5284503
story
Comments: 224 +- Science: Vacuum Leaks Lead To Another LHC Delay on Wednesday July 22 2009, @09:54AM
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicscience.gif); width:62px; height:75px;
science
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicnews.gif); width:60px; height:66px;
news
suraj.sun tips this story at ZDNet about a new problem with the LHC. Quoting:
"The restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been pushed back further, following the discovery of vacuum leaks in two sectors of the experiment. The world's largest particle collider is now unlikely to restart before mid-November, according to a CERN press statement. The project had been expected to start again in October. To repair the leaks, which are from the helium circuit into the insulating vacuum, sectors 8-1 and 2-3 will have to be warmed from 80K to room temperature. Adjacent sub-sectors will act as 'floats,' while the remainder of the surrounding sectors will be kept at 80K, CERN said in the statement. The repair work will not have an impact on the vacuum in the beam pipe. CERN has pushed back the restart a number of times, as repair work has continued. To begin with, scientists said the LHC experiment would restart in April 2009. In May, CERN [said] that the restarted experiment could run through the winter to make up some of the lost time."
Related Stories
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely
rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.
ZOMG, (Score:5, Funny)
History might not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again.
The story or the development process?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe history is repeating itself, if the first test they did caused some sort of temporal loop at the atomic level and that's what's been causing all the subsequent problems.
OK (Score:4, Funny)
I want to know where they hid the working LHC at.
Parent
Re:ZOMG, (Score:4, Insightful)
"This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again."
Hopefully Hubble. Plagued up front, hugely successful later on.
Parent
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not complaining about the work (it's sorta like having an irritating kid - no matter what, it's still your kid
Since I feel like venting (no pun intended
The bottom line is that finding a small leak* in a man-sized chamber is difficult to begin with. Imagine how insanely difficult it would be to do this in the frakking LHC! And there, since they deal with subatomic particles, they need even better vacua than I do. Gawd I'm glad I'm not the guy in charge of finding leaks - I'd probably start gibbering and running around in little circles if I had to deal with it
____________________
*Here, small usually means somewhere around 1E-9 std.cc/s - at this rate, it would take more than 25 thousand years for a vacuum chamber the size of a beer stein to fill up due to air bleeding in from the outside. Much more than that actually since the rate would go down when the pressure difference decreases but this will do for now. And yet, such small leak rates can wreak havoc in delicate experiments (for instance, in a recent one where I was trying to measure the flow conductance of nanoholes - very tiny flows and leaks can screw things to hell).
Parent
*sigh* (Score:5, Interesting)
At least... (Score:4, Funny)
...the delay will mean the world lives on for 2 more months ;=)
;)
Ofcourse, A(H1N1)v will prevent the startup alltogether, as key personnel falls sick at the critical time
Then again, the sudden reappearance of sunspots on the sun probably means the super nova will come before even that happens
Oh no, I forgot to take my pills !
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Argh."
Pirates! I knew it!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You've already created a black hole though. It sucks in tax money which then promptly disappears, and nothing ever comes out of it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe LHC should merge with ISS then. At least the BH would orbit the Earth a while, giving us a little time to ... uh ... pray?
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Funny)
Actually that's not a bad idea, no problem of 'vacuum leaks' up there, and the black hole could suck up all the space junk in orbit! Great idea!
Now off to patent it... :)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ye be a pirate, then? Are you trying to start an ARGHument?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It will take 3 years to come back online (Score:5, Funny)
I predict the collider turns on in 2012.
Damn you Nature! (Score:3, Funny)
Why oh why must you abhor a vacuum???
Vacuum Leaks... (Score:4, Funny)
... soon they won't be able to stop them. It will be a hazardous vacuum spill, endangering all the surroundings of the LHC!!
Re:Vacuum Leaks... (Score:5, Funny)
Vaccuum leaks are one of those under-appreciated dangers, along with dry spills, hot freezes, and explosions of calm.
Parent
Vacuum leaks are bad (Score:5, Funny)
I had a vacuum leak once and in less than 5 seconds my house, instead of just smelling like dog hair smelled like stale month old dog hair in a vacuum bag. I also learned to empty the bag more often.
Over or Under June 2010 - taking bets (Score:2)
A vacuum leak causing delays? (Score:3, Funny)
The delay is not big for such an experiment... (Score:4, Insightful)
For an experiment of such magnitude, a delay of a few years is not very important...it's way more important to make the experiment in a good way, above anything else.
