was there a couple of weeks ago
http://www.aerialarchives.com/stock/img/AHLB2985.jpg
friend of mine was there a couple of weeks ago
hughjampton
pfm Member
Actually when they fired it up it all went perfectly and they created a Higgs Boson. But due to the impossibility of such a particle existing in our universe it punched a hole in the false vacuum state, and the universe went into some other level.
But as our present universe split off from the doomed one at the point of the Boson's creation we were unaware of what had happened to the parallel universe; and these splits occur constantly millisecond by millisecond, so there are many universes where I am a multimillionaire for instance, as well as others where I was never born. Or where the dinosaurs evolved and created a world civilization, and so on.
If the collider does create the particle again, and it has already done so countless times, the same thing will happen, and we may or may not be be in the universe which goes down the pan. But we will never know it, we will just go out like a light.
Possibly.
But as our present universe split off from the doomed one at the point of the Boson's creation we were unaware of what had happened to the parallel universe; and these splits occur constantly millisecond by millisecond, so there are many universes where I am a multimillionaire for instance, as well as others where I was never born. Or where the dinosaurs evolved and created a world civilization, and so on.
If the collider does create the particle again, and it has already done so countless times, the same thing will happen, and we may or may not be be in the universe which goes down the pan. But we will never know it, we will just go out like a light.
Possibly.
Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/
Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber
Bread on the busbars could have seen 'dump caverns' used
By Lewis Page
Posted in Physics, 5th November 2009 13:23 GMT
A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.
According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.
Reg readers alerted us yesterday to the temperature rises in the LHC's Sector 81, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning: most of the collider's operational data can be viewed on the web for all to see. Initial enquiries to CERN press staff led to assurances that the rises were the result of routine tests.
However Dr Mike Lamont, who works at the CERN control centre and describes himself as "LHC Machine Coordinator and General Dogsbody" later confirmed that there had indeed been a problem. Lamont, briefing reporters at the control room yesterday, told the Reg that machinery on the surface - the LHC accelerator circuit itself is buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva - had suffered a fault caused by "a bit of baguette on the busbars", thought perhaps to have been dropped by a bird.
As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets - by no means up to the task imposed on them. Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka, a CERN engineer, told the Reg that this can happen unpredictably at temperatures above 9.6 K.
An uncontrolled quench would be bad news with the LHC in operation, possibly leading to serious damage of the sort which crippled the machine last September. At the moment there are no beams of hadrons barrelling around the huge magnetic doughnut at close to light speed, but when there are, each of the two beams has as much energy in it as an aircraft carrier underway (http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/beam.htm). If the LHC suddenly lost its ability to keep the beam circling around its vacuum pipe, all that energy would have to go somewhere - with results on the same scale as being rammed by an aircraft carrier.
About to get hit by an aircraft carrier? You need a Dump
But there's no cause for concern, according to Lamont. The LHC's monitoring and safety systems have always been capable of coping with an incident of this sort, and have been hugely upgraded since last September.
Had this week's feathered baguette-packing saboteur struck in coming months, with a brace of beams roaring round the LHC's magnetic motorway, the climbing temperatures would have been noted and the beams diverted - rather in the fashion that a runaway truck or train can be - into "dump caverns" lying a little off the main track of the LHC. In these large artificial caves, each beam would power into a "dump core (http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/beam-dump.htm)", a massive 7m-long graphite block encased in steel, water cooled and then further wrapped in 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump core would become extremely hot and quite radioactive, but it has massive shielding and scores of metres of solid granite lie between the cavern and the surface. Nobody up top, except the control room staff, would even notice.
This whole process would be over in a trice, well before the birdy bread-bomber's shenanigans could warm the main track up to anywhere near quench temperature. Should the magnets then quench, no carrier-wreck catastrophe would result.
According to Lamont, provided the underlying fault didn't take too long to rectify, the LHC could be up and beaming again "within, say, three days" following such an incident.
We asked if more such incidents would occur, once the Collider is up and running for real from later this month.
"It's inevitable," the particle-wrangling doc told the Reg. "This thing is so complicated and so big, it's bound to have problems sometimes."
Meanwhile, it would seem that this particular snag has been solved, as the Sector 81 temperatures are now headed back down (http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/cryo_main/cryo_main.php?region=Sector81) to their proper 1.9 K. ®
Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber
Bread on the busbars could have seen 'dump caverns' used
By Lewis Page
Posted in Physics, 5th November 2009 13:23 GMT
A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.
