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
Re:anything worth doing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is this really cutting-edge technology, or just a bigger circle?
From an engineering standpoint, scalability is always a cutting-edge type of problem. No different than .... IT stuff.
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:5000 bad joints != cutting edge, It's ineptitud (Score:5, Interesting)
I was struck by the craftsmanship and pride that went into trivial things in Germany. For instance, the asphalt on the road doesn't simply get slopped over the concrete curb like in the US... they left a perfect little gap, rarely getting any asphalt at all on the concrete. Then, the tar guy would seal the gap, carefully getting tar only into the gap and very little, if any, on the curb. In the US, they ladle it out without any concern whatsoever about aesthetics.
Of course it was charming, but completely pointless. Nevertheless, it's good to see people take such pride in their craft, and it makes me feel pretty good about other German products.
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I was struck by the craftsmanship and pride that went into trivial things in Germany. For instance, the asphalt on the road doesn't simply get slopped over the concrete curb like in the US... they left a perfect little gap, rarely getting any asphalt at all on the concrete. Then, the tar guy would seal the gap, carefully getting tar only into the gap and very little, if any, on the curb. In the US, they ladle it out without any concern whatsoever about aesthetics.
Interestingly enough that's part of the reason why they lost the war. The typical German design for equipment was overly-engineered, overly-complicated and overly-expensive. Compare their armored vehicle designs to those of the Americans and Soviets. They were arguably more advanced but they pushed the engineering technology of the day to the point that they were more prone to breakdown, harder to maintain and harder to mass produce.
The Sherman wasn't a match for most German tanks one-on-one but that di
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Re:5000 bad joints != cutting edge, It's ineptitud (Score:4, Interesting)
The implication of that is that you create __TWO__ huge bureaucracies, one in industry, to provide compliance data, and another, in government, to process it. THAT is why the US healthcare system sucks.
This leads to BIG GOVERNMENT, which is already hopelessly corrupt, and for which there is no real check since the pols and media can always fix the result and there is no real limit to government power.
In contrast, the idea of The Good Swiss, who does his job, properly, the first time, on his own, is still strong here. It is like that because people think that is (C) The Right Thing To Do.
One, very obvious, consequence is TAX, in Kanton Zuerich we pay ~ 13% employment tax and 7.6% sales tax, most Kantons are cheaper.
One pass, haul ass, do it RIGHT the first time (a) works, (b) explains the Swiss attitude to quality.
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Plus you need a connection that can function down at liquid helium temperatures but doesn't get destroyed when it is brought to room temperature for maintenance. Add to that the massive amount of power going through these connections and you have a very severe environment you have to deal with.
By the way, when I did some work with electrical connections at liquid helium temps we used indium based solder.
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The connections are between copper bus bars. Superconducting material is typically clad in copper and it's the copper that gets soldered together. The joints need to have a resistance of less than 25 nano-Ohms, which seems to be the difficult part.
http://gordonwatts.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/energy-vs-power-vs-heat-vs-oh-no/ [wordpress.com]
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But the LHC uses helium, so that problem should be solved.
Re:anything worth doing (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the reduced energy: Re, the Higgs Boson (that's the one that everybody talks about): Is that still the one sure thing that this machine will sort out? If the Higgs exists, will they still see it right away, and if it doesn't, will the scientists still finally say, "There is no Higgs, we need new physics to account for why; things have mass, something in our standard model went awry"?
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Love the reference. I think I had her singing it in my head as I read it just now.
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.
Re:anything worth doing (Score:5, Funny)
Given the reduced energy: Re, the Higgs Boson (that's the one that everybody talks about): Is that still the one sure thing that this machine will sort out? If the Higgs exists, will they still see it right away, and if it doesn't, will the scientists still finally say, "There is no Higgs, we need new physics to account for why; things have mass, something in our standard model went awry"?
No, it won't. Actually God keeps breaking the LHC. You didn't think (s)he'd let a bunch of monkeys have h(er/is) particle do you?
Re:anything worth doing (Score:5, Funny)
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Basically they are never going to see a higgs boson, they are going to look at all the stuff that flies out of these collisions and trace back each bit and try to figure out where what its lifecycle was. When you find something that isn't explained by known particles and fits the model of the higgs boson you can statistically believe it exists.
If the Higgs does exist it you ma
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is also usually hard to do
the setbacks are part and parcel of such a complicated effort
True. But could there be additional complications? To compare it to another grandiose project, the Three Gorges Dam. For starters, it's a prestige project so the Party cannot allow it to fail without losing much face. Second, if there are any technical shortcomings in the design, they will be covered up due to the pressure from on-high. Third, there's theft by contractors in the substitution of inferior materials, allegations of defective workmanship, and so forth. And again, these issues would be covered u
invalid analogy (Score:2)
aside from huge expense and huge technical complication, the negatives of the three gorges dam are completely unlike the negatives of the large... hardon
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Just visiting here from 4chan? How's summer break?
