CERN's LHC Powers Down For Two Years 71
An anonymous reader writes "Excitement and the media surrounded the Higgs boson particle for weeks when it was discovered in part by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But now, the collider that makes its home with CERN, the famed international organizational that operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory, is powering down. The Higgs boson particle was first discovered by the LHC in 2012. The particle, essentially, interacts with everything that has mass as the objects interact with the all-powerful Higgs field, a concept which, in theory, occupies the entire universe." We covered the repair announcement last month.
TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
I know at least 3 different hippie/steampunk-esque people that have never as much as put a new handle on a kitchen drawer, but yet have a $2000 bag of parts sitting on their kitchen tables that, supposedly, once complete, will be a 3D printer. Granted, those bags have been sitting there for months, even years in one case, but they are determined it will get put together and eventually help them build their straw bail houses. Every single one of them is convinced that the past 10,000 years worth of engineering mankind has been involved in was misguided, wrong and wasteful. They, with their Nikola Tesla biographies in hand, will revolutionize the world with their geodesic domes and modern day dirigibles. They also hunt ghosts on the weekends. Interesting times.
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Well, as they say:
When a man says he is going to do something, then he will do it. There is no need to remind him every 6 month of it.
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Yes. Very true. Its always funny to explain to people who insist that a 3d printer is the true revolution for making things at home, that if you train a little bit, have a decent manual toolbox with a calipers rule, a set of files, a small drilling/engraving machine (dremel) and decent ways of fixing the workpiece (total cost far below the cheapest usable 3D printer) you will be much much more flexible in terms of materials to use and precision. The most parts (not all) which i have seen printed using a con
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The whoosh is strong in this one...
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Material is the problem (Score:2)
However, if anyone has a 3D printer and the time we do have detailed 3D models of the detector geometry that we use for simulations. There has
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More that the quality (which is most assuredly is an issue) the material is a more important factor. Know any good ways to print copper plates, or cryostat vessels etc.
You can print casts in wax, and make lost wax casts. I don't know if you can casts bopper in them, wikipedia only mentions gold, silver, bronze and brass. However, unless you need very intricate geometries, I think traditional metalworking is better.
those that are plastic usually need to be very transparent and I don't imagine 3D printing will achieve anything like the clarity we need.
A single layer can be somewhat transparent (I printed this [thingiverse.com] in clear blue PLA, and the wings are kind of transparent), but multiple layers are, at best, translucent. That might just be my expertise, of course, and I would imagine stereolithography being better at
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Why print out the collider when you can print out the hadrons themselves?
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't these people realize we're in the 3D printing epoch now? Can they just print out a new LHC in less than two years?
Well, yes but from whose point of view? Remember all those black holes that that LHC was supposed to create? Everyone was afraid they were going to destroy the world. That didn't happen but they did create a bit of a time dilation issue. For the gang working at the collider, they're just shutting down for a couple of weekends to do a little sweeping up. But for the rest of us on the outside, it's two years.
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Thats the cleverest post I've read in a long time on here. Nice one :o)
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Don't these people realize we're in the 3D printing epoch now? Can they just print out a new LHC in less than two years?
And a small black hole is the best cutting tool in the universe.
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Try 3D printing that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1L2xODZSI4 [youtube.com]
Repairs...right... (Score:5, Funny)
More like the UN got a death threat from the intergalactic Splugorthian empire to cease with our efforts to open an unregulated worm hole. It was ALIENS I tell you!
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The warning shot? [wikipedia.org]
All-powerful Higgs field? (Score:1, Insightful)
find God and power down (Score:2)
For what it's worth (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm visiting Geneva later this year for exactly this reason.
TWO YEARS?! (Score:3, Funny)
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...They'll do what they must.
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They collected heaps and heaps of data. (Petabytes even!) The scientists will use this downtime to work on the backlogs and see what's interesting in what they have gathered so far.
Re:TWO YEARS?! (Score:4, Funny)
It serves them right for going straight after the large hadrons. They should have practiced with small or medium hadrons first.
Ruh Roh (Score:2)
So without the LHC the universe is in danger of imploding now? Or exploding? Run this singularity business by me one more time here.
Re:Ruh Roh (Score:4, Funny)
Let's just say that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the second hand on the Doomsday clock back by 5.39106E-44 seconds while the LHC is out of service.
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for the record, *I* laughed
Understandable but still frustrating (Score:5, Informative)
I've been involved in enough large scale projects to know why you bring up parts, or underpower the system, and run them to see what breaks. And stuff does break, it's the name of the game.
Still, it's pretty frustrating to watch this shut down for 2 years. We'll be getting results from the Pluto probe about the time this thing comes back up.
Re:Understandable but still frustrating (Score:5, Insightful)
Some parts for LHC were getting designed in the 1970s. 2-years is *nothing*.
Comments here are like if nothing can be done. You know, real science is actually understanding the petabytes of data already measured and stored. Hey, they even have to figure out that Higg's boson look-like thingy that they did measure but still not sure what it is 100%.
As I said, 2 years, it is nothing. Lots of data to go over. Trust me, no one will be idle.
Re:Understandable but still frustrating (Score:5, Funny)
Trust me, no one will be idle.
Trust me. I will be.
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When the LHC will come back, it will run protons again, and again lead nuclie at some more future point.
Heavy-ion collisions is something the machine was designed for.
It's the higher energy that requires the extensive repairs and upgrades, and the downtime.
