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Walter Watts
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Giant Particle Collider Struggles
« on: 2009-08-04 17:11:04 »
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The New York Times
August 4, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/space/04collide.html?em

Giant Particle Collider Struggles

By DENNIS OVERBYE

The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.

Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.

Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.

After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all.

But soon?

This week, scientists and engineers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, are to announce how and when their machine will start running this winter.

That will be a Champagne moment. But scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength, stretching out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, like producing a particle known as the Higgs boson thought to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass, or identifying the dark matter that astronomers say makes up 25 percent of the cosmos.

The energy shortfall could also limit the collider’s ability to test more exotic ideas, like the existence of extra dimensions beyond the three of space and one of time that characterize life.

“The fact is, it’s likely to take a while to get the results we really want,” said Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist who is an architect of the extra-dimension theory.

The collider was built to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and smash them together in search of particles and forces that reigned earlier than the first trillionth of a second of time, but the machine could run as low as four trillion electron volts for its first year. Upgrades would come a year or two later.

Physicists on both sides of the Atlantic say they are confident that the European machine will produce groundbreaking science — eventually — and quickly catch up to an American rival, even at the lower energy. All big accelerators have gone through painful beginnings.

“These are baby problems,” said Peter Limon, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who helped build the collider.

But some physicists admit to being impatient. “I’ve waited 15 years,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a leading particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “I want it to get up running. We can’t tolerate another disaster. It has to run smoothly from now.”

The delays are hardest on younger scientists, who may need data to complete a thesis or work toward tenure. Slowing a recent physics brain drain from the United States to Europe, some have gone to work at Fermilab, where the rival Tevatron accelerator has been smashing together protons and antiprotons for the last decade.

Colliders get their oomph from Einstein’s equivalence of mass and energy, both expressed in the currency of electron volts. The CERN collider was designed to investigate what happens at energies and distances where the reigning theory, known as the Standard Model, breaks down and gives nonsense answers.

The collider’s own prodigious energies are in some way its worst enemy. At full strength, the energy stored in its superconducting magnets would equal that of an Airbus A380 flying at 450 miles an hour, and the proton beam itself could pierce 100 feet of solid copper.

In order to carry enough current, the collider’s magnets are cooled by liquid helium to a temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, at which point the niobium-titanium cables in them lose all electrical resistance and become superconducting.

Any perturbation, however, such as a bad soldering job on a splice, can cause resistance and heat the cable and cause it to lose its superconductivity in what physicists call a “quench.” Which is what happened on Sept. 19, when the junction between two magnets vaporized in a shower of sparks, soot and liberated helium.

Technicians have spent most of the last year cleaning up and inspecting thousands of splices in the collider. About 5,000 will have to be redone, Steve Myers, head of CERN’s accelerator division, said in an interview.

The exploding splices have diverted engineers’ attention from the mystery of the underperforming magnets. Before the superconducting magnets are installed, engineers “train” each one by ramping up its electrical current until the magnet fails, or “quenches.” Thus the magnet gradually grows comfortable with higher and higher current.

All of the magnets for the collider were trained to an energy above seven trillion electron volts before being installed, Dr. Myers said, but when engineers tried to take one of the rings’ eight sectors to a higher energy last year, some magnets unexpectedly failed.

In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.

Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy. “It looks like we can get to 6.5 relatively easily,” Dr. Myers said, but seven trillion electron volts would require “a lot of training.”

Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. If that were the case, said Joe Lykken, a Fermilab theorist who is on one of the CERN collider teams, “It’s not the end of the world. I am not pessimistic at all.”

For the immediate future, however, physicists are not even going to get that. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 trillion electron volts.

“We could be doing physics at the end of November,” he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks.

“It’s not the design energy of the machine, but it’s 4 times higher than the Tevatron,” he said.

Pauline Gagnon, an Indiana University physicist who works at CERN, said she would happily take that energy level. “The public pays for this,” she said in an e-mail message, “and we need to start delivering.”