With a < 7 digit user id number, I'll tend to conclude otherwise.
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All (Score:5, Funny)
High school physics students will tell you that physics experiments are doomed from the start.
If it smells, it's Chemistry.
If it squirms, it's Biology.
If it doesn't work, it's Physics.
Just how they managed to suck billions of dollars from governments is beyond me, unless political "science" isn't really a science at all!
PS: for the humor impaired: This is a joke.
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PS: for the humor impaired: This is a joke.
Perhaps; but for the rest of us it isn't.
Re:All (Score:5, Funny)
Just how they managed to suck billions of dollars from governments is beyond me
Well, you could say the LHC working better than intended. Instead of making a black hole, it became one.
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Did anyone else think... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that's what happen when you hire the low bidder?
Somebody is very touchy today (Score:2, Troll)
Seriously, I'm a troll?
This is some pretty difficult, complex work. As a sibling post pointed out, there are very highly stressed systems. Whoever bid this - and, no, I don't know anything about how it was bid but I have my suspicions - probably didn't decide to go hire a crack team of the best assemblers in Europe. They figured their standard labor for guys (and gals) who wire up buildings, telecom, and other lab environments. I work with these types of people sometimes, and they're not always focused on t
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Re:Did anyone else think... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did anyone else think... (Score:4, Funny)
Now I just have a picture in my head of the whole thing not working because somebody tripped over the cable connecting the whole thing to the standard wall outlet..
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And then hire the cheapest technician you can find to make that solder joint. Good solder work is hard, and while just about any idiot with a solder iron can glob a few wires together (as I have proved on occasion), it takes someone really good at it to make a connection wh
Large Hadron Collider Struggling (Score:5, Funny)
Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone ever think that Fermilab is paying Cern employees to sabotage their collider? Each setback adds 6-8 months to the life of Fermilab...
Re:Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LHC_quadrupole_magnets.jpg [wikipedia.org]
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Ha!
And not only have you proven Fermilab is out to sabotage the LHC, you've also proven that Fermilab plays Horde.
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Re:Conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
Says the man whose .sig links to his Fermilab profile page! We're onto you!
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And don't forget the first failure ocurred because of a design fault on one of the Fermilab-built magnets. I'm with you on this one, those sneaky physicists.
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Yeah, I know it's a tad blame the victim like, but it seems to me that this is an EU sort of problem.
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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]
2012 (Score:5, Funny)
FTFA:
"scientists say it could be years, if ever, before the collider runs at full strength"
Looking more and more likely that a Dec 2012 full-power test could be on the cards.
Ah, memories (Score:4, Funny)
There was a character running around named: "Drphillip" and I thought to myself, "huh, interesting name he has." And then all of a sudden, he started shouting in town:
"OH NOES. teh large hardon collider is turning onz0rz!!!"
I was wondering why the world hadn't imploded... (Score:2)
Okay, back to work. Maybe a Vogon constructor fleet will get here first.
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Don't worry, the Vogons will not be here until 2012.
You know that famous Maya calendar? Well, actually it's the timing diagram for the final phase of Earth's computer program.
Give them time... (Score:5, Funny)
Lazy Europeans (Score:5, Funny)
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But if we don't ever get it up and running, how would we ever kill the Pope?
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Well, there's the difference between the US and the EU. Do you want it done on time, or do you want it done correctly? (yes, I know you were joking, but then so am I) ^_^
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Sensible Europeans (Score:2)
Re:Lazy Europeans (Score:5, Informative)
oh the humanity (Score:2)
I don't blame it. If I were a Large Hadron Collider, I would probably struggle too.
WTF??? (Score:5, Funny)
After I invested my entire 401(k) in crowbars???
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:it's the space-time continuum messing with them (Score:3, Funny)
1. once an effective way to control time travel is discovered, said method will be able to exist at all times.
CITATION NEEDED
Parallel universes (Score:2)
Not in all the parallel universes [wikipedia.org]. If you travel back in time and change one fact in the past, you'll create another universe where that event actually happened.
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If the time travel method needs some pre-existing infrastructure
Like a really hot cup of tea ?
When the world is running down, you make the ... (Score:2, Offtopic)
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That's interesting. Here in Arizona, it's a little different. Most of the contractors like you mention are either illegals, or meth-heads. The meth-heads can't return phone calls, can't show up on time, are flaky and unreliable. The illegals are cheap, but frequently don't know what the hell they're doing and do substandard work as a result. Non-illegal, non-meth-head, reliable and competent contractors are extremely rare around here.
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No, here the non-illegals are the ones who are flaky and unreliable. I'm pretty sure most of them are on meth. You wonder what they do to earn money since they can't be bothered to return phone calls? I imagine meth has something to do with it.
The illegals, on the other hand, are actually very reliable and punctual. They show up early in the morning when they're supposed to. They really make the "licensed contractors" look bad. For things they're good at, they generally do a decent to good job. But t
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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.