Just in time for the Mass Effect... (Score:2)
We'll be getting results from the Pluto probe about the time this thing comes back up.
Cool. We'll need the LHC to analyze the mass relay under Charon's ice...
Re:To all you leftist science geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, businesses rarely looks farther than 5 years in a business plan.
If a research project can't make a profit in that time, they don't pursue it.
The LHC took 10 years to build, from 1998 to 2008. Therefore nearly all of the physics research that has been performed and its resulting discoveries and breakthroughs would never have happened if it was left to the "free market".
Science and understanding can not progress through simple theory. The ideas must be tested and validated. That's the reason for facilities like this.
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understand it through more experimental observation maybe....
Science too long term and unpredictable (Score:5, Insightful)
But now that they've found the Higgs boson, what are they going to do with it?
I don't know it depends on what clever ideas people come up with. At the moment we are not even sure if it is the Higgs we have produced so we need to study it more. This precisely illustrates why industry will never fund research like this: it is too far ahead of any practical application and may even turn out to just be a stepping stone with no applications of its own but which leads to something amazingly useful. While I could make wild conjectures about what we might be able to discover the best way to understand the case for fundamental science like this is to look back.
In the early 1900's Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus and you could have wondered exactly the same thing: what is anyone going to do with it now we know it is there. Well 40 years later it lead directly to a new source of power. However indirectly it let us understand atoms far better. That understanding, along with quantum mechanics gave use an understanding of materials that led to the invention of the silicon transistor, an invention that has literally transformed the entire planet. I very much doubt Rutherford, or anyone on the planet at the time, had even the tiniest clue that this would be the result of this discovery.
Sadly it seems that the cry for immediate, short term applied science is getting stronger and stronger. What the industry types who are calling for this need to understand is that they are turkeys asking for christmas. Sure it might be nice to have all those fundamental research dollars wrapped up under the christmas tree and given to you to build a better widget but once those presents are opened and gone there will be no more fundamental research you can apply to build the next generation of widgets. It's then that they will realize who society will eat for dinner...
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Yeah, and according to legend newton worked with apples. The deeper we dig the harder it will get. TAlking of getting, you don't seem to get what basic research is for. There has to be someone that has the funding and the balls to dive to the deep end. If there wasn't we'd all still be sitting by the pool being scared of it and chanting "god did it".
Heard of the Web? (Score:3)
Rutherford worked with, maybe, a thousand dollars worth of gear, and was producing results (ie world record radio transmission distances).
Right. So if we are going to start looking at things outside fundamental research you may possibly have heard of something called the world wide web - if not try Googling it. ;-) Now, look up where it was invented and why. Doing fundamental research can have spinoffs just as much now as it did in Rutherford's day.
As for the cost of research yes it does cost more to find the Higgs - we need protons with about one million times more energy than the alpha particles Rutherford used. Since nature does not pr
Re:To all you leftist science geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
There is also the issue of externalities. Discovering something new about the universe would benefit many people, not just the investors who paid for the science. When you have a situation where lots of people will benefit, but the cost tends to be concentrated, you have a good reason for government funding.
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Actually, businesses rarely looks farther than 5 years in a business plan.
If a research project can't make a profit in that time, they don't pursue it.
Untrue. Many businesses spend many many many years in research and development before getting any return on that investment. For example, on average, it takes about 10 years to get a new drug onto the shelf. Pharmaceuticals not only invest a decade into each new product, but they also sink about a billion USD by the time they start recovering those costs (if they do at all, not every medicine is a home run).
The fact is the market not only could but would step in to fill some first rate research, and do it f
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Most "developed" new medication is not better than the old one. That's why countries created drug evaluation facilities where the quality of drugs is measured. Furthermore, pharma companies do not do much basic research, it is more or less all applied research. This includes the development of plants or bacteria to produce certain substances. Base research is to investigate how cells work. Adding genes and evaluating results is what the companies do.
There are some exceptions. In the past IBM did some intere
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That's why business funded alternative energy research during the 1990s when oil dropped to $10 a barrel. Oh wait...
Re:To all you leftist science geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
Like that travesty that is NASA...if there was value to space exploration at all, then the free market would have stepped up in the 1960's and put a man on the moon!
Oh, wait a minute. There was no short-term profit and the R&D cost was so amazing only a government could pull it off.
Well, it isn't like there's long list of tangential advances that benefit all the rest of us now and which allow corporations to profit directly from.
Oh, wait.
Sure the government's main job is common defense, but seriously, if everything was left up to the free market we'd be no where near what we have now. I'm not even going to get into what NIH has done for the common good.
Did I miss something? (Score:2)
July 2012
The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have just announced the discovery of a new particle which is consistent with a Standard Model Higgs boson. There is still a lot of work to do to confirm whether this really is the Higgs, and if so whether it is a Standard Model Higgs, but this is a major result
February 2013
The Higgs boson particle was first discovered by the LHC in 2012
Did I miss the "lot of work" between July 2012 and December 2012 that confirmed that the particle "is the Higgs, and if so whether it is a Standard Model Higgs".? Wow, I must have been asleep. According to this [wikipedia.org] maybe not.
However some kinds of extensions to the Standard Model would also show very similar results based on other particles that are still being understood long after their discovery, it may take years to be sure, and decades to fully understand the particle that has been found.
We've got a finger-moon problem (Score:1)
I am Higgs... (Score:1)
the great and powerful! If you want to see the boson you must bring me an 11th dimensional super string. That shouldn't take you more than 2 years.