Europe's LHC To Run At Half-Energy Through 2011 194
quaith writes "ScienceInsider reports that Europe's Large Hadron Collider will run at half its maximum energy through 2011 and likely not at all in 2012. The previous plan was to ramp it up to 70% of maximum energy this year. Under the new plan, the LHC will run at 7 trillion electron-volts through 2011. The LHC would then shut down for a year so workers could replace all of its 10,000 interconnects with redesigned ones allowing the LHC to run at its full 14 TeV capacity in 2013. The change raises hopes at the LHC's lower-energy rival, the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, of being extended through 2012 instead of being shut down next year. Fermilab researchers are hoping that their machine might collect enough data to beat the LHC to the discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle key to how physicists explain the origin of mass."
Half-measures (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Half-measures (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, we need to be fully afraid that it will destroy half the world. Hopefully the other half.
Re:Half-measures (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you get a Schrodinger's black hole - it may or may not be there until you open the lid.
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Maybe you get a Schrodinger's black hole - it may or may not be there until you open the lid.
No, no, no. It's both there AND not there until you open the lid.
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We saw this coming in 2028, and needed to have them shut this down so that they'd lose a year. This alters the timeline sufficiently. If all goes well, no other adjustments will need to be backdated until 2013. Where's Shroedinger's cat, by the way?
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Two words: spin-off. Let the new guys deal with it.
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no, it just means they'll be right on schedule for the end of the world in 2012 when they crank it up to full power.
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No, the black hole will only be half as big :)
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Where is Gordon Freeman when you need him?!?
Already on it (Score:2)
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/09/09/terrible-news-gordon-freeman-spotted-near-large-hadron-collider/ [joystiq.com]
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Nope, be fully afraid they'll create half a black-hole. But since 50% of black-hole mass won't actually be a black-hole, we'll probably survive.
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Re:Half-measures (Score:5, Funny)
the Source of all the risk (Score:5, Funny)
I'm scared for all the half-lives at risk.
But what about all the counter-strikes and the portals?
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Are you saying we may as well be left for dead?
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I was left for dead too :(
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So then we can be 3dB less afraid!
Where is the Outrage... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's no one's fault really. It's just the Higgs Boson once again [newscientist.com] making sure that cern never uncovers its Cthulhu like existence.
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I may not be a scientist, but shouldn't a design cover the requirements?
It is an unprecedented scientific experiment, not the some sort of business logic application coded in Java that you undoubtedly do for a living.
Yeeesh, cover the requirements indeed.
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think you misunderstand how larger government woks projects are run, and why.
Not if he's Chinese.
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:4, Funny)
At least its still spelled correctly, even if it is a grammatical abomination.
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Looks like a perfectly reasonable NP to me ([[government woks] projects]), so although you may have pragmatic problems it's no grammatical abomination. Your missing apostrophes in the follow-up post, turning two VPs into genitive pronouns, are the real grammatical issue (and even then don't obscure understanding).
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:5, Insightful)
The interconnects are rather complex superconducting devices, not simple electronic connections. It certainly would have been possible to design them with a higher safety factor, but that would have increased the cost. If that approach had been taken with all of the critical components for the machine, the overall cost would have been significantly higher. Unfortunately for a large cutting edge project on a tight budget, you need to take some technical risks. Over the next 10 years we will see if they put a reasonable safety factor on the overall design.
Pay Now or Pay Later (Score:3, Insightful)
It certainly would have been possible to design them with a higher safety factor, but that would have increased the cost...Unfortunately for a large cutting edge project on a tight budget, you need to take some technical risks.
I seem to have heard this argument before.
The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
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Governments work on a steady flow of funding. There is no way to deliver one thing in year one with ten years budget without making the guy who authorized it lose his job. Better to cut costs and use future budgets to fix the problem.
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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Or in this case the central banks who print money for the government all the time so that they can spend more than their budget would allow. And borrowing. Let's not forget that.
Sure, for a certain project you might not be able to overspend, but as a whole let's not pretend government budgets are fiscally responsible in any way.
Re:Pay Now or Pay Later (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to have heard this argument before.
The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
I seem to have heard this misconception before. The Apollo fire wasn't because of a cutting-edge project taking technical risks, or making a considered judgement to accept smaller safety margins in exchange for reduced costs.
Having a mixed-gas oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere in the Apollo capsule would have increased the internal capsule pressure in orbit, requiring a beefier structure and more weight. More dangerously, it would have required the development of suitable partial-pressure sensors for the precise measurement of oxygen levels within a mixed-gas environment. That would have constituted a technical risk. In contrast, the system used in the original Apollo design required only a simple pressure gauge to ensure sufficient oxygen for the crew.