LHC != Installing a Sink (Score:5, Interesting)
... best of what's still around. I've noticed a distinct decline in the quality of professional services in the last decade.
Unrelated. The LHC failures have all been caused by unforeseen consequences of standard techniques applied in completely unique situations or new techniques developed to suit the situation. When you are doing something that has literally never, ever been done before things like this are common. Prior experience can only take you so far after that you are learning how to do the thing because you are the first person to ever do it. This is a far cry from installing a sink or rewiring a house which has been done thousands of times before and for which the ways in which it can fail are well known and can be avoided.
The people involved in the work are not just a few plumbers and electricians that were called up from the local yellow pages (or Pages Jaunes at CERN) but are either CERN employees or employers of contractors. My experience has been that while they are extremely "union" orientated (they are very particular about their breaks, starting/stopping work etc) they are also extremely professional to the point where they have come and shown be the right way to do something so it did not make their work look unprofessional!
Re:LHC != Installing a Sink (Score:5, Funny)
"unforseen consequences"
Great. Now I _AM_ going to stock up on crowbars.
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.
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The cost/benefit curve has a very clear kink in it.
Well then figure out what its kink is, and hire it an open-minded hooker or something to straighten it out. Geeze, do I have to think of everything?
Large Hadron Collider and Tevatron (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like they need to get the Milliard Gargantubrain or the Googleplex Star Thinker working on a solution, and fast!
physics equivalent of International Space Station? (Score:2)
I'm glad I'm an atheist... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm glad I'm an atheist... (Score:5, Funny)
time travelers from future stalling it (Score:2)
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VERY LARGE test bed? (Score:2)
BUT chip makers, SSD hard drive makers [slashdot.org], space telescope mirror makers and rocket engine companies can have test runs in the zillions... and they still fail. Either catastrophically, or just bad math answers
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Re:VERY LARGE test bed? (Score:4, Funny)
Nonsense. Mathematics isn't a science!
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I have long wondered how it is that physicists can create ONE monstrous detector, and be completely certain that it works within spec... and within the design precisoin and accuracy.
Its not one detector, the whole point is its a zillion detectors operating in parallel, so you just calibrate them all relative to each other...
Check out the specs on just the tracker layer of the CMS detector... essentially a 76 megapixel ultra high speed movie camera. I suspect, if one channel fails, thats considered OK, they'll work around it. Or consider the calorimeter layer, which is built out of 61200 crystals, as long as 60K or so of them are working in spec, that's probably good enough for good d
Clever Tevatron People (Score:3, Funny)
Damn those cold solder joints... (Score:4, Funny)
I knew I should have read my copy of Forrest Mims's "Getting Started in Electronics" more carefully before working on the Large Hadron Collider!
All part of the plan (Score:5, Funny)
"We start with a 50 Euro note and a 50 USD note," Dr. Grotzy explained. "We accelerate them to near the speed of light- interesting things can happen when the velocity of money gets this high. When the beams of Euros and USDs collide - thousands of notes per minute- we get some interesting reactions.
"This is a photograph of one such collision- an annihilation as you can see," Grotzy said, pointing at the annotated diagram. "The buck stops here."
"Out of it you can see these spiraling particles. Given the $50 is one of the ingredient particles, we call this 'Grant money going down the drain'.
"The experiment is actually quite easy to run. If the beams start to wane you just go up to the generator and throw more money at it.
"To keep busy we'll be adding more projects. With with a little more funding from the Brits, we can test out a heating system powered by burning cash. Convert a pound's mass into energy.
"Some people are concerned this collider will produce economic black holes that will destroy the worldwide economy. I can assure you this is nothing but uninformed rumor.
remember the hubble (Score:4, Insightful)
the LHC could still be awesome.
It's proof! (Score:5, Funny)
It takes too long (Score:3, Funny)
My Hadron is fading away...
4 [TeV] should be enough (Score:3, Funny)
I have a family reunion in december I need to get out of, and a rogue singularity orbiting the core of the earth is a nice excuse not to go.
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.
Not quite (Score:4, Interesting)
So basically this is a fluff piece that takes various peoples statements out of context and tries to promote a problem that CERN itself does not support. Yes it's late, yes there are issues, but the title LHC struggles is hardly warranted.
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Re:Magnets (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, you can store energy in strained magnetic fields -- so-called "spin batteries" [sciencedaily.com]. But it's poor energy density. Magnetic "batteries" are still trying to get up to the energy density of supercapacitors, which are in turn still trying to get up to the density of lead-acid batteries, which have been left in the dust by techs like lithium ion batteries. But it's a very new tech, so we'll have to see where it goes.
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So I says, "Super collider? I just met her!" And then they built the super collider. Thank you, you've been a great audience.
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Why did I read the title 'Large Hardon Collider Struggling'? Christ, I must be at home here.
Hardon Collider (Score:5, Funny)