According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.
Reg readers alerted us yesterday to the temperature rises in the LHC's Sector 81, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning: most of the collider's operational data can be viewed on the web for all to see. Initial enquiries to CERN press staff led to assurances that the rises were the result of routine tests.
However Dr Mike Lamont, who works at the CERN control centre and describes himself as "LHC Machine Coordinator and General Dogsbody" later confirmed that there had indeed been a problem. Lamont, briefing reporters at the control room yesterday, told the Reg that machinery on the surface - the LHC accelerator circuit itself is buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva - had suffered a fault caused by "a bit of baguette on the busbars", thought perhaps to have been dropped by a bird.
As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets - by no means up to the task imposed on them. Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka, a CERN engineer, told the Reg that this can happen unpredictably at temperatures above 9.6 K.
An uncontrolled quench would be bad news with the LHC in operation, possibly leading to serious damage of the sort which crippled the machine last September. At the moment there are no beams of hadrons barrelling around the huge magnetic doughnut at close to light speed, but when there are, each of the two beams has as much energy in it as an aircraft carrier underway (http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/beam.htm). If the LHC suddenly lost its ability to keep the beam circling around its vacuum pipe, all that energy would have to go somewhere - with results on the same scale as being rammed by an aircraft carrier.
About to get hit by an aircraft carrier? You need a Dump
But there's no cause for concern, according to Lamont. The LHC's monitoring and safety systems have always been capable of coping with an incident of this sort, and have been hugely upgraded since last September.
Had this week's feathered baguette-packing saboteur struck in coming months, with a brace of beams roaring round the LHC's magnetic motorway, the climbing temperatures would have been noted and the beams diverted - rather in the fashion that a runaway truck or train can be - into "dump caverns" lying a little off the main track of the LHC. In these large artificial caves, each beam would power into a "dump core (http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/beam-dump.htm)", a massive 7m-long graphite block encased in steel, water cooled and then further wrapped in 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump core would become extremely hot and quite radioactive, but it has massive shielding and scores of metres of solid granite lie between the cavern and the surface. Nobody up top, except the control room staff, would even notice.
This whole process would be over in a trice, well before the birdy bread-bomber's shenanigans could warm the main track up to anywhere near quench temperature. Should the magnets then quench, no carrier-wreck catastrophe would result.
According to Lamont, provided the underlying fault didn't take too long to rectify, the LHC could be up and beaming again "within, say, three days" following such an incident.
We asked if more such incidents would occur, once the Collider is up and running for real from later this month.
"It's inevitable," the particle-wrangling doc told the Reg. "This thing is so complicated and so big, it's bound to have problems sometimes."
Meanwhile, it would seem that this particular snag has been solved, as the Sector 81 temperatures are now headed back down (http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/cryo_main/cryo_main.php?region=Sector81) to their proper 1.9 K. ®
I want some of whatever you've been taking!
TOFFEEMAN1878
Chosen Not Manufactured
Spoiler below
The protagonist is Lloyd Simcoe, a 47 year old Canadian particle physicist. He works with his fiancée Michiko, who has a daughter, Tamiko. Another researcher and friend is Theo Procopides.
The fallout from the flash forward occupies much of the first part of the book. The consequences include the death of Michiko's daughter as an out-of-control vehicle plows into her school. Oddly, no recording devices anywhere in the world functioned in the present during the event. Security camera tapes show noise and even recording devices in television studios show nothing until the event is over. This is interpreted as proof of the observer effect in quantum theory. With the awareness of the entire human race absent, "reality" went into a state of indeterminacy. When the awareness returned, reality collapsed into its most likely configuration, which was one in which moving objects had careened out of control in the direction they were already headed.
The deaths of several characters are forecast by the "flash forward". Anyone who did not experience it is assumed to be dead in the future. This includes Theo Procopides. Some people report reading about his murder in the future. However as time goes by it seems that the events of the future are not predestined. Some people, depressed by their visions of their own dismal futures, commit suicide, thereby changing those futures. The story begins to take on the features of a murder mystery, as Theo attempts to prevent his own murder. His brother Dimitrios, who aspired to be a writer but saw himself just working in a restaurant in the future, is one of the suicides.
