LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns(news.bbc.co.uk)
news.bbc.co.uk
LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8556621.stm
6 comments
Indeed. It surprised me reading this BBC article, as we hadn't heard anything along those lines here at CERN. In fact, the Director General sent a note (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/msg-dg-1003...) to all CERN personnel, very much cheerful about the future, without mentioning any kind of unforeseen interruption in operations.
All levels of management at CERN are very open, both about successes and failures. Even more so about the latter: bad news travel fast and all that (and we are a quite close community here on-site).
All levels of management at CERN are very open, both about successes and failures. Even more so about the latter: bad news travel fast and all that (and we are a quite close community here on-site).
So he needed only 4 tweets to make a coherent argument on Tweeter. Not bad.
Social media (straight from the source) trumps traditional media once again.
He wouldn't have needed to say anything if there was no traditional media. They were the ones that implied the LHC was broken.
In light of this, could someone change the title?
so it was never intended to run at full power without further engineering? or is the article wrong about it staying at half power?
from the article: So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year ...
from the article: So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year ...
All planned in advance. See, e.g., http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/01/29/...
Relevant quotation: "After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data."
Relevant quotation: "After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data."
thanks!
[deleted]
There was an article by an LHC scientist a while back suggesting that someone is traveling from the future and sabotaging the LHC.
The article may have been a joke, but...
The article may have been a joke, but...
I don't think that it would be someone (or something) traveling back from the future to sabotage the LHC. Rather, it's possible that the LHC, if fully operational, would destroy the universe, and we just happen to live in one of many universes in which hardware failures and birds dropping baguettes have prevented it from doing so.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_... :
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron] collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
With each delay, the theory becomes a hair less fanciful.
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron] collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
With each delay, the theory becomes a hair less fanciful.
I find it surprising that we have discussions about this in the public. To speak about ripples back in time in a non-SCI-FI context is a bit surreal.
Although perhaps science is the new boogie-man. It's no longer the gods tearing down something, it's ripples back in time :-)
Although perhaps science is the new boogie-man. It's no longer the gods tearing down something, it's ripples back in time :-)
I don't think that is science from academia, but rather popular science that is trying to be speculative so Discovery will be tempted to make a tv-show about it..
[deleted]
Well, whatever it takes to get kids more interested in science... right? How many folks at SpaceX do you think started their careers as Star Wars junkies?
They knew Star wars was Scifi. What would the effect be if they joined to be part of something cool to find out it was nonsense?
I bet the History channel would do it. Half that channel is ghost shows anyways.
>With each delay, the theory becomes a hair less fanciful
I've been searching the list to try and classify this correctly, and I think it's this one: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#co...
I've been searching the list to try and classify this correctly, and I think it's this one: http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#co...
If by "a hair", you mean statistically insignificant, sure.
Ha. Please share with us the probabilities behind time travel :)
Obligatory: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1919
I'm fine with this as long as they promise to resume operations on December 23, 2012.
I think it's one of those things where if they pushed it to far and really broke it they wouldn't have the resources to fix it. It's such a long term project already that it is wise to take every precaution.
[deleted]
This is causing something of an uproar in TwitterSpace:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23LHC
Edited for layout and to add link to twitter search. And this comment.