So, did the hadrons Collinder actually work? and why the silence now?

reply to post by Kay_S


The cause of the damage was bad wiring, in a nutshell. A poorly made connection led to a temperature spike in some very large and sensitive magnets. It's called a quench. They knew exactly what had happened, the moment it happened, but it takes two weeks alone to warm up the area affected so people could enter and work on it. The whole timescale of repair os 2-3 months.

Some of you here are having a paddy about "unknown dangers" and "messing with things they don't understand, like a child with a nuclear reactor". Typical poorly-informed, knee jerk reaction stuff without actually looking at what they do at the LHC.

It's nothing like a kid with a reactor, that analogy is going in my "Worst Analogies of 2008" compilation

reply to post by stumason


Exactly right my friend. They now need to make the decision to future proof the entire ring which could put it out of action till late next year, but if thats the case they are changing the schedule and starting right at the higher energy collisions. Personaly i think this is a shame and hope it gets fixed and there are no future problems. All the talk of the end of the world.....
If you told someone 200 hundred years ago that we could be posting messages on here from around the worls you would have been burned at the stake.

No-matter what youre background you have to acknowledge we wouldnt be where we are today without pioneering scientific experiments like this one.

reply to post by Fromabove

Just what exactly is a Hydrogen "particle" and how would you go about filling it with "Hellium"? If you want to have any credibility, stick to elements in the periodic table and learn the difference between atoms, molecules and particles. Stupid uneducated remarks like that merely make this forum a laughing stock, and makes it easier for the government to ridicule people who try to raise genuine questions about the covert activities governments engage in around the world.

Those making absurd assumptions that the LHC is going to create a black hole, or burn off the atmosphere in a chain reaction obviously have no clue how the LHC works, the nature of the experiments being conducted, or really for any sort of physics and science in general.

There is a possibility it could rip a tiny black hole in the universe, but there is that same possibility that a tiny black hole could be ripped in the middle of the sun, one hour from now!

There is no possibility its going to burn off the atmosphere, and it wasn't a build up for helium in the tube. The wiring to one of the magnets was faulty and the magnet started to heat up. This is terrible for the machine, and would render the whole project useless if the magnet broke. So they shut it down, warm the room up for 2 months and then replace the magnet. The whole tube is underground, which makes everything difficult, including burning off an atmosphere. I think we proved thermonuclear dont burn off the atmosphere in los alamos, nagasaki and hiroshima if I am correct.

Originally posted by stumason

Some of you here are having a paddy about "unknown dangers" and "messing with things they don't understand, like a child with a nuclear reactor". Typical poorly-informed, knee jerk reaction stuff without actually looking at what they do at the LHC.

You don't really know what the researchers are doing at CERN, unless they tell you. But what they tell you is just info about what they would like to do, and the info got nothing to do with reality.

How does science compute the margin for the unexpected?
Before anything else, you create a comparative category. After that, you find out that the LHC is an enormously complex piece of engineering. You take it from there, run a risk assessment on major components and after multiplying the reliable parameters, you find out that the collider will experience with 95% certainty a malfunction due to hardware failure within 100 hours of operation. Then you inform the interested public about these possibilities.

Nothing of this kind was released to the press, because the risk assessment wasn't even done. The CERN researchers just pushed the Start button thinking Dear Father in the Heavens, please watch kindly over our underground circle.

The CERN engineers were not really surprised by the setback, but there is always a margin for the unexpected living in the Catastrophe file. Science is not about re-assuring opinions; science computes probabilities -- if the parameters are known. It's only natural that some people would be apprehensive about the CERN experiment not knowing the margin for the unexpected.

What concerns me isn't necessarily black holes and strangelets although I don't rule that out as possible and that in itself makes the whole thing immoral at best in my eyes.

What does concern me is a much higher chance they will create something that hasn't been predicted at all.

Curiosity killed the cat.

reply to post by Teknikal


Luckily the people running it know a lot more about this stuff than you do.

You'll see there's nothing to worry about, but I'm sure that won't stop you from making wild guesses about the next scientific experiments that use words that scare you.

Originally posted by Teknikal
What does concern me is a much higher chance they will create something that hasn't been predicted at all.

That's a necessary by-product of science practised by humans. For example, Viagra is sold to remedy something completely different than the development of the drug was intended for.

The unexpected has two main categories: the arrival of a different family member and the arrival of a stranger previously never seen. I really wonder what kind of frankenstein will emerge from the LHC tunnels. The math is useless here to predict things of this nature, but if you take all known cases of scientific serendipity and use an inference formula to accommodate the LHC condition, there is 0.000012% chance that the LHC will produce known elements that actually never existed. These elements will coalesce over a short period of time taking on a shape of a malevolent white giant, as opposed to the white dwarf -- a term that describes a collapsed star.

reply to post by detachedindividual


You do realize that the only difference between the LHC and all the other particle accelerators built over the past century and a bit is that the LHC is bigger? CERN's LEP and Brookhaven's RHIC aren't anything to sneeze at either.

Here are some pictures of the damage taken from a Power Point presentation given by Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN, on 28 November 2008.





The force was so great during the incident that the LHC Ring physically twisted out of alignment and the floor mounts were ripped from the concrete floor.

From the presentation:

"The number of magnets to be repaired is at maximum of 5 quadrupoles (in Short Straight Sections) and 24 dipoles, but more (42 dipoles and 15 quadrupoles) will have to be removed from the tunnel for cleaning and exchange of multilayer insulation."

[edit on 22-12-2008 by vectrixcube]

It never ceases to amaze that when new technology comes...it will destroy the Earth. Atomic bombs, fission/fusion, cloning, LHC...You wanna know how I see it? It probably won't happen. The world won't end when the LHC collides it's first set of particles just as it doesn't end every time the other colliders do it. The world won't end at 2012 either...although that's another subject.

Now...with that said...I am sure it has been proven countless times that anything is possible. If the LHC fires up and the atmoshpere and Earth go boom...are you really gonna know much? It's gonna hit...world gone...you gone...

I realize a death sentence is frightening. If the Creator (whoever you believe that is) or the law came and told you the end of your life, it would radically alter your way of living. How could one survive while mentally intact knowing that on xx-xx-xxxx at xx:xx he or she will die? Too frightening. The thing is, we don't know when we are gonna die. 2012 and the LHC is all speculation so I say why not just relax and let come what may. If the world ends, it's gonna happen and you'll probably never have a snowflake's chance in Hades of stopping it. Frankly I use that as my mantra to live a good, happy, and worry-free life.

Besides...how many times has the world come to an end when a new technology was invented that was radical? If I am not mistaken the current count is zero.

I highly doubt this will destroy anything but some particles and who knows, maybe even some pride. I for one will welcome the new technology and as mentioned before...this experimentation has been done many many many times before.

-Kyo

This machine will not destroy the Earth. The energy from the particle collision isn't even sufficient enough to light up a light bulb. Nature has much more powerful particle accelerators than we could ever hope to make on Earth.