Moreover, in orbit the Apollo capsule internal pressure would be only about 5 psi - about a third of an atmosphere. While that pressure of oxygen is sufficient to support combustion, it isn't dangerously high, and all of the materials used aboard Apollo were tested for fire safety under those conditions. The big problem was that on the launch pad, the capsule contained a full atmosphere of oxygen (the excess pressure would be bled off as the capsule ascended to orbit). Nobody thought to test under those conditions. Even then, there's at least some evidence to suggest that it was the astronauts' webbing the capsule with large amounts of Velcro that allowed the fire to spread so rapidly.
Finally, the earliest design for the Apollo capsule hatch opened outwards and was equipped with explosive bolts for rapid egress. It was at the insistence of astronaut Gus Grissom (who may have been the victim of premature triggering of such a system on his Mercury capsule) that the hatch be replaced with an inward-opening, 'plug' design that lacked explosive bolts.
Both previous manned U.S. space capsules (Mercury and Gemini) had used essentially identical pure oxygen atmospheres, without concern and without any problems. Did they get lucky? Absolutely, in retrospect. Should the Apollo engineers have recognized the dangers that their predecessors had overlooked? Probably. Was the fire the result of taking 'technical risks' on a 'cutting edge project'? Nope. They thought they were sticking with a simple system that had worked for years, and didn't want to asphyxiate an astronaut by fiddling with something reliable.
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Noted historian Wikipedia mentions a number of worries in the original design [wikipedia.org]. You are definitely correct about the oxygen, weight, etc. However, uninsulated wire and flammable materials were brought up by the astronauts before delivery. If only they'd been adequately listened to...
-l
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Yet, if you get it right in the first attempt but at a much higher cost, you get smacked around because obviously it was a waste of money. Just look at the Y2K bug.
Nothing bad happened, so obviously all the money spent to avoid all the bad things would have happened were badly spent.
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Compromise is critical part of engineering - one of the reasons that "no compromise engineering" adverts are so silly. You can always make something better if you are willing to spend more money. You can improve one parameter if you are willing to give up on another. For example airliners are designed with something like a 1.5X safety factor on strength (above maximum loads). If the safety factor was 2X, probably a couple of in-flight break-ups would have been avoided, but the overall cost of air travel wou
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I seem to have heard this argument before. The Apollo fire. The loss of the Challenger. Repairs to the Hubble.
The difference here is that they know what the current safe maximum is, so they'll operate it for a while, tear the thing down and replace them with interconnects with higher safe maximums, and start it up again. They are aware that the lower safety factor must also mean a lower-power experiement (not that putting 7 TeV of energy into a single proton is normally considered low power).
Re:Pay Now or Pay Later (Score:5, Informative)
Oh there's so much more. The sinking of Columbus' ship Santa María comes to mind, the death of Marie Curie by cancer, the risks Franklin took when proving lightning was electricity and the murder of William Bullock by his printing-machine. Here are some more: http://listverse.com/2008/12/14/10-inventors-killed-by-their-inventions/ [listverse.com]
The thing is, the greatest discoveries very often come at a great risk. The risk-averse culture than has steadily been introduced since, say, the 1970s probably greatly holds back mankinds progress. No longer are victims of cutting-edge technologic failures hero's, instead their designers are the victim of outrage and lawsuits. This makes me very sad. Risks are not something bad, risks are things taken by brave people. Very often those people are the ones responsible for great leaps in mankinds progress.
Therefore the argument you quote is not just a good argument, it is a great argument. Wimps that cannot handle it should stay away from it and keep their mouth shut.
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We have all this knowledge and technology to implement safety features. Why not use it?
-l
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There was nothing wrong with repairs to the Hubble. If they skimped and scraped, it has yet to bite them in the ass. The repairs to the Hubble are the most outstanding bit of spaceflight humans have done since leaving the moon. Each mission was a success - extending the life of the telescope and giving it greater and greater capabilities. It was always meant to be so.
If you are referring to the original flaw in the Hubble mirror, I think you'll find it not so clear cut, either.
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You mean more, or less than shutting down the whole project, redesigning the interconnects, and taking a whole year to replace them?
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Well if you want to explore new physics, almost by definition you can't be absolutely sure of what will happen. Present theories do not predict that the LHC can produce a macroscopic black hole, but of course can't rule it out with 100% certainty. The only way to be absolutely certain is to not do anything new. Its similar to deciding not to produce a faster network switch because the internet might become a vengeful hyper-intelligent AI and kill us all. You can't prove it won't happen.
