Short Circuit In LHC Could Delay Restart By Weeks 57
hypnosec writes: On March 21 CERN detected an intermittent short circuit to ground in one of the LHC's magnet circuits. Repairs could delay the restart by anywhere between a few days and several weeks. CERN revealed that the short circuit affected one of LHC's powerful electromagnets, thereby delaying preparations in sector 4-5 of the machine. They confirmed that seven of the machine's eight sectors have been successfully commissioned to 6.5 TeV per beam, but they won't be circulating a beam in the LHC this week. Though the short circuit issue is well understood, resolving it will take time, since it's in a cold section of the machine and repairs may therefore require warming and re-cooling.
Thanks (Score:1, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
In some universes. I hope to be in one of the universes where the LHC forgot to pay its electric bill, and gets shut down.
Just great... (Score:3)
Re:Just great... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have a crowbar on reach at all moments, you're gambling with your own life.
Re:Just great... (Score:5, Funny)
Now if only someone could create a combination crowbar and towel. Keep one of those on you, and you'll be set for anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Just great... (Score:4, Funny)
My, look at the time. BRB fixing the Lambda Core.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure what good it would do to sneak up on a crowbar (they've never been particularly alert anyway), but i stocked up my crowbar collection this past week...
Re: (Score:1)
I find crowbars are not sentient, so stalking up on them is not too difficult. Keeping a large supply of them, otoh, can be hard.
It's the universe trying to stop us innit... (Score:3)
Re:It's the universe trying to stop us innit... (Score:5, Interesting)
The universe does not need to stop us, because from the inside of it you can never prove you have the faintest idea of the way it is implemented, even if you got to model and understand every single particle and every single interaction. Does an insulated VM run on intel or on powerpc or on a commodore 64 with a hell of a RAM expansion? no way to know from the inside of it.
So the most rational reason becomes: they tried using systemd to speed things up but some not well documented glitch made the thing shut down. The short circuit is a scapegoat.
Re: (Score:2)
The universe does not need to stop us, because from the inside of it you can never prove you have the faintest idea of the way it is implemented, even if you got to model and understand every single particle and every single interaction. Does an insulated VM run on intel or on powerpc or on a commodore 64 with a hell of a RAM expansion? no way to know from the inside of it.
Pretty sure that with a bit of timing measurement, you could tell apart a C64 from recent Intel. Identifying other, more subtle details of the host might be more difficult, but not impossible.
You're right in that there's no way to actually prove anything about it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not from the inside.
You can viewing from the outside.
But just a quick hypotehtical.
Say we are a computer simulation. And our timeframe progresses in very tiny finite steps. Each one of those steps is say 1 clock cycle in the machine hosting our simulation. Whether that clock cycle takes 5 years of its timeframe, or 1 second of its timeframe its still only 1 time step for us, and we would never know. Or it can run 4 at a time or 20 at a time, or hundreds because its a giant beowulf cluster of machines, the s
Sun and moon the same size (Score:4, Insightful)
You realize that the sun/moon size thing is just a temporary condition, right? The moon's been receding from Earth and will continue to do so, so in a few hundred million years it'll be noticeably smaller than the sun and we will have no more total solar eclipses.
And the dinosaurs probably got to enjoy more eclipses because the moon was closer then.
Given that, it's hard for me to read anything into the sun/moon size thing other than that it's a coincidence.
--PM
Actually there are certain tests (Score:2)
There are actually certain physical phenomenon that would confirm that we are in a simulation, just from the mathematical constraints.
Here is a link to the actual paper [arxiv.org].
Re: (Score:1)
That paper talks about rigid lattices. That is not how it works. The simulation is QM in action. It's probability based. It more closely resembles water or gas than a lattice and the constraints are in line with the uncertainty principle instead of some absolute fixed lattice points.
Re: (Score:2)
Simulations are inspired by the way the universe behaves.
If you discover that the universe can be implemented in the same ways a simulation is, you have simply done a kind of circular reasoning. Reality looks like a simulation that looks like reality.
Not to detract from studies (captcha: proceed), It is very interesting to model how the universe MIGHT be implemented, but the ultimate implementation, or whether the concept of implementation has any meaning applied to the universe as an object, are theoretica
Re: (Score:1)
If we are a computer simulation, that might explain why it took a day to simulate the heavens and the earth, and to get past the surface of last scattering; another day to simulate the formation of elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium via supernova, and allow the elements to cool enough to form molecular clouds; another day to simulate the formation of planets and the beginning of life; and so forth. As each stage became more complicated, the simulation was taking longer in computer time to model shor
Re: (Score:2)
as the AC also said in his words, the timing inside the simulation is the simulated cpu time, the simulated hw clock cannot link to a real clock else the insulation is not there.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure that with a bit of timing measurement, you could tell apart a C64 from recent Intel.
Assuming the RTC isn't also emulated (and based on emulated CPU clock ticks).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We're not talking about realtime emulation where 1 second of emulated time equals 1 second of actual time, we're talking perfect (from the perspe
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
> Emulators DON'T have the quirks and timing issues of real hardware
In fact the comparison was among the host hw, not the emulated hw vs. bare metal. The code correctly implementing a full VM must run with the same results on all hardware where it has correctly been ported. I know it's theoretical because VM code gets advantage of bare metal (hw clock, RNG) but then the simulation is not perfect and it's a problem of the sim, not of the example.
To cut it shorter, in the domain of tic tac toe games defi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
No. The next thing the universe might care about is a big quantum computer. "God does not play dice" is about the idea of hidden state. Our universe appears to have certain properties which are random, but they could actually just be the results of hidden state variables. We have done experiments which rule out the simplest possibility - Local Hidden State, each particle is carrying around some state we can't access. Nope. But that still leaves two options. One is "God does play dice", the universe's seemin
Re: (Score:3)
If your car won't start, how can you prove that any other places in the world exist?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think works as you think it does.
If you point your goggles to a spot and see a lion eating a gazelle, finding afterwards that your goggles had a dent won't make you doubt of the existence of that lion.
Or, in other words, short circuits don't conjure results that coincide with decades of theory.
Re:How do we know the Higgs was really discovered (Score:4, Insightful)
Experiment result : "A squirrel fell on the azidoazide azide magnetic container, leveling the lab and leaving a 23 feet deep crater where the Dean's office used to be."
Conclusion : "Higgs Boson!"
Nooo... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Post-LS1 Powering Tests Campaign (Score:3)
http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/ [web.cern.ch]
I'm Betting ... (Score:2)
Something dropped out of someone's pocket.
This would never happen if they forbade pockets, you know.
This is why (Score:2)
Pippin said it best (Score:3)
Short cuts make long delays.