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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Re:Giant Particle Collider Struggles
« Reply #1 on: 2009-11-09 07:31:12 »
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[letheomaniac] The LHC reminds me more and more every day of Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex. The TPV's design included at the outset a small piece of fairy cake, whereas a passing avian has taken it upon itself to introduce another small baked good to the LHC with terrible consequeces...

Source: The Register
Author: Lewis Page
Dated:5/11/09

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber

Bread on the busbars could have seen 'dump caverns' used

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. 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.
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Re:Giant Particle Collider Struggles
« Reply #2 on: 2009-11-13 15:09:50 »
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[Blunderov] Perhaps it's not a collider. Perhaps it's an improbability engine.


sentientdevelopments.com

13 November 2009, 11:25:04 AM

Let’s get metaphysical*: How our ongoing existence could appear increasingly absurd


12 November 2009, 05:20:21 AM | george@sentientdevelopments.com (George)
So the Large Hadron Collider has been shut down yet again – this time on account of a bird dropping a piece of a bagel onto some sensitive outdoor machinery. The incident is not expected to keep the LHC out of commission for too much longer, but it represents yet another strange event that has kept the world’s most infamous particle accelerator out of service. In fact, the LHC has yet to function at full operational capacity since its completion over a year ago.

What makes this all the more interesting is that the Hadron Collider has been dubbed by some observers as a doomsday device on account of its unprecedented size and power. A minority of scientists and philosophers believe that the collider could produce a tiny black hole or a strangelet that would convert Earth to a shrunken mass of strange matter.

It's worth re-stating, however, that this is a fringe opinion. Several years ago, Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom wrote a piece for Nature in which they concluded that a civilization destroys itself by a particle accelerator experiment once every billion years.

Okay, admittedly, one in a billion seems excruciatingly improbable. But not impossible. And it's this 'shadow of doubt' that has got so many people in a tizzy -- especially when considering that this so-called doomsday machine keeps breaking down. Seems awfully convenient, doesn't it? Are we to believe that this is mere co-incidence? Or is there something more to what's going on?

Now, I'm not talking about conspiracies or sabotage, here. Rather, a number of philosophers are making the case that something more metaphysical is going on.


Take, for example, the quantum immortality theory, which argues that you as an observer cannot observe your non-existence, so you will keep on observing your ongoing existence -- no matter how absurd. Aside from a large grain of salt, you also have to buy into the Everett Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics for this to work. As the universe splinters into probability trees, there are new trajectories that are forced into existence by your ongoing presence; in an infinite universe all observations must be made, no matter how improbable.

Now, at any given time we have to assume that we are living in the most probable of all possible habitable worlds. But that doesn't mean it's true -- it's just an assumption given the absence of sampling data. As quantum probability trees diverge, those that tread into more improbable spaces will begin to splinter with less and less frequency and diversity; there will be a limited number of escape routes given absurd and highly complex (but survivable) existence spaces.

All this can lead to some rather bizarre conclusions -- including the thought experiment in which you attempt to obliterate yourself with an atom bomb, only to have some kind of force majeure get in the way that prevents you from acting on your suicide.

It's important to remember that this only works for your ongoing existence. The rest of the world can burn around you; what matters is that you continue to observe the universe.

Okay, back to Hadron. Let's assume for a moment that quantum immortality is in effect and that the LHC is in fact the apocalypt-o-matic. It can therefore be argued that, because we are all collectively put into peril by this thing, we will never get to observe it working properly. There will always be something that prevents the device from doing what it's supposed to be doing -- everything from mechanical failures through to birds dropping bagels on it.

What's even more disturbing, however, is that these interventions could get increasingly absurd and improbable. It may eventually get to the point where we have to sit back and question the rationality of our existence. The world may get progressively screwed up and surreal in order for our personal existence to continue into the future.

