9/10/08 End of the World?

[Beth-Deth]

EXACTLY!!

Animal blow up dolls will be used by giraffs everywhere! 

[HyperU2]

Get Metrolink on the case, their collider worked.

[ZoMyGoddess!]

personally, im pretty excited about that last scenario that mike brought up. 

[the color nine]

Hadron Collider halted for months

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be out of action for at least two months, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) says.

Part of the giant physics experiment was turned off for the weekend while engineers probed a magnet failure.

But a Cern spokesman said damage to the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator was worse than anticipated.

The LHC is built to smash protons together at huge speeds, recreating conditions moments after the Big Bang.

Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

Section damaged

On Friday, a failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C.

The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.
more
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7626944.stm

[the color nine]

Some more time for them to get their..math together.

LHC re-start scheduled for 2009
The time necessary for the investigation and repairs precludes a restart before CERN’s obligatory winter maintenance period, bringing the date for restart of the accelerator complex to early spring 2009. LHC beams will then follow.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR10.08E.html

[Beth-Deth]

Whew!

[LostSouls]

  I now have to wait until 2009. 










secretly not upset by this

[the color nine]

CERN plans to restart the LHC in October, following an incident last September that halted the experiment. A fault, caused by imperfect welding, led to a leak of liquid helium that caused damage when it heated and expanded.


The grid that will process data from the Large Hadron Collider has undergone stress-testing, as CERN and other groups try to gauge its limits.

The tests, called Scale Testing for the Experiment Program '09, threw huge amounts of data around the distributed computing project, which uses dedicated optical-fiber networks to distribute data from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) to 11 main computer centers in Europe, Asia, and North America.

From these centers, data is dispatched to over 140 centers in 33 countries around the globe, where the LHC data is managed and processed. The recent grid tests, which lasted for two weeks, were completed before the beginning of July.
Images: Where particles, physics theories collide

Click image for gallery on the Large Hadron Collider.
(Credit: Maximilien Brice for CERN)

LHC computing-grid project leader Ian Bird said Friday that CERN had tried to break the grid but had not succeeded.

"People were trying to break the system by seeing how much data we could push through it, but we didn't (break it)," Bird told ZDNet UK. "The test was successful."

more
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10279901-76.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

[the color nine]

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has once again become one of the coldest places in the Universe.

All eight sectors of the LHC have now been cooled to their operating temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - colder than deep space.

The large magnets that bend particle beams around the LHC are kept at this frigid temperature using liquid helium.

The magnets are arranged end-to-end in a 27km-long circular tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border.

The cool-down is an important milestone ahead of the collider's scheduled re-start in the latter half of November.


The operating temperature of the LHC is just a shade above "absolute zero" (-273.15C) - the coldest temperature possible. By comparison, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is about 2.7 kelvin (-270C; -454F).

The LHC's magnets are designed to be "superconducting", which means they channel electric current with zero resistance and very little power loss. But to become superconducting, the magnets must be cooled to very low temperatures.
   



The operating temperature of the LHC is just a shade above "absolute zero" (-273.15C) - the coldest temperature possible. By comparison, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is about 2.7 kelvin (-270C; -454F).

The LHC's magnets are designed to be "superconducting", which means they channel electric current with zero resistance and very little power loss. But to become superconducting, the magnets must be cooled to very low temperatures.
   


For this reason, the LHC is innervated by a complex system of cryogenic lines using liquid helium as the refrigerant of choice.

No particle physics facility on this scale has ever operated in such frigid conditions.

But before a beam can be circulated around the 27km-long LHC ring, engineers will have to thoroughly test the machine's new quench protection system and continue with magnet powering tests.

Particle beams have already been brought "to the door" of the Large Hadron Collider. A low-intensity beam could be injected into the LHC in as little as a week.

This beam test would involve only parts of the collider, rather than the whole "ring".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8309875.stm

[merdeath]

Is THIS going to be our last pic?

[the color nine]

First black hole for light created on Earth


The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.


A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards.

Now Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, have turned Narimanov and Kildishev's theory into practice, and built a "black hole" for microwave frequencies. It is made of 60 annular strips of so-called "meta-materials", which have previously been used to make invisibility cloaks.

more on how it works
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17980-first-black-hole-for-light-created-on-earth.html

[the color nine]

Nov 6 2009  Wow: LHC Shut Down Over Piece Of Baguette

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.

Reg readers alerted us yesterday to the temperature rises in the LHC's Sector 81, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning: most of the collider's operational data can be viewed on the web for all to see. Initial enquiries to CERN press staff led to assurances that the rises were the result of routine tests.

However Dr Mike Lamont, who works at the CERN control centre and describes himself as "LHC Machine Coordinator and General Dogsbody" later confirmed that there had indeed been a problem. Lamont, briefing reporters at the control room yesterday, told the Reg that machinery on the surface - the LHC accelerator circuit itself is buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva - had suffered a fault caused by "a bit of baguette on the busbars", thought perhaps to have been dropped by a bird.

As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets - by no means up to the task imposed on them. Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka, a CERN engineer, told the Reg that this can happen unpredictably at temperatures above 9.6 K.

An uncontrolled quench would be bad news with the LHC in operation, possibly leading to serious damage of the sort which crippled the machine last September. At the moment there are no beams of hadrons barrelling around the huge magnetic doughnut at close to light speed, but when there are, each of the two beams has as much energy in it as an aircraft carrier underway. If the LHC suddenly lost its ability to keep the beam circling around its vacuum pipe, all that energy would have to go somewhere - with results on the same scale as being rammed by an aircraft carrier.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/

[the color nine]

After over a year of delays, CERN's Large Hadron Collider saw its first collision on Monday when two low energy proton beams were smashed into one another. This comes after the LHC's warm up over the weekend, and it's another milestone for the 17-mile-long-ring as it works itself back up to full strength.

From CERN:

    Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments' calibrations.

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer remarked that it was "a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time."



http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR17.09E.html

[deeply shaded]

If I'm expected to read and understand this my world will have to be ending today. 

[songbirdsong]

Oh Lawd, this reminds me of the great Jurassic Park freakout over creating dinosaurs. I mean, this is huge and it's happening and I believe it to be more threatening/interesting than breeding raptors but all I can think is:

"Hold onto your butts."

Well said, Mr. Arnold.

[Hotsauce McGilacuty]

Oh Lawd, this reminds me of the great Jurassic Park freakout over creating dinosaurs. I mean, this is huge and it's happening and I believe it to be more threatening/interesting than breeding raptors but all I can think is:

"Hold onto your butts."

Well said, Mr. Arnold.

When did that happen?

[songbirdsong]

When did that happen?

I just remember hearing a lot of talk radio and even a few church sermons about all the ethical issues associated with cloning and manipulating genes (including but not limited to those of dinosaurs) when the movie came out. Then again, I was in 6th grade and anything that was on the news for over a week was considered a freakout by my immature alarmist standards.

[PCP777]

We still exist. 

[wheresthebeef]

We still exist.  

They haven't actually successfully split an atom yet. Don't count your higgs boson's before they are collided.

[PCP777]

They haven't actually successfully split an atom yet. Don't count your higgs boson's before they are collided.

I love it when you talk dirty like that.