Freud a GoGo
The Beeb amongst others headlined Hardon Collider Restart today.
http://i.gyazo.com/fb2f992994aebb13d54816b4c614e878.png
Boffins: Large Hadron Collider NOW movin', we're getting down and crush groovin'
The world's mightiest particle accelerator was resurrected this morning, following a two-year shutdown to upgrade the proton-shattering Large Hadron Collider. The LHC, which is based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, was brought back into operation earlier today. Scientists said that two proton beams were circulated in opposite …
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Sunday 5th April 2015 13:56 GMT Mallorn
ATLAS Pictures
This is the first experiment I have ever worked on where I find myself learning updates in the press before colleagues...mind you I'm in Western Canada and have only just got up and checked the web before email. If you are interested there are picture of it hitting the ATLAS detector here:
https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic/EventDisplayRun2Start
but the beam is only at the injection energy of 450 GeV from the SPS. The real test will be when they accelerate the beams to 6.5TeV each which requires the full 11kA current in the magnets. That's when we will learn if the 2 years of repairs worked and the magnets can handle the current...so fingers crossed with a little luck this time our understanding of the universe will break before the machine!
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Monday 6th April 2015 01:13 GMT ~mico
Re: Reverse the Polarity
IF you make the beam rotate while it circles and IF the calculations on general relativity are correct, it might produce a reactionless gravity-like thrust along its major axis, due to unbalanced frame dragging in rotating spinning torus. This impulse drive is the closest you can get to star trek technology. If it works.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitoelectromagnetism#Higher-order_effects
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Sunday 5th April 2015 15:37 GMT harmjschoonhoven
Re: Are we all doomed?
@X 7
On april 30 1937 Westinghouse celebrated the completion of the huge structure of the 200" Hale telescope. At the occasion Albert Einstein asked Rein Kroon, the chief egineer, What happens if somebody makes a mistake in manufacturing?. Kroon answered We build it over again. Whereupon Einstein said My work is much simpler. When I make a mistake I just tear up the paper I wrote on.
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Sunday 5th April 2015 16:44 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: Are we all doomed?
That would mean mathematical consistency of Einstein's theory is a necessary and sufficient condition for Einstein being sure not having made mistakes. Wrong on both counts:
Mathematical consistency of the theory might exist (insofar as one can be sure about that), but it might be totally useless in physics, describing a world that is not this one (e.g. a 2D+1 spacetime).
Mathematical consistency or even soundness of the theory might be missing but it might well be very useful in physics (most of physics is dirty tricks, fast haxx and formulae that look good for unfathomable reasons)
You need that telescope.
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Sunday 5th April 2015 20:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
and if they can't? Are we all doomed?
There is a Scottish* engineer whose sole job is to wait around for the day when the chief engineer announces that the magnets cannot handle the current, so he can suddenly appear and announce "Dinna fash yersel, me and the boys ken weel what tae do, we can lash this rig with tow an' she'll hold jist fine".
Just because it's a cliché overworked to death and beyond in every vaguely engineering related TV show and far too much science fiction, doesn't mean it isn't the way the world really works.
*Or Northern Irish, I'm not prejudiced when it comes to clichés.
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Sunday 5th April 2015 16:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
I know I'll get shouted at for this but...
I'd love to see the sort of money we've collectively thrown at particle physics thrown at something like fusion power which, if we can make it work, will have a huge pay-off for the whole of humanity. I think it's great that we've found the Higgs but actually doing anything with that knowledge that will affect the average person is 100 years away probably. The physicists working on these problems have been wildly successful and the standard model is a thing of beauty but it feels to me like it's become the pop star of science sucking up the funding to the detriment of other worthy areas.
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Monday 6th April 2015 10:25 GMT Boris the Cockroach
A few costs
According to a quick wiki(and its no reliable guide), the LHC has cost about $10 billion
The US defence budget at the same time was about $660 billion.
Or put it another way... the US defence budget would buy you 30 LHCs with enough left over to build 10 ITER fusion research projects....... EVERY YEAR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Monday 6th April 2015 19:58 GMT Ian Michael Gumby
Huh? Re: A few costs
Apples to oranges.
But the question was why not concentrate on developing fusion power. Well for that matter why not develop safe 4th+ gen reactors that don't create weapons grade materials as an output and are light years safer than the first gen plant at Fukishima?
That's a lot cheaper than the LHC.
Could the US had built something the size of the LHC? Yes, but at the time.. they thought it better to let the EU do it and to not have competing projects. IMHO, this is a bit foolish because with two... you can do twice the experiments or check and verify the results from the other LHC.
But w.r.t fusion energy, yes we need it.