BTW: the black holes
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:5, Insightful)
Science, by its very nature, deals with the unknown. We're at the point now where it looks like we're going to have to assemble thousands of experts, using billions of dollars to continue to make fundamental discoveries. If any of us had a road map, I assure you that we'd use it. This means that sometimes, we spend all that time and energy and hit a dead end.
But here's the cool part: dead ends are sometimes better than confirming what we already knew. There was an interview with a theoretical physicist on the radio the other day, and the interviewer asked him what his worst fear and greatest hope for the LHC was. He said, "They're the same thing. We find out that we were completely wrong about something." This is simultaneously frightening and exhilarating, and it's what makes fundamental research so exciting.
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Only fundamental research into particle physics. There are plenty of equally fundamental research areas (genetics if you are practically-minded, math if you're not) which don't require billion dollar budgets.
Personally, I see the whole "physics is the ultimate science" as a con to graft in more grad students.
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The world is not a nasty, nasty, vile thing that's out to get you. Take a deep breath. Sometimes, really, people mean what they say. Sometimes they act in earnest. Sometimes there is no ulterior motive.
Is it so difficult to let go of your cynicism for five minutes?
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I think it reasonable to expect taxpayers to get something back from it
You mean like the computer you wrote your post on? The medicine that has roughly doubled life expectancy in the developed world in the past few hundred years or so? What you seem to be advocating is akin to the recent UK government plans to assess potential economic benefits of research before granting funding which has met with considerable opposition [independent.co.uk]. Private enterprise is c
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"You remind me of the kid at school who would ask what relevance every single thing they were being taught would have in a work place."
If you're going to be patronising you might try and get the point first.
"You mean like the computer you wrote your post on?"
Funny you should mention that - Babbage was given government money specifically to build a machine to calculate log tables amongst other things that could be used by the navy. When he failed to produce funding was withdrawn. Electronic computers came ab
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You must be an American.
Something is broken / wrong / not flawless, maybe we should sue them!
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:5, Funny)
Not that I believe that sort of thing but it is the first thought that popped in my head while reading the summary.
Re:Where is the Outrage... (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, its a >20km super fluid helium (about 1.4K IIRC) superconducting collider with voltage and magnetic fields at the very limit of what we are capable of. The miss management part of the project was miss managing expectations. There is no way we should expect this to run as a typical engineering project with only one or two delays and cost over runs (typical in most large engineering projects).
To give you an idea of just how far from typical engineering this is, take super fluid helium as an example. It can leak fast out of holes not much bigger than an atom. Also in the super fluid phase the thermal conductivity is insane, but one little spot thats just hot enough to get a small area just above the critical temperature (~2K) then... that area is effective thermal insulator compared to the super fluid and then you can't keep your magnets cold cus you cant get rid of parasitic thermal loads quick enough. Now lets make a connector for this stuff, and put a 10kA cable inside... We need 10 000 of em.
We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Ok well mainly because its bloody interesting.
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Just to add some perspective on the US cost, note that the US contribution is about $500 million [newsweek.com] - also remember the LHC has been constructed over about a 15 year period I believe, so on average that's a yearly cost of $33 million. For comparison, the US yearly military budget is over half a trillion dollars.
Alternatively, based on estimates of the cost of the Iraq War [wikipedia.org], of $2-3 billion a week, the entire worldwide cost of the LHC over 15 years is about 3-4 weeks in Iraq...
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the entire worldwide cost of the LHC over 15 years is about 3-4 weeks in Iraq...
Yeah, but the war in Iraq is about protecting freedom, don't you get that??
(No, I have no idea HOW the war in Iraq protects "freedom", and I'm less sure all the time that "freedom" means what I think it means, but let's not get into that).
Nothing to sneeze at (Score:5, Insightful)
This more conservative ramp up is probably smart given the previous problems with equipment failure on the LHC. This will allow the systems to be tested thoroughly before going to max capacity.
Luminosity more important than energy (Score:5, Interesting)
The Big Deal about the LHC isn't just the energy. It's also that it allows for a much higher collision rate than the Tevatron. Even if you only run the thing at Tevatron energies, it's possible that it can collect as much data in a week as the Tevatron could in years.
When the LHC guys down the hall show up tomorrow I'll have to ask them about the planned luminosity in the first year of running.
Re:Luminosity more important than energy (Score:5, Informative)
> much higher collision rate than the Tevatron
About 100 times. But remember that cross section goes down with E, so the effective collision rate at high energies is just about flat. See:
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/general/acphys.htm
TRIUMF still kicks in this regard.
