[Doofy]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

Oh no, there's a devastating rebuttal, based on political subterfuge, to an argument Doofy has raised? He's not gonna like that at all.

Again, dude, why's everything got to be an argument with you?

[ShortcutToMoncton]

[/humour]


laugh more, life is short old man

[olePigeon]

T-24 hours.

(I just hope some nut doesn't try and blow it up.)

[Doofy]

Rumour has it that they've turned it on already (according to some guy on El Reg who got an email off his buddy who works at CERN).

And France is still there. FAIL.

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by Doofy 

Rumour has it that they've turned it on already (according to some guy on El Reg who got an email off his buddy who works at CERN).

And France is still there. FAIL.

France is STILL there??! What did we pay all those billions of €€s for?!?!??!!?

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by voodoo 

France is STILL there??! What did we pay all those billions of €€s for?!?!??!!?

So we're ALL still here then.

But seriously. Although it's now switched on they won't be running the really high energy experiments for a few months yet. It does boggle the mind that such a complex machine should actually start up and run at all.

Fun fact, the particles in the main beam will eventually be accelerated to within 20km/h of the speed of light.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

No, it shouldn't boggle the mind at all.

Larger and larger particle accelerator has been a staple of science for decades, ever since Lawrence started with the cyclotron back in Berkeley in the late 20s/30s. This is simply a bigger particle accelerator than we're had before, but if US Congress hadn't gotten skittish in '93 or whenever it was, the SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER (teh awesome name) in Waxahachie wouldn've been, like, probably 3 times the size of the LHC.

I mean, yeah, it's pretty crazy, but the popularity of the LHC seems kind of funny to me. It's like we're going through the 1950s "science is CRAZY!" phase all over again, with exactly the same particle accelerators, just on a slightly larger scale.

greg

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

No, it shouldn't boggle the mind at all.

Dude, it's half in France. Built by loads of frenchmen. Have you ever owned a french car? Only 20% of the electric work at any given time.

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

No, it shouldn't boggle the mind at all.

Larger and larger particle accelerator has been a staple of science for decades, ever since Lawrence started with the cyclotron back in Berkeley in the late 20s/30s. This is simply a bigger particle accelerator than we're had before, but if US Congress hadn't gotten skittish in '93 or whenever it was, the SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER (teh awesome name) in Waxahachie wouldn've been, like, probably 3 times the size of the LHC.

I mean, yeah, it's pretty crazy, but the popularity of the LHC seems kind of funny to me. It's like we're going through the 1950s "science is CRAZY!" phase all over again, with exactly the same particle accelerators, just on a slightly larger scale.

greg

Coulda, shoulda, woulda.. we have the largest doomsday device and you have a cancelled project in Texas.

Europe is teh winzor!

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

Dude, it's half in France. Built by loads of frenchmen. Have you ever owned a french car? Only 20% of the electric work at any given time.

touché

[olePigeon]

First beam was successfully shot around the LHC. Still alive.

[brassplayersrock²]

Doesn't it take more then one beam to make a boom?

[Jawbone54]

Well, it does take two to make a thing go right.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Jawbone54 

Well, it does take two to make a thing go right.

Indeed.

In the mean time, you can just look up into the sky and see the same thing. It's just that the LHC allows for it to happen in a controlled environment where we can observe the results.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Wow, that was eloquent, yet so simple to understand…as if you were talking to children…



greg

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

Wow, that was eloquent, yet so simple to understand…as if you were talking to children…



greg

You see, the way Particle Physics works is that there's a stork and, uh, he collides with a bee...

[ShortcutToMoncton]

…up in the sky…

[brassplayersrock²]

... and this creates a special rain in which....

[olePigeon]

Some really cool pictures of the LHC:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/200..._collider.html

[Eug]

[moep]

found a livestream from inside the LHC, cool stuff.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

[Andrew Stephens]

Originally Posted by moep 

found a livestream from inside the LHC, cool stuff.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

fantastic!

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by moep 

found a livestream from inside the LHC, cool stuff.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

hahaha - That was pretty good.

