

Large Hadron Collider "Fizzles" - kingkawn
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/earth/04collide.html?hp

======
mattheww
In a machine like the LHC, there are two important quantities: \sqrt{s} = the
collision energy which is designed to be 14 TeV and L = the luminosity which
gives you an idea of how often there will be collisions. IIRC, this is
designed to be two orders of magnitude above the Tevatron.

\sqrt{s} tells you what kind of "range" you have in discovering new physics.
Even at 8 TeV (both beams at 4 TeV), the reach is increased over the Tevatron
by a factor of four. This puts the most likely Higgs mass in reach. More
extravagant physics may or may not be out of range until the design energy of
14 TeV is reached.

L tells you how long (as in hours of running) it takes to achieve certain
statistical significance in a given result. Rarer results take longer to
achieve. The difficulties in achieving this goal are not addressed in the
article, but are roughly tangential to those of achieving high energy. From
what we heard during the couple weeks of running last year, everything was on
track to make their goal possible.

What's notable about the article is that the experimentalists are all fairly
happy about the performance. While last year's mishap was worse than what
anyone hoped for, nobody was expecting to be at the full energy even by now.

On the other hand, it's interesting that the theorists are so pessimistic
about the delays. A lot of them have spent the last 15-20 years coming up with
predictions for what the LHC will see. A lot of those predictions will be
invalidated when the first LHC results are published.

------
lpgauth
"Test of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider; A Proposal" -
<http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991>

~~~
davepeck
I'm not a physicist, but parts of this are entertaining to read, especially:

    
    
      However, in spite of these beneﬁts of performing the card-
      drawing experiment it would be a terrible waste if a card 
      really did enforce the closure or a restriction on the LHC. 
      It should occur with such a low probability under normal 
      conditions that if our model were nonsense, then drawing a 
      card requiring a strong restriction should mean that our 
      type of theory was established solely on the basis of that 
      “miraculous” drawing.
    

Delightful nonsense, indeed!

------
pbhjpbhj
How realistic was the original energy target? Did they oversell it? I don't
think that they'd have gotten the funding to go only as far as 5x10^12 eV.
That may be 5 times higher than the tevatron, but the results are simply going
to be, shucks we needed another trillion eV, lets create another largest
engineering project and physics experiment ever.

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kingkawn
I wonder how many wind turbines it would take to operate at full power?

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pasbesoin
The NYT link that was provided appears to be dead now.

Google News turned up this source for what appears to be the same NYT article
with a slightly different title:

[http://www.starbulletin.com/news/nyt/20090804_Giant_particle...](http://www.starbulletin.com/news/nyt/20090804_Giant_particle_collider_fizzles_adding_to_mysteries_of_life.html)

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onreact-com
Make sure to check out "Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances
invalid" <http://arxivblog.com/?p=1150>

based on a New Scientist story

"How do we know the LHC really is safe?"
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126926.800-how-do-
we...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126926.800-how-do-we-know-the-
lhc-really-is-safe.html)

------
onreact-com
The LHC is the Titanic of the 21st century. It broke down on the first day
while testing and they attempted to hide the news about that for weeks.

Also the way they dealt with the critics was more than ugly, they tried to
shut them up even by DDoSing their websites.

Last but not least they got hacked by some script kiddies.

This is just the latest in a series of LHC FAIL news. Even conventional
nuclear reactors are dangerous but here we have some irresponsible and
incapable money burning mad men at work. This is no science it's voodoo. The
whole "God particle" thing is just bizarre. I don't buy this explanation for
all the waste of billions of dollars.

Btw. Did you know that CERN is working on antimatter nuclear weapons (which
are much smaller and powerful) for the last two decades and the LHC is
basically an "antimatter factory"?

~~~
antipaganda
Yeah, sorry, but Angels and Demons wasn't real.

~~~
onreact-com
I'm not talking your fantasy book I'm talking about the actual antimatter
experiments at CERN. Read this: <http://cui.unige.ch/isi/sscr/phys/antim-
BPP.html>

------
zandorg
Why break 1 when you can have 2 at twice the price?

[John Hurt in Contact]