At CERN, the scientists plan a repeat of the run, but this time warning the world of the exact time, so that preparations can be made. However, there is no "flash forward", but the LHC does find the Higgs boson.
Soon after this discovery, the riddle of the "flash forward" is solved. At the same time as the LHC was running, a pulse of neutrinos arrived from the remnant of supernova 1987A. The remnant is not a neutron star, but a quark star, a superdense body of strange matter. Starquakes cause it to emit a neutrino pulse at unpredictable intervals. As the date at the other end of the "flash forward" approaches, a satellite is launched into an orbit close to that of Pluto, from where it can give several days warning of another neutrino pulse arriving. The neutrinos travel slower than light, since they have mass, and thus a radio message (though the book uses the notion of "faster-than-light communication" involving tachyons) from the satellite will arrive at Earth before the neutrinos do. The intent is to run the LHC again and create another "flash forward".
Theo Procopides, meanwhile, discovers a fanatic attempting to sabotage the experiment blaming the LHC staff for his wife's death in the first flash forward. In a chase sequence through the tunnels containing the LHC equipment, he is able to stop this, preventing his own murder in the process.
It turns out that the neutrino pulse arrives on the exact day which everyone experienced during the original event. The world stops and rests at the appointed time, but this time nobody experiences anything, except for a few. Simcoe experiences a vision of himself moving through time for billions of years (suggesting that the next neutrino burst would be billions of years in the future and last for one hour), his consciousness existing in different artificial bodies. He is aware of another person being with him in some of these situations.
When the event is over, there is general puzzlement over why nothing happened. Simcoe comes to realize that the effect connects two periods of quantum disturbance occurring within the lifetimes of the individuals involved. Since there will be no more events in the lifetimes of any living people, nobody experiences a "flash forward", except for those who are secretly associated with an immortality project controlled by the same person whom Lloyd sees in is second flashforward. In particular, living Nobel laureates are being offered the chance to participate. However, it is unclear whether or not he accepts the treatment depending upon the interpretation of "forgetfulness" he describes to his wife. It is implied that Theo will be offered the treatment as well. The novel ends with Theo contacting Michiko in the hopes of living out the rest of his life with her.
TOFFEEMAN1878
Chosen Not Manufactured
I am it's loosely based on the above,enjoying it so far but it's a bit slow!
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
Spoiler below
The protagonist is Lloyd Simcoe, a 47 year old Canadian particle physicist. He works with his fiancée Michiko, who has a daughter, Tamiko. Another researcher and friend is Theo Procopides.
The fallout from the flash forward occupies much of the first part of the book. The consequences include the death of Michiko's daughter as an out-of-control vehicle plows into her school. Oddly, no recording devices anywhere in the world functioned in the present during the event. Security camera tapes show noise and even recording devices in television studios show nothing until the event is over. This is interpreted as proof of the observer effect in quantum theory. With the awareness of the entire human race absent, "reality" went into a state of indeterminacy. When the awareness returned, reality collapsed into its most likely configuration, which was one in which moving objects had careened out of control in the direction they were already headed.
The deaths of several characters are forecast by the "flash forward". Anyone who did not experience it is assumed to be dead in the future. This includes Theo Procopides. Some people report reading about his murder in the future. However as time goes by it seems that the events of the future are not predestined. Some people, depressed by their visions of their own dismal futures, commit suicide, thereby changing those futures. The story begins to take on the features of a murder mystery, as Theo attempts to prevent his own murder. His brother Dimitrios, who aspired to be a writer but saw himself just working in a restaurant in the future, is one of the suicides.
At CERN, the scientists plan a repeat of the run, but this time warning the world of the exact time, so that preparations can be made. However, there is no "flash forward", but the LHC does find the Higgs boson.
Soon after this discovery, the riddle of the "flash forward" is solved. At the same time as the LHC was running, a pulse of neutrinos arrived from the remnant of supernova 1987A. The remnant is not a neutron star, but a quark star, a superdense body of strange matter. Starquakes cause it to emit a neutrino pulse at unpredictable intervals. As the date at the other end of the "flash forward" approaches, a satellite is launched into an orbit close to that of Pluto, from where it can give several days warning of another neutrino pulse arriving. The neutrinos travel slower than light, since they have mass, and thus a radio message (though the book uses the notion of "faster-than-light communication" involving tachyons) from the satellite will arrive at Earth before the neutrinos do. The intent is to run the LHC again and create another "flash forward".