[Mastrap]

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Large Hadron Collider out for "months" due to magnet failure


Annnnd....we're back in the real world

[brassplayersrock²]

"It was the damned cook."

That sucks, I was waiting to see what would happen.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by ShortcutToMoncton 

Large Hadron Collider out for "months" due to magnet failure


Annnnd....we're back in the real world

The cause isn't really a "magnet failure," though it's the failure of a set of magnets is why it's out of commission for months. It's something much more mundane: an electrical problem.

Originally Posted by BBC Story

"A full investigation is still under way but the most likely cause seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two of the magnets which probably melted, leading to a mechanical failure.

"We're investigating and we can't really say more than that now.

"But we do know that we will have to warm the machine up, make the repair, cool it down, and that's what brings you to two months of downtime for the LHC."

The spaciest machine on the planet gets dope slapped by a power connector problem. Cheap parts? Poor assembly? Bad luck? Whatever. It's broken and needs to have a whole sector warmed up (from near absolute zero) before anything can be worked on. And it seems that the temperature thing is the biggest factor in the time it'll take. Bum-mer.

[OreoCookie]

What happened is called quenching and can actually be quite dangerous. We were warned before experiments with superconductors that we have to watch out for that. So what happens is the following: you have a super conductor with lots of amps flowing through it with virtually no resistance at all. Superconductors are cooled with a cold liquid (usually liquid helium, but it's works just as well with liquid nitrogen and high temperature superconductors). Suddenly, part of the superconductor becomes a normal conductor (e. g. by cooling failure). Suddenly there is a resistor in the circuit and a massive amount of energy is converted into heat, the superconductor quenches. Hence, a large amount of gas evaporates violently, causing an explosion.

[Doofy]

OK, so the people we're trusting to not create a black hole where the Solar System used to be can't even sort out a bit of superconducting?

Pah.

[analogika]

That's like expecting the record producer to sort out the hard drive jumper configuration in the studio backup NAS.

Pah.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

What happened is called quenching and can actually be quite dangerous. We were warned before experiments with superconductors that we have to watch out for that. So what happens is the following: you have a super conductor with lots of amps flowing through it with virtually no resistance at all. Superconductors are cooled with a cold liquid (usually liquid helium, but it's works just as well with liquid nitrogen and high temperature superconductors). Suddenly, part of the superconductor becomes a normal conductor (e. g. by cooling failure). Suddenly there is a resistor in the circuit and a massive amount of energy is converted into heat, the superconductor quenches. Hence, a large amount of gas evaporates violently, causing an explosion.

I've read a number of different (simplified for the public) descriptions of what happened, and my "electrical connector" comment came from them, primarily the BBC report. I got the impression that there was a "normal" part failure that led to a cooling failure, that led to the quenching... Any better info on what the original part failure was?

[Eriamjh]

It's broke. The world is spared.

[- - e r i k - -]

Err... you are about a weekend out of date:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/0...-collider.html

Originally Posted by Discovery News

Sept. 19, 2008 -- The world's largest particle collider was running again Friday after an electrical fault forced it to stop just days after being launched to global fanfare, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said.

The problem affected a cooling system for high-powered magnets designed to steer beams of particles around the Large Hadron Collider's 27-kilometer (16.9-mile) circular tunnel, CERN said.
CERN spokesman James Gillies told AFP a 30-tonne transformer in the cooling system failed Thursday last week and it had taken about a week to replace the equipment and get temperatures back to their required state.

[ghporter]

Who'd have thunk that Discovery News could out-do BBC in reporting a complex issue in simple, yet accurate terms? Interestingly, while the BBC story has a "page updated on..." entry, it doesn't say when the original story was posted, so I was unaware that this had happened a week earlier.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Alright, someone's lying.

greg

[Mastrap]

Not necessarily. They were always planning on shutting it down for winter, no?

[- - e r i k - -]

Indeed. It's a scheduled shutdown, where'd they'll take a closer look at the failure.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Well, that one said they're not doing a re-start before the winter shutdown, whereas the other article said they were already up and running after the magnet failure. Seems a little confusing.

greg