One could already make the case that our collective existence is already absurd on account of our possession of apocalyptic weapons, namely the nuclear bomb. We've already come alarmingly close to apocalypse, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the infamous Stanislav Petrov incident. Would it be unfair of me to suggest that we should probably have destroyed ourselves by now? I would argue that the most probable of Everett Many World Earths have destroyed themselves through nuclear armageddon, but we happen to observe a version of Earth that has not.


This said, our ongoing existence does not seem ridiculously absurd. There are rational and believable reasons that account for our ongoing existence, namely self-preservation and a rigid safety-check system that has prevented a nuclear accident from happening.

But will the same thing be said a few years from now if the Hadron Collider keeps shutting down? What will happen to our sense of reality if stranger and stranger things start to intervene?

And what about the more distant future when we have even more apocalyptic devices, including molecular assembling nanotechnology and advanced biotechnologies (not to mention artificial superintelligence)? It's been said that we are unlikely to survive the 21st Century on account of these pending technologies. But given that there are some probability trees that require our ongoing existence, what kind of future modes will that entail? Will it make sense, or will the succession of improbably survivable events result in a completely surreal existence? Or will our ongoing presence seem rational in the face of a radically altered existence mode -- like totalitarian repression or the onset of an all-controlling artificial superintelligence?

Hopefully I don't need to remind my readers that this is pure philosophical speculation. Metaphysics is often fun (or disturbing as in this case), but it is no substitute for science. I think we should think about these possibilities, but not to the point where it impacts on our daily life and sense of reality.

But I'm sure we'll all want to keep a close eye on that rather interesting particle accelerator in Switzerland.

* [Bl.] "Like they do on the Discovery Channel".

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Re:Giant Particle Collider Struggles
« Reply #3 on: 2010-04-06 07:33:29 »
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[Blunderov]The Fairy-cake Militia strikes again...

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49305387,00.htm

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future
By Nick Hide on 01 April 2010, 10:33am

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a former CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

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Re:Giant Particle Collider Struggles
« Reply #4 on: 2010-04-13 05:36:33 »
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[Blunderov] We willan-on-take you now to our Scientific  Correspondent, Dr. Dan Streetmentioner, in Switzerland and some late breaking haventa forewhen presooning news from CERN. Dr., are you mayan arivan on-when?


www.dailygalaxy.com


April 13, 2010
"Man from the Future" Arrested At CERN's LHC Escaped Custody -True Identity Discovered"

Last week The Daily Galaxy did a post about a would-be saboteur arrested on April 1 at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland who made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Several of the Galaxy's readers took us to task for falling hopelessly for what appeared on the surface to be an April's Fool Joke.


But our Euro-based editor suspected that the so-called "April Fool's" timing was a cover, a clever ruse, indeed, a red herring planted by CERN authorities -stung by the recent bad press about the LHC creating incipient black holes that could destroy the planet- to cloak a much bigger and more terrifying story.


We also know that CERN authorities were upset last year when the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery (more on this later).

So we dug deeper, ignoring that popular canard that when you find yourself in a hole, to stop digging.

Here's what our man in Geneva, Hugh McCleod, unearthed (in a manner of speaking) from several top-ranking CERN sources who insisted on anonymity.

First, insisting that his name was Eloi Cole, the strangely dressed young man wearing a florescent bow tie told authorities that he had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world . Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. Authorities reported that he would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from." He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender. The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier that week, a milestone Mr Cole admitted he was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines -a beverage many of CERN's more brilliant physicists believe (as does the American politician, Sarah Palin and pundit, Glenn Beck) helps fuel their brain power and insights into the quantum world. (We'll elaborate on the Mountain Dew connection later in the story).

Under intensive interrogation Cole told CERN investigators that "All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world" and eventually admitted that his real name was not Eloi Cole, but rather, Arthur Dent. His identity was subsequently confirmed by British physicist and rock star, Brian Cox, employed at CERN who recognized the above quote as a seminal ID marker from the 1970s bestseller, The Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy.

