Large Hadron Collider Struggling 371
Writing in the NY Times, Dennis Overbye covers the birthing pangs and the prospects for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (which we have discussed numerous times). "The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. [And] 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 [Fermilab's Tevatron] across the ocean. ... 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... 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 [of 7 TeV]. Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 [TeV]. '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."
anything worth doing (Score:5, Insightful)
is also usually hard to do
the setbacks are part and parcel of such a complicated effort
keep up the hard work, you are broadening mankind's knowledge, the expense and the hard work are as valid an endeavour as any other that can be proposed
Did anyone else think... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that's what happen when you hire the low bidder?
Re:anything worth doing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All (Score:2, Insightful)
PS: for the humor impaired: This is a joke.
Perhaps; but for the rest of us it isn't.
it's the space-time continuum messing with them. (Score:2, Insightful)
1. once an effective way to control time travel is discovered, said method will be able to exist at all times.
2. no method has yet been discovered.
therefore,
3. the method cannot be discovered.
and finally,
4. any device which will allow its discovery cannot ever be operational.
it's in the manual, dummies.
Re:Conspiracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't Settle (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they don't settle for running at a lower energy just to avoid criticism about the start date. There is too much potential for what we could discover using the collider's full capacity.
If it is at all feasible to get this running at or near 100%, it's worth it to put in the time now to fix it. I'd rather wait another year now, then wait 30+ years for the next accelerator to be built.
Re:When the world is running down, you make the .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Did anyone else think... (Score:5, Insightful)
Temporarily Lower Energy (Score:5, Insightful)
However, That being said it was never really the case that would would turn the machine on and the Higgs would magically pop out of the ether for all to see. The most likely scenario is a low mass Higgs which decays to b-quarks. Unfortunately the LHC will be EXTREMELY good at producing b quarks from known physic processes (there is even a entire experiment devoted to studying them - LHCb). The result is that a lot of hard, painstaking work will be needed before we can spot the b quarks from a Higgs from background "ordinary" b quarks. Of course there is still a chance that the Higgs might have enough mass to decay to two Z bosons which would be very easy to see early on but, if the Standard Model Higgs exists, the chance looks slim.
5000 bad joints != cutting edge, It's ineptitude (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd give them the "cutting edge" argument if the physics didn't turn out as expected, but bad joints... give me a break.
So much for swiss workmanship.
Re:Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
CERN does not have a majority of these under their belt. It might be a difference in how they are managed. Perhaps Fermilab has a better hierarchy, better safety rules and prioritizes work more efficiently. Maybe they actually triple check each wire before they press the On button and CERN cuts corners. This is all supposition, but reality is a harsh mistress and it is obvious they're doing something wrong.
Clearly you must me be a theoretical physicist, as opposed to a experimentalist, because that explanation was really complicated and stuff, although it did lack the required theoretical physicist collection of complicated equations.
The experimentalist physicist explanation is, as usual, much simpler, the LHC has more recent news reports about failures than the Tevatron, because the LHC was first run in late 2008, and the tevatron was completed in 1983, somewhat before the birth of a typical grad student, so all the news reports about tevatron teething problems were more than a quarter century ago, and long forgotten.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevatron [wikipedia.org]
Re:When the world is running down, you make the .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors are extremely rare around here.
It's probably because the "non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors" were constantly underbid and thus driven out of business by people that would rather save a buck than have it done right.
remember the hubble (Score:4, Insightful)
the LHC could still be awesome.
Project Management Failure (Score:3, Insightful)
CERN management did not want to undertake any significant low power testing and consequently suffered a major failure. In addition, as it now seems clear, the overall oversight left something to be desired. I'm not saying people did not work very hard but it is difficult to believe corners were not cut in a race to get running before the Tevatron could start accumulating enough statistics to allow them to spot and claim the Higgs (though still not likely at the 5 sigma level.)
At times I mourn the SSC in Texas (Score:4, Insightful)
If we ever are to control things like gravity and other exotic properties of spacetime it will be with insight and knowledge gained through particle physics theory and experimentation. Sometimes I wonder what discoveries we turned our backs on by cancelling the Superconducting Supercollider that was to be built in Texas. It was cancelled in 1993 in the face of cost overruns. When you look at the history of that project, however, it's clear that it NEEDED to be cancelled. It had become a black hole for money because of design and construction cost overruns. It was more out of control than any strange particles it might have produced. I hope the Large Hadron Collider doesn't suffer the same fate, but it doesn't bode well for the future when the overall design and QC on the manufactured components are now being called into question. Sad. When ambitious projects such as these founder it's usually their own fault.
Re:Lazy Europeans (Score:2, Insightful)
As opposed to the US method of having it done by people who are generally overstressed, haven't gotten much sleep, and are worried about losing their medical insurance when they finish?
Re:5000 bad joints != cutting edge, It's ineptitud (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:remember the hubble (Score:2, Insightful)
The LHC will eventually get there, but to expect it to be Tevatron perfect on its first run is a bit of an over-reach.
Re:5000 bad joints != cutting edge, It's ineptitud (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh come on, It's getting that America is like the Jews of the turn of the century. If some worker or manager in Europe is lazy, incompetent, or simply makes an honest mistake (albeit 5000 honest mistakes is kind of a lot) is it really somehow the evil plotting American's fault? Give us all a break. It's called taking personal responsibility for your actions.
Re:it's the space-time continuum messing with them (Score:1, Insightful)
What about a time machine which cannot go back in time any farther than the moment of it's invention?