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LHC Repair To Cost At Least $21 Million
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 18, 2008 08:08 AM
from the black-holes-don't-come-cheap dept.
from the black-holes-don't-come-cheap dept.
ThanatosMinor writes "September's quench at the Large Hadron Collider is going to cost CERN at least $21 million and delay future collisions until June of 2009 at the earliest. Enjoy your last few months outside of an event horizon."
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Writing in the NY Times, Dennis Overbye covers the birthing pangs and the prospects for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (which we have discussed numerous times). "The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections. [And] many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies. Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine [Fermilab's Tevatron] across the ocean. ... Technicians have spent most of the last year cleaning up and inspecting thousands of splices in the collider. About 5,000 will have to be redone... Retraining magnets is costly and time consuming, experts say, and it might not be worth the wait to get all the way to the original target energy [of 7 TeV]. Many physicists say they would be perfectly happy if the collider never got above five trillion electron volts. Dr. Myers said he thought the splices as they are could handle 4 [TeV]. 'We could be doing physics at the end of November,' he said in July, before new vacuum leaks pushed the schedule back a few additional weeks. 'It's not the design energy of the machine, but it's 4 times higher than the Tevatron,' he said."
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I'm starting to believe... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm starting to believe... (Score:4, Funny)
This reminds me of my early childhood, when I bet my sister that no matter how many of her cookies she gave me I'd be able to eat them all.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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The study is authored by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, who argue that the very particles the LHC produces will prevent the accelerator from ever being used. Harvard post-doc and CERN collaborator Kevin Black relates their argument to the grandfather paradox - that a particle like the Higgs boson goes back in time and prevents its own birth (i.e. the future changes the events of the present).
...and...
As evidence, they provide the failed Superconducting Super Collider, which Congress canned in 1993 after spending $2 billion on the project.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And Higgs is known as the God particle. Maybe God is stopping the construction of this modern Tower of Babel.
When Memes Collide (Score:4, Funny)
This is not the Sarah Conner you are looking for.
This message brought to you by Speedy Boson Delivery Service -- "If it's not there by yesterday, it will never be there."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We don't appreciate that kind of racism around here.
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, I'll bite... from all the bad stuff you could have chosen to call that post, how on earth did you end up on 'racist'?
That's a bargain for a doomsday device! (Score:5, Funny)
Professor Farnsworth's doomsday devices are a lot more expensive and they haven't even been invented yet!
Re: (Score:2)
How can you tell it's more expensive? Earthican Dollars also don't exist yet..
When its back up... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:When its back up... (Score:5, Funny)
We slay an indeterminate number of dancing angels?
I mean, if they're line dancing, then fair enough.
Parent
Perspective (Score:4, Funny)
If you worked at the LHC you too would be happy to hear "The repair will cost at least $21 million."... ... If the last comment before that was "Dear God it's all falling appart!".
zzzzzz (Score:4, Funny)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7734251.stm [bbc.co.uk]
I like their quote "The cost of the work will fall within the Cern's existing budget" though it does make me idly speculate on the size of their budget and how large a secret fortress I could build with it....
Re:zzzzzz (Score:5, Insightful)
14 million quid is the price of a decent footballer. It's really not that much money at all. CERN's total budget runs to something like £700 million per year.
Parent
CERN's budget (Score:2, Interesting)
CERN's budget is not secret at all. It is something like 800 million EUR per year.
What intrigues me is that the numerical value has remained the same, despite inflation eating up its worth through the years...
Re:zzzzzz (Score:5, Funny)
"how large a secret fortress I could build with it...."
You'll can probably build some undergroung fortress with some 20km or 30km of radius, I guess. With a doomsday machine still on budget!
Parent
Erm (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta love the flamebait tag... (Score:4, Insightful)
Complete sense-of-humor failure over there. It's also in a couple of the above replies.
Rob
Need funding? "Hey, who's got a spare wrench?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Great work if you can get it. Need 20 million in funding? Drop a wrench into something that looks complicated. :)
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Damn those scientists! (Score:5, Insightful)
They should have planned for this kind of thing and taken it into account, like by having a few months of performing shake-down tests and finding any problems then!
Oh, wait...
Dimensions (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dimensions (Score:5, Funny)
The parallel universes in which the LHC works without failure are already wiped out by the LHC
This is the.. unanthropological principle :) ?
Parent
Lies Kill (Score:4, Insightful)
"The media portrayal of the LHC experiments has been branded as irresponsible and sensationalist by psychologists - especially since the death of a 16-year-old Indian girl, who killed herself after being distressed by the coverage on an Indian news channel." [trinitynews.ie]
The threat to human life from people like KDawson posting sensationalist anti-LHC garbage to places like /. is real and documented. At least one person has actually, demonstrably died due to the precise behaviour that KDawson is exhibiting on this story.
The supposed threat from the LHC, on the other hand, is a fantasy made up and promoted by irresponsible, money-hungry media shills like KDawson to sell ads.