Maury
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Full speed in 2013?? (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, HEL-LO?!! Have you guys forgotten that the world is going to end in 2012?!! I think you might want to ramp it up all the way in 2011...just in case.
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No, their plans will go ahead of schedule, and they will be ramping it up to full power in December of 2012.
What I don't understand (Score:2)
Re:What I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)
The failures, or rather misdesigns/misbuilds, are in "copper bus bars". These effectively act as shorts across the superconducting electromagnet coils. Since the coils are normally superconducting (when at cryogenic temperatures), the short does nothing. But if the coil gets ever so slightly above its critical temperature, it ceases to be superconducting. At that point, it still has very very low resistance, but the current through it is so enormous that it heats up rapidly. When it gets to a certain temperature, its resistance becomes comparable to the resistance of the copper bus bar shorting it, and the current starts to flow more and more through the copper, thus protecting the superconductor from getting too much hotter. At least, that's what is supposed to happen.
What is wrong is that some of the solder joints for the bus bars are not good, and have too high of a resistance. A higher resistance in the bus bar system means a higher superconductor temperature before the current starts to flow through the copper, and in the end, this means damage to magnets.
I'm not sure what level of testing was done, but building a short segment and testing it up to slightly above design spec is probably not really feasible. In order to get the particles to the eventual energies, you need the whole ring to be in working order, because it takes tons of complete circles around the ring to accelerate the particles. Injection from the SPS to the LHC occurs at 1/14th the design beam energy, and the LHC ring takes it up from there.
Even if you could inject 7 TeV protons into a short segment of the ring, you'd still not be able to get the design beam intensity that way, because you don't have all 2000+ bunches ready for injection at once.
You could run the magnet intensities up to what is needed to bend a beam in a tight enough circle at high enough energies even without any actual beam in there, and this was probably done. However, quenches (magnets getting above critical temp) happen principally because of the beam. The beam loses particles and energy at a fairly high rate due to a variety of effects, and all those particles and all that energy goes into heating something, usually the bending magnets. I suppose you could do a deliberate quench by playing with the cryo, though. Perhaps that was done, and we were unfortunate enough to have tested only good subsystems this way.
As you may have guessed, I am a particle physicist (on CDF), but not a beams engineer. So, some of the above is guesswork, but I hope I've been able to relieve some of your ignorance.
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As you may have guessed, I am a particle physicist (on CDF), but not a beams engineer. So, some of the above is guesswork, but I hope I've been able to relieve some of your ignorance.
You work out of FNAL by chance?
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Thank you very much, you explained it well and I understand more now.
Wouldn't a quench have a huge back-EMF associated with it as the field collapses? I don't see any alternative but for much of that energy to go through the coil-bar circuit and heat the coil up more.
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Yes - that is a very serious problem. Superconducting magnet systems are designed to shunt the quench energy through some sort of dissipating resistor, but it is a very tricky business. Basically you switch a resistor in series with the SC coil. Sound easy until you think about 10,000 Amps and megajoules of stored energy.
Another way to look at it (Score:5, Funny)
In an equally optimistic point of view, if Higgs boson is later shown to not exist, the Tevatron Collider can claim that it was able to not find it before the LHC!
Another Sign of the Times (Score:2, Insightful)
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In a way the LHC may be the last project of the grand old empire. It may be scaled down from the SSC, but it is still by many measures the largest and most complex machine ever created - designed to understand the most basic physics. 30 years ago you wouldn't have needed to ask what it was for, any more than you would have wondered why were were spending money to go to the moon, or to send spacecraft to Jupiter and Saturn.
With the end of the cold war we no longer feel the need to prove our superiority by bu
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Don't worry - the rise of China will soon cure that.
So the bird was carrying a sliced bagel this time (Score:3, Funny)
Not just lower power, but lower luminosity (Score:4, Informative)
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LHC [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
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WTH is a “femtobarn”?
Is that where ants put their aphids, after milking them?
Europe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice to see that when something goes wrong, it becomes 'Europe's' LHC. I thought CERN was an international thing.
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Um, Europe does consist of many nations.
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That blurb genuinely does annoy me - it's almost like it's being made out to be a Europe vs USA thing. It's not - the labs do different experiments for the most part, and it's pretty sad to see science turned into a "who gets there first" style gameshow. Makes me sad :(
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Heh. Like a married couple.
USA: Do you know what your collider did today?!
Still very well done (Score:2)
I used to work on the software handling the test results from hardware commissioning of the LHC, and an inevitable conclusion is that a lot of smart people did a lot of work to get the accelerator working as well as it does, given the restrictions and unknowns of the project.
It's official (Score:2)
The LHC is the Duke Nukem of high-energy physics.