Reminds me of that God joke... (Score:4, Funny)
To paraphrase, this guy is in the middle of a flooding city. He repeatedly refuses attempts of others to rescue him, claiming God will save him. He drowns, winds up in Heaven, and asks God why he didn't save him. "I sent you a two boats and a helicopter..."
So I can see God now using his mighty and flagellant tendrils to tinker with the LHC's inner workings and yet we still press on, thwarting his every attempt to save the planet Earth and the life he created. I'm certain this will all end with a, "Okay, power it up!", followed by a surprisingly brief sucking sound as the world is drawn into a black hole of its own making.
I can just see the look on his face...
The misery of the LHC (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about what it takes to work on that thing. It's in a long underground tunnel of rather small diameter for what's in there. Fixing stuff in place is difficult and hazardous. Removing a magnet involves disconnecting everything (a big deal; some of the connections are welded and superconducting), lifting the magnet onto a narrow carrier that runs on the walkway (no idea how that's actually done) and inching the carrier for kilometers to one of the two big vertical shafts where it can be hoisted out vertically. As an underground maintenance job, this is not fun.
The canceled American SSC was designed with a larger tunnel diameter. The LHC was designed with the assumption that not much magnet maintenance would be required, which cut costs but turned out to be a bad assumption.
Re:Worrisome (Score:5, Insightful)
What's worrisome is that these same scientists who can't seem to build this thing without some fatal flaw are the same scientists telling us there's nothing to worry about when they create a black hole.
Sorry if I'm missing intended humor in your post but that just doesn't make any sense.
These are construction flaws. The fact that the black holes they may be able to create are not a threat has nothing to do with any sort of special containment. It's simply that the size and level of energy is no where near enough to last even nanoseconds.
The ignorance about the dangers of particle accelerators is disconcerting.
By the way, if you want a good look at modern physics, read Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos". Really good read.
Parent
Re:Worrisome (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide [wikipedia.org]
I admit it's silly, but I can't shut up the thought in the back of my head that maybe the earth only continues to exist in branches where the start up of the LHC is delayed.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're sort of incorrect here. Yes, we built the LHC to probe a new energy regime. However, much MUCH higher energy collisions occur in the atmosphere every day. If we could place multimillion dollar particle detectors like ATLAS and CMS in the atmosphere, we would.
So you could say that we know what definitely will not happen; the world will not be destroyed. I have proof: we're here today to discuss the subject. Since the Earth has been around for some billions of years and these types of events are f
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They're attempting to create black holes. There aren't "controlled circumstances" for that outside of "We'll keep it really cold and we'll only make little ones."
No, they're not. And "Controlled" means an environment where they know that the only collisions are the one they create, and where the impact occurs in a vacuum surrounded by large amounts of highly sensitive detectors. The "uncontrolled" version happens constantly, yet here we are. Hard to comprehend, I know, but not surprising for someone who
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The scientists blame the engineers. But let's see who gets "credit" for the Galactic Darwin Award.
Re:Worrisome (Score:4, Insightful)
What's worrisome is that these same scientists who can't seem to build this thing without some fatal flaw are the same scientists telling us there's nothing to worry about when they create a black hole.
No, what's worrisome is that the murderous idiocy of self-serving show-offs is so persistent.
How many people do you have to kill before you'll stop promulgating this stuff?
An emotionally unstable teenage girl in India killed herself because she was so terrified that the world was going to end when the LHC turned on. I assume you're extremely pleased with that outcome, as it is the only concrete effect that the efforts of people like you to propagate this vicious nonsense has had.
Proud of yourself?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Are you that badly informed, or just that unfunny?
There are giant amounts of particles with way higher speeds colliding with our atmosphere all the time, creating the same type of black holes.
The type that is apparently so unstable, that all those particles did not create one single black hole that are us all.
Go figure.
And try to not get your "knowledge" from the loudest and dumbest of all people.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
This is the USA that you're talking about, right? To the extent this physics knowledge is in the Bible, such efforts are unnecessary expenses. To the extent the knowledge is not in the Bible, such efforts are forbidden.
It's only a setback for lab technicians (Score:3, Funny)
Real physicists have already worked out the equations and have anticipated the results of the experiments at CERN.
Experimental lab techs are the ones who are having setbacks here.
Don't worry your little monkey brain too much. Humans are progressing just fine.
Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
It's now what, a year behind the schedule they'd set after the explosion? CERN is looking worse and worse.