The LHC is safe. People like KDawson kill.
actually (Score:5, Insightful)
At least one person has killer herself because she went into an irrational panic, and did something stupid and rash. That's often a sign of psychological problems.
Yeah, the media coverage has been sensationalist and dumb. But it didn't kill anyone.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Stupidity kills. That's ridiculous, claiming that he could kill people. You know what? I don't much like kdawson either, but anyone that kills themselves because they were told the world was going to end deserves a some kind of nationally recognised award for being a fucking moron.
Her own abject stupidity, her appalling lack of critical thinking skills killed her. She killed herself because of a doomsday claim that she could've found to be false in an hour, if she actually bothered to evaluate it. She
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What's with everyone blaming kdawson? I thought it was a scientifically proven fact that KDawson never, ever reads the stories he publishes here, much less writes them.
A dream come true! (Score:3, Funny)
Enjoy your last few months outside of an event horizon.
It's been my life long dream to experience an Event Horizon. The only shame is I won't be able to contemplate such a great experience afterwards. ;)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I bet they're kicking themselves (Score:5, Funny)
Pocket change (Score:5, Informative)
The total cost of the is estimated to be somewhere between 3 billion to 7 billion. A couple of tens of millions will increase the overall cost by less than 1%.
Black Hole Calculation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Black Hole Calculation (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether something is a black hole or not is not determined by mass but by density. In theory, if you can sqeeze the mass into a small enough volume it will collapse into a black hole. No one ever said that any produced black hole will destroy the solar system, let alone impact the galaxy.
The worst case senario is the blackhole spirals through the Earths crust for the next few hundred thousand years, hardly ever absorbing any matter because of its extremely small size. Even if it were to eventually absorb all the matter of the Earth you would have a black hold smaller than the head of a pin, going around the exact same orbit with the exact same amount of gravitational attraction that the earth had.
Of course, this ignores the fact that such a small black hole will almost instantaniously evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation. It also ignores the fact that most likely the LHC is an order of magnitude too weak to produce the micro black holes at all. Finally, it ignores the fact that neutron stars exist. If the LHC is powerful enough to produce a stable black hole, then cosmic rays hitting neutron stars are too. After a few million years we wouldn't have neutron stars as they would all be converted to black holes.
The point is, there are lots of reasons that the LHC won't destroy the Earth. Not having enough mass to produce a black hole isn't one of them.
Parent
Just as I predicted... (Score:2)
Re:First ouch! (Score:5, Funny)
That would be lame. Imagine this dialogue:
Nerd guy: 'And then, we will be stuck in the event horizon and...'
Beautiful girl: 'Damn... So I have to use all the time that I have to make sex to all those non-nerd guys over there. Bye!'
Parent
Re:First ouch! (Score:5, Funny)
That would be lame. Imagine this dialogue:
Nerd guy: 'And then, we will be stuck in the event horizon and...'
Beautiful girl: 'Damn... So I have to use all the time that I have to make sex to all those non-nerd guys over there. Bye!'
No you've got it all wrong. Its 'And then, we will be stuck in the event horizon, but with my new flux capacitor I can bring two person through into a parallel universe across the twenty-fifth dimension. One of them has to be me, because only I can control it and I was thinking perhaps you... but no it would mean staying in a confined space without light for hours
several hours later: Gosh this parallel world is the one just like ours but where the laws of physics are different enough that the LHC didn't make a black hole'
Parent
Re:First ouch! (Score:5, Funny)
I can see that you have given this matter altogether too much consideration.
Parent
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Re:First ouch! (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly. Besides, the live webcam [cyriak.co.uk] looks fine.
Parent
Re:First ouch! (Score:4, Insightful)
And I also thought that most slashdot posters would be savvy to the use of tongue-in-cheekery... which assumes that the reader actually knows what's going on (which, if they are a regular slashdot reader, they should).
Seriously. Whoosh.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You'd be mistaken. If he included a wink or something to suggest that he wasn't a moron who actually was worried about the possibility of a black hole, then it might have been very slightly funnier than something that isn't at all funny.
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I got that it could be a joke while reading, but I've also seen a lot of people who are atually worried about black holes (I was one until I read some informative comments and links here on /. ).
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Wow that's old. But anyway...I'll reply here for the interested. Feel free to mod me offtopic (because I am):
What killed BBSes was none of those things.
1) That's why post/call ratios were invented. Duh.
2) The technical clique were often right there with the gabbers. We talked to the gabbers to pick up chicks. Most of us were successful, too. I went on a few dates. None of them ever turned into anything serious, but it was still fun.
3) Maybe. I lived in an area with lots of BBSes, and I don't think
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> Surely one hour's R&D expenses could be spared for the LHC.
Unless they're researching a black hole repeller shield, of course.
Re:Ignoramus invents singularities (Score:5, Funny)
Parent