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This would actually be a good idea. Kind of like how Jobs and Wozniak made the original Apple computer cost $666. Fuck the fundie psychos!
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That's about a microjoule.
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Yup. :) And the luminosity of the LHC is 0.8 fucktons (metric) of particles per second.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
The beam energy at 7TeV is 362 megajoules. This is about the energy that you could get by maxing out a household mains connection (230V 20A) for one day, or about the energy content of 11 liters of gasoline. Quite a bit, but not huge at energy scales.
Of course, the beauty of the LHC is that it accomplishes this energy in the form of a particle beam circling the collider at near the speed of light. This means that the power of the beam is about 4 terawatts if my math is right, so it could power about 3300 DeLorean time machines (not for very long, though). Keep in mind that this power is circling endlessly in the LHC, so it isn't being consumed - the actual electric power consumption to run the whole LHC is "only" about 120 megawatts.
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7 TeV is about a microjoule.
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Yup, synchrotron radiation. This is significant with electron accelerators, but the LHC accelerates heavy ions where it isn't that much of a problem. The synchrotron power emitted is about 3.7kW in total.
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That is per particle. At full power there's over 300 MJ total in the particle beam(s).
in 2012 a mess up a Fermilab will let the cubs win (Score:2)
in 2012 a mess up a Fermilab will let the cubs win!
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Most mythologies? Can you list them? I thought that only some mythologies even included an end-of-the-world scenario, and of those, almost all are wise enough not to give a date. So I'm puzzled by this claim. Can you specify which mythologies include an end of the world in 2012, so that we can see whether they form a majority?
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Can you specify which mythologies include an end of the world in 2012, so that we can see whether they form a majority?
I'm personally not aware of any mythologies which state that the world will end in 2012, only of a calendar which resets.
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Maybe they can claim that it has to do something with global warming and the giant sound of sucking machines, and micro-black holes will start getting the money for them.
Pity that sort of money isn't available .... (Score:2)
... for sciences that are of more immediate benefit. I have nothing against blue sky research in particle physics but in general its a fairly esoteric area of research that produces little of value that trickles back to mankind as a whole. I'm really not convinced this level of funding should be spent on it when other areas of science and technology struggle to get ANY sort of funding. I believe that research budgets should be based on the potential value of any results that may crop up and nice it may well
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Are you serious? None of those more useful things you listed would be here without, say, nuclear physics. Scanning microscopes, NMRI, VLSI... heh.
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HTTP would not be here either. So this guy wouldn't be able to spread this nonsense, and we wouldn't have to shut him down.
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BTW, engines aren't going to get much more fuel efficient. The area to improve now is to reduce vehicle weight and size, which is an uphill battle against safety requirements (SUVs really upped the ante in the safety arms race in the late 90s/early 2000s), cost (the cheapest ways to improve safety are to add steel and increase size...oh wait), and image-related issues such as "big is safe, think of the children!" and "I want a big car because I'm insecure about my penis size."
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"5.5 Billion to show that the brightest people from a variety of countries can work together for the good of mankind is a bargain"
Well I'm glad you think an academic group hug is worth 5.5 billion. I'm afraid I don't and I'm not alone in that.
Re:Slash Tank (British viewers: think Dragon's Den (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Guilty of low aspirations (Score:5, Insightful)
If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing.
Did you RTFA? That's exactly what they're doing. It takes time to come up with a proper fix, but while you're coming up with something, why not use the thing? Even at a fraction of its energy, the LHC is the most advanced accelerator in the world. It would be a shame to just let it sit there.
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If the LHC was designed properly, run the friggin' thing. If not, fix the friggin' thing.
Did you RTFA? That's exactly what they're doing. It takes time to come up with a proper fix, but while you're coming up with something, why not use the thing? Even at a fraction of its energy, the LHC is the most advanced accelerator in the world. It would be a shame to just let it sit there.
Without even counting that running it will stress some other hardware and uncover some other potential problems.
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Hard to get all worked up about this when the people running the program don't seem to be concerned about accomplishing anything significant. Sort of like spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent, flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it.
Well, no. It sounds like they're quite concerned about doing something useful after spending those billions of euros. They still have the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth by a good margin, even if it's not up to its full design power (yet). They can do some solid science, good experiments, collect a year's worth of data and test all of their detectors and other hardware.
After that, they'll have a year with the beam turned off, in which they can actually analyze the mountains of data that we
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> spending untold billions on a supersonic aircraft, and after all the money is spent,
> flying it subsonic for a year or so, and then grounding it for another year to re-wire it
Which is EXACTLY what happened to the Concordski.
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