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Science Technology

Short Circuit In LHC Could Delay Restart By Weeks 57

Posted by Soulskill from the universe-will-survive-a-bit-longer dept.
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.
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Short Circuit In LHC Could Delay Restart By Weeks More

Short Circuit In LHC Could Delay Restart By Weeks

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  • Thanks (Score:1, Funny)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 )
    That's how many weeks we have more to live before being crunched in a black hole.
    • So why my own post is -1 Troll and its below neighbor that says basically the same thing is +3. Strange, I tell you.

    • 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)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @03:02AM (#49334035) Journal
    Now would probably be a good time to stalk up on crowbars and prepare for unforeseen consequences, right?

  • It's the universe trying to stop us innit... (Score:3)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @03:08AM (#49334045)
    It doesn't want its secrets revealed ;)

    • Re:It's the universe trying to stop us innit... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by marcello_dl ( 667940 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @04:07AM (#49334181) Homepage Journal

      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)

        by fisted ( 2295862 )

        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)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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

          • 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)

              by Anonymous Coward

              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.

            • 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

          • 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

        • 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.

        • 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)

            by fisted ( 2295862 )
            Yes, but I wasn't assuming that the VM would go out of its way to pretend to be something different.
            • An insulated VM, which is what marcello_dl was talking about, wouldn't rely on a hardware RTC; if it did, it wouldn't be insulated, would it?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by fisted ( 2295862 )
                In order to meaningfully emulate the RTC, the host still needs a real RTC, much like in order to emulate a CPU, the host needs a real CPU. Whether or not the host is warping the timesource for the emulated RTC or just uses the real one as its backend, i don't see how that's relevant to insulation
                • Yes, of course a host needs a CPU in order to emulate another CPU, but it needn't be the same (or even similar) architecture (e.g. it doesn't need an x86 class CPU to emulate an x86 class CPU, though it *does* help speed things up a bit). As for the RTC, or any other hardware, well, all you need is the CPU and some clever software to emulate pretty much anything.

                  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
      • Never actually worked on kernel and drivers? Emulators DON'T have the quirks and timing issues of real hardware, which is why one smart BSD variant always uses real hardware, while another particular one has used emulators for some of its development and so falls over on various real hardware.

        • > 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

      • You assume the makers of the universe's emulator did a perfect job. And that they designed to foil detection. Maybe they did not. Maybe they even made a way for sufficiently advanced technology to discern the difference intentionally.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

  • Nooo stop work on LHC Stephanie. Stephanie reassemble?

  • Post-LS1 Powering Tests Campaign (Score:3)

    by jcdr ( 178250 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @06:27AM (#49334491)

    http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/ [web.cern.ch]

  • Something dropped out of someone's pocket.

    This would never happen if they forbade pockets, you know.

  • you double-check that you don't have solder bridges. Use only what you need, and make sure those joints are bright and shiny!

  • Pippin said it best (Score:3)

    by Barlo_Mung_42 ( 411228 ) on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @12:18PM (#49337045) Homepage

    Short cuts make long delays.

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