Theo Procopides, meanwhile, discovers a fanatic attempting to sabotage the experiment blaming the LHC staff for his wife's death in the first flash forward. In a chase sequence through the tunnels containing the LHC equipment, he is able to stop this, preventing his own murder in the process.
It turns out that the neutrino pulse arrives on the exact day which everyone experienced during the original event. The world stops and rests at the appointed time, but this time nobody experiences anything, except for a few. Simcoe experiences a vision of himself moving through time for billions of years (suggesting that the next neutrino burst would be billions of years in the future and last for one hour), his consciousness existing in different artificial bodies. He is aware of another person being with him in some of these situations.
When the event is over, there is general puzzlement over why nothing happened. Simcoe comes to realize that the effect connects two periods of quantum disturbance occurring within the lifetimes of the individuals involved. Since there will be no more events in the lifetimes of any living people, nobody experiences a "flash forward", except for those who are secretly associated with an immortality project controlled by the same person whom Lloyd sees in is second flashforward. In particular, living Nobel laureates are being offered the chance to participate. However, it is unclear whether or not he accepts the treatment depending upon the interpretation of "forgetfulness" he describes to his wife. It is implied that Theo will be offered the treatment as well. The novel ends with Theo contacting Michiko in the hopes of living out the rest of his life with her.
ah, white text on a pale gray background! Sounds like a brand of hifi
http://www.switched.com/2009/11/06/bird-drops-baguette-shuts-down-large-hadron-collider/
Baguette Bearing Bird Bombs Boffins' Buss-bar. Breadcrumbs Break Big Bang Bagel.
I'm pretty sure its the evolved descendants of a future avian hybrid civilization sending back messages from the future warning us that they would like us to concentrate on better bread making recipes before the LHC is switched on and kills everything but the birds because breadcrumbs of the future are a bit shit...
Baguette Bearing Bird Bombs Boffins' Buss-bar. Breadcrumbs Break Big Bang Bagel.
I'm pretty sure its the evolved descendants of a future avian hybrid civilization sending back messages from the future warning us that they would like us to concentrate on better bread making recipes before the LHC is switched on and kills everything but the birds because breadcrumbs of the future are a bit shit...
Nice Alliteration
TheDecameron
Unicorns fart glitter.
you are describing the most expensive toaster in the history of man after this one-
http://www.gilroydispatch.com/content/img/f122635/dualit-toaster.jpg
Jonathan Ribee
Unavailable at present
The similarities and differences between the Flash Forward book and the "very loosely based' TV serious are interesting. The book is pretty much all CERN scientist based, the TV series almost everyone is in the FBI. There is only one policeman in the Book, a rather staid Swiss detective who is only 8 when the flash forward happens - as the books Flash is of 20 years in the future instead of TV's 6 months.
There is even a difference in the duration of the Flash Forward - not much - I'm just imagining some TV executive conducting "consumer workshops" and pitching that anything over two minutes would create incredulity in important network demographics - or something.
It's a nice little mini lesson on how stuff is dumbed down / made "more exciting."
There is even a difference in the duration of the Flash Forward - not much - I'm just imagining some TV executive conducting "consumer workshops" and pitching that anything over two minutes would create incredulity in important network demographics - or something.
It's a nice little mini lesson on how stuff is dumbed down / made "more exciting."
Talking to my daughter yesterday we realised that one day in billions of years from now, we might get to see a recorded history of our world to watch. If a planet many billions of miles from here is looking at us and seeing this planet from millions of years ago, they would be able to record everything that happened here, from the formation of the planet, to dinosaurs, to present day, and then beam it back to us.
Obviously it would take billions of years, but if you're burying corpses in your garden thinking that no-one will ever find out, well...you'd better watch out! Err...yeah...you'd better think again. So there! That's got you worried now, hasn't it.
I'm going to dig the wife up and see if I can revive her
Obviously it would take billions of years, but if you're burying corpses in your garden thinking that no-one will ever find out, well...you'd better watch out! Err...yeah...you'd better think again. So there! That's got you worried now, hasn't it.
I'm going to dig the wife up and see if I can revive her