Especially if you want something that could be used to create cheap reliable power without giving the country access to fissionable material and potential WMD.
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Monday 6th April 2015 16:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
LHC - about $9 billion USD total
James Webb Space Telescope - projected $8 billion USD
ITER prototype fusion reactor - projected $20 billion USD
F-35 next generation fighter - projected $1.2 trillion USD and climbing ( see Lewis Page's articles on the F-35)
($1 trillion = $1000 billion)
The great scientific achievements of mankind are basically a thin cream on top of a quart/liter of sour milk.
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Sunday 5th April 2015 18:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
sucking up the funding
CERN costs peanuts compared to the money wasted on the things that kill people - I think we know this anyway - but the spinoff from CERN is advances in engineering and physics which will be made by people who worked on projects there for maybe a few years and gained knowledge and skills before going on to other things.
We've been reading a lot in recent years about how gaining skills requires thousands of hours of work on things that are slightly too difficult from what you can manage right now. CERN is a giant incubator for that sort of thing. Having a goal - the Higgs, disproving the Standard Model, detecting dark matter or some evidence for loop gravity - is important because human beings need goals to get out of bed in the morning. But it's the getting there that matters.
It is no good simply throwing money at things like fusion because these are extremely hard problems that may even not have a solution. People have to come up with ideas and they have to be tested, and this takes time. Spending more money won't necessarily speed things up. The Manhattan project is not a good example because compared to the LHC or a workable fusion reactor the problems involved were trivial - they could be solved by a small number of physicists and engineers using nothing more advanced than single function punch card machines, and much of the cost was simply building lots and lots of plant to extract the uranium and breed the plutonium. Currently it has been realised that the optimistic idea of using D+D->He won't work in any believable scenario and things are back to making what is basically a very slow H-bomb; D - T fusion with the nasty byproduct "absorbed" by a uranium blanket which gets hot instead of going bang. Spending a lot more money won't cause the universe to come up with some convenient new isotopes.
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Sunday 5th April 2015 20:11 GMT Yes Me
"What makes you think they're not developing fusion power?"
Yeah, right. I remember being very excited as a little boy to read about the Zeta experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZETA_%28fusion_reactor%29) and how we'd have free electricity in a year or five. Still waiting. It's just damn' hard to do.
The more we understand fundamental physics, the better our chances of getting that free electricity. That's worth the price of a few beers per citizen per year, which is all that CERN costs.
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Sunday 5th April 2015 17:22 GMT MrT
The musical theme continues...
... this time the headline's from the Beastie Boys - unlike the Divinyls one on the Apple Watch piece, I didn't buy any of their stuff. Same writer on Kelly Fiveash/Team Register articles of late? Good stuff, keep it up!
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Monday 6th April 2015 05:12 GMT Striped Lungi
Does this count?
I made a smasher at home myself.. I tied two stones to two string (one string one stone). I had one guy spin that one way and another guy spun it the other way.. slowly we adjusted the height/plane of the spin such that the stones collided.. and smashed.. and a piece went and hit my brother in law in his buttocks and he had quite a visible "Black" bruise.. Does that count as dark matter? Or do I need to apply for a bazillion $$ grant and write some incomprehensible paper to prove that it was indeed dark and it quited mattered (to him).. Thanks
p.s If magnets and electricity are must have "qualifications" we are open to the idea.. but for now it was the first successful run of our smasher.
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Monday 6th April 2015 19:41 GMT boba1l0s2k9
Re: Has the LHC destroyed the Earth?
For http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/ It relies on the little known "worldHasEnded" JavaScript type. Those Netscape chaps were forward-thinking -- view source on the site to see for yourself.
For http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
"Every 250 ms, a private satellite fleet measures gravitational distortion at 24 equally spaced points in LEO. This distortion map is compared with the one computed by the Iridium constellation 1 hour prior. If they are equal, the system goes back to sleep for another 250 ms. If they are not equal, the system enters an alert state and takes several more confirmation readings at 50 ms intervals. If after 5 seconds (100 readings) the configuration has not returned to within 1% of normal, the system enters the "armed" state; otherwise, it returns to baseline. If we have entered the "armed" state, it is likely that an extreme gravitational distortion event has occurred. The network then localizes the event with respect to an Earth Centered Earth Fixed map. If the distortion is centered on the LHC, we enter the "active" state; otherwise, the event is logged, the system is put to sleep for 5 seconds (or longer, with a back-off algorithm), and returned to baseline. If we have entered the "active" state, all satellites attempt to initiate a downlink to the nearest base station and set a flag. This flag triggers a stored procedure which updates the web site."
Or in other words: they're just a bit of fun. :)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