Following his initial interrogation, The Daily Galaxy learned that Mr Cole/Dent was taken to a "secure" mental health facility in Geneva, but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, we learned, "but not that bothered." We suspect they should be. Here's why:

Dent (aka Cole) was observed, McLeod learned from an elderly custodian, to have been assisted in his escape from the CERN detention center by a tall distracted visitor, an out of work actor claiming to be Dent's friend who signed the daily register with the initials "FP."

The physicist/Bono wannabe Cox told authorities that the initials might belong to a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction character named Ford Prefect. This friend, who told a receptionist that he was delivering a towel to Dent/Cole prior to their rushed escape, left behind, we learned, a severely dog-eared copy of a popular biography, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. We are unsure at the moment of how this might relate to unfolding events.

The delivery of the towel confirms in our opinion the re-emergence on Planet Earth of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect. The towels we know from our readings of the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy give the pair extraordinary powers: "A towel," it says, "is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough."

The Daily Galaxy, textual experts in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also know that if the text is to be taken as gospel, which we believe it should be, that both Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have made several past appearances throughout Earth's history via worm holes or other currently unknown wrinkles in the space-time continuum.

We also believe that Eloi Cole/Dent's obsession with Mountain Dew Code Red combined with Dent and FP's possession of towels, points to a theory that has meaningful and perhaps dire implications for Earth.

The Mountain Dew formula was invented in Lumberton, North Carolina by a man named William H. Jones. This William H. Jones, we have learned, was born and raised in Dulce, New Mexico, the alleged site of Dulce Base, the name for an alleged secret underground facility under the Archuleta Mesa. The base is claimed to be a multi-leveled "genetics lab" in which both humans and extraterrestrial beings cooperatively conduct experiments.

Hugh McLeod and The Daily Galaxy investigative team were contacted by unnamed sources to set up a series of follow up interviews with the mysterious "FP" and Arthur Dent (aka Cole) at an undisclosed secret location in Chile's Patagonia.

These odd series of events have led us to conclude that the original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy  by deceased (perhaps) Douglas Adams may have been not about Earth, but was actually a vivid message to us about the fate of Earth's twin in our adjacent parallel universe or brane -a theory reinforced by recent advances in cosmology proposed by physicists such as Neil Turok and Lee Smolin.

Hugh McLeod's upcoming rendezvous with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect later this week should prove momentous, if not historic. We expect we'll discover a not mostly harmless link between the hidden symbolism of Mountain Dew Code Red and the recent earthquake in Haiti and Indonesia, massive volcanic eruptions in Iceland and Chile, the mining disasters in China and West Virginia, and Newt Gingrich's decision to run for president in 2012.

This is the second installment of a Daily Galaxy SciFi investigative series. Reader leads, videos, images, and alternative theories and characters are welcomed and will be incorporated and posted in upcoming installments.

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Walter Watts
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Re:Giant Particle Collider Struggles
« Reply #5 on: 2010-04-13 20:34:21 »
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2010-04-13 05:36:33   

[Blunderov] We willan-on-take you now to our Scientific  Correspondent, Dr. Dan Streetmentioner, in Switzerland and some late breaking haventa forewhen presooning news from CERN. Dr., are you mayan arivan on-when?

<snip>

Hugh McLeod's upcoming rendezvous with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect later this week should prove momentous, if not historic. We expect we'll discover a not mostly harmless link between the hidden symbolism of Mountain Dew Code Red and the recent earthquake in Haiti and Indonesia, massive volcanic eruptions in Iceland and Chile, the mining disasters in China and West Virginia, and Newt Gingrich's decision to run for president in 2012.

<snip>




Walter worries that the upcoming meeting between Hugh, Arthur and Ford will somehow put a cosmologically fatal prick in the fabric of spacetime!

Quickly my dear Watson, STOP THAT PRICK!


Walter
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