Oh, come on, man, it's not CERN's fault that the anthropic principle limits us to observing universes that haven't ended our existence by creating black holes in a hadron collider!
Parent
No (Score:3, Informative)
The explosion happened last September, so it can't be a year behind the new schedule; it hasn't even been a year since the explosion! The schedule set after the explosion was to run again the following September, so it's now predicted to be 2 months behind that schedule
And it's really not too bad, since the SSC was far more overbudget than the LHC has ever been and was being footed solely by the US (whereas the LHC is international). And we're not really losing anything from even a one-year delay. Also,
Re:Is that first thing we need ? (Score:5, Informative)
Particle interactions with more energy than LHC can produce happen in the Earth's atmosphere every day. But outside of a carefully controlled environment with extensive sensor equipment, they can't be studied. The LHC is not about creating energies never before seen on Earth-- it won't do that. It's about doing so in an extremely controlled manner than can be measured and investigated.
Parent
Re:Is that first thing we need ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?
That's because of a number of factors.
If present science are so sure about all possible consequences of creating black holes using Large Hadron Collider or any collider that size, than why any expirements needed ?
Because for a hypothesis to become a theory, it must be tested. That's how science works.
How people that are not "against science" can guarantee any HollyDolly mother, that she's childs are in safe place
There is no such thing as absolute safety. Your "1%" chance enormously overestimates the chances of a black hole swallowing the earth. We're not talking about a pea sized black hole (which would have a mass as great as a mountain), but an infinitessimal mass measuring the same as a few atoms, at most.
Information can enter black hole but can't escape.
See, the problem is calling these tiny singularities "black holes". Wikipedia's definition of "black holes" excludes these things. There is a vast difference between a gnat and an elephant, even though both are animals. There's no magic about black holes swallowing light; in space an object must have enough mass to collapse on itself to create a black hole, if I remember correctly it's about the mass of a thousand suns.
You have far more dangerous things to worry about, driving your kids to the store for instance.
Further reading about black holes. [wikipedia.org] Further reading about the LHC. [wikipedia.org] Further reading about Micro black holes [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why nobody was able to find any alien civilizations yet ?
Prime Directive
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I've never understood about this explanation is that it doesn't explain why it's always the anti-particle that falls into the black hole. Wouldn't chance dictate that half the time it will be the particle, causing the black hole to take on the extra mass?
(I'm sure the answer to this question is somehow related to a similar question that I've always had... and that is: why is the universe composed almost entirely out of matter rather than being a mix? and why aren't there any anti-matter black ho
Re: (Score:2)
Once it 'works' . . . my guess is something will go wrong with the measuring instruments. There's no reason to think that the base functionality is the only thing flawed. It'll be great to finally have particles fire around the track, collide, and have bad data.
Cutting-edge science uses cutting-edge technology.
Of course it breaks !
But in a few decades these technologies might be ready for industrial uses.
Re:Bit off more than they could chew (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why movies have producers. It's to keep the artists in check. Someone should have kept the brains in check when they designed this thing. Instead of being smaller and useful, it's just a gigantic waste of money -- the Waterworld of the scientific community.
Yes, and we should dismantle Hubble and replace it with an army of hobbyist astronomers with a 100$ telescope. They won't find anything new except maybe a few near-earth asteroids, certainly no exoplanets and all the other interesting stuff happening. Same with LHC, if you wanted any particle accelerator I think we had an electron one in high school science class. We could play with it forever but I doubt we'd ever get any more results on the standard model and the higgs particle. Experimental science of this kind is all about building the most sensitive equipment you can - it's complex, expensive, obsoleted by the next generation but it's the only way to do science and not guesswork.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, right now the tevatron [wikipedia.org] at Fermilab [wikipedia.org] is superior to the LHC, and it's half as big as your 12 km and most likely as complex as the LHC. It may in fact be years before the LHC comes on line, but I have no doubt that it will come on line.
The LHC will tell us things that the Tevatron can't when it does come on line. It will be well worth the wait.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No worries though, he has a crowbar [reddit.com] now.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
His comments and criticisms reveal only that he knows very little about particle physics. For instance,
"Obviously, a elementary particle has a predefined shape and size that cannot be adjusted and that leads to an issue with an efficient packing arrangement to create a micro-blackhole"
This makes no sense from any perspective.
His harshest criticism is that we're not certain what the equivalent cosmic ray energy would have to be in order to produce the same center of mass energy as the LHC. He's completely