So, the LHC has been shut down until next year, after a major helium leak in on section. This means it will be March or April of next year before collisions in the ATLAS detector create dragons that will eat us all.
Now you know why I didn't make a big deal of the "start-up" a couple of weeks ago. (Well, also, I was in Canada at a conference...)
If you're worried that this will delay the march of progress, though, fear not:
The failure occurred as the accelerator's two proton beams were being ramped up for a test run at 5 TeV. CERN had then planned to use the winter shutdown to make final adjustments to the superconducting magnets that guide the beam so that the accelerator could start-up again in the spring at the full energy of 7 TeV.
However, CERN has now decided to cancel the 5 TeV test run and re-start the accelerator at full power in the spring, according to CERN spokesperson James Gillies. "We are not behind schedule for 7 TeV", he told physicsworld.com.
I'm sure that will work out just fine.
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It's a coverup! There was a resonance cascade, but this time they managed to stop it.
More Half-Life jokes?
Rumors have it that they've already detected the Higgs Boson - they're just too embarrassed to announce it while sounding like Mickey Mouse. We've got to wait till Spring till the helium levels drop and allow them to sound serious again.
They created a wormhole and so many odd socks and items of lost luggage sprung out of it that it will take until the spring before the spring cleaning is done....
Just reverse the polarity! Or throw in one brilliant student, who will spend one sleepless night tweaking things. After that, it will work immediately, and much better than anyone expected. That's how they do it in Star Trek, and it obviously describes how things really work.
(I'm a frustrated physicist, with some experience of how electronics and mechanical parts break down, go missing or just need a lot of TLC before they work.)
Now you know why I didn't make a big deal of the "start-up" a couple of weeks ago.
I can only snort in derision, here.
I design gadgets the size of my hand, and it's rare-- I mean rare-- that they work the first time, exactly as expected.
Scale that up to the LHC, and realize that at that scale, everything is a "deliverable prototype." Yeah, they'll have that puppy working, in band-aid, hand-holding mode, about Q309, I reckon. This is not a statement of denigration on the design and fabrication; it is a statement of awe-inspired confidence.
So what does a TeV beam do to the side of a vacuum chamber, after the busted magnet fails to keep it on track?
Theres no Higgs Boson, I'm betting. I like my own theory of gravity.....its like standing under a waterfall