Really Bad News: LHC to be Switched Off Until Spring 2009
Written by Ian O'Neill
It looks like some significant repairs will need to be made to the LHC before a re-start attempt (CERN)
Brace yourselves for some more bad news.
In a statement released by CERN today, due to an obligatory maintenance period, the LHC will have to remain off-line until late March or early April 2009. Problems with an experiment as huge as the worlds biggest particle accelerator can be expected, but this will be a costly delay and a psychological setback after the initial excitement of the first particle circulation on October 10th. The elusive Higgs Boson will have to wait a few more months…
I had a nagging feeling over the weekend after writing about the LHC quench and the two month delay in operations - what if the delay is longer than we think? The severe damage was caused by faulty wiring between two supercooled electromagnets when scientists carried out electrical tests at the facility Friday morning, resulting in a helium leak between sections 3-4 of the 27 km (17 mile) accelerator ring. Although no one was injured, the emergency services had to be called and the electromagnets heated up well beyond operational temperatures. Initial reports suggested experiments would be put back until the end of the year, but now it would seem the LHC won't accelerate particles again until spring 2009.
"Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation on 10 September, this is undoubtedly a psychological blow. Nevertheless, the success of the LHC’s first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN’s accelerator complex. I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigour and application." - CERN Director General Robert Aymar.
This is indeed a severe blow to CERN and the scientists at the LHC, but the delay is necessary as the time required to warm up the accelerator, fix the problem and cool it down again will extend into CERN's obligatory winter maintenance period. Therefore we won't see any more accelerated protons until 2009.
Once again, in light of these setbacks, physicists are keeping positive and hoping for success in the near future. "The LHC is a very complex instrument, huge in scale and pushing technological limits in many areas,†said Peter Limon in the CERN press release, who was responsible for commissioning the Tevatron at Fermilab in the USA. "Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases."
There have been delays in the commissioning of the LHC (after all, it was originally planned to be operational in the mid-2000s) and setbacks in the last few days, but after two decades of planning and construction, a few more months isn't that long in the grand scheme of things…
Source: CERN press release
Filed under: Physics
September 24th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Heh , more like some paranoid rouge like character who probably was a double agent for the doomsday theorists triggerd the leak in helium… you never know man , you never know
September 25th, 2008 at 6:01 am
Ya know, all the bad things that went down in
I Am Legend (the 2007 movie version) started happening in 2009.
Plus Bush will finally be thrown out of office in 2009 - unless he creates another terrorist attack and declares martial law in the US in order to maintain a neoconservative dictatorship.
Also, if you flip the nine upside down and add extensions to the two zeros in 2009, you get… 666.
Coincidence? I think not.
September 25th, 2008 at 6:48 am
hey quantum_flux
i'm a christian… and i really like science… and that doesn't make me less christian…
i'm not agreed with rogue… neither the other "conspiracy" guys…
September 25th, 2008 at 8:51 am
If gamma ray bursts are the result of very high energy cosmic ray, headon collisions, unmeasurable by our 100 year old science on the subject, than perhaps we'll get a more measurable version when the collider starts back up, if it does.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:58 am
So here’s some “proof & truth” you can ponder, Aodhhan, because you asked for it. Abridgement is impossible & it will look more like a prosy “paper” but it can’t be helped. Sorry! If it can’t be here then it’ll have to be at Space.com or somewhere else….
…but first of all, OF COURSE they’ll be doing other things, apart from looking for new particles they can call “dark”, but if you think there are sound reasons for doing away with the notion of “dark matter”, then you’ll feel the facilities are being ill-used.
What’s odd is the way you ignored the marrow of the matter –the two opposing theories on the nature of gravitation– as though you knew about this & take it for granted, which is doubtful. Otherwise you would’ve addressed the issue, instead of pointing out the obvious.
Dark matter is not on the cutting edge of anything. It’s a makeshift, “ad hoc” contrivance, a mere twig, whimsically grafted onto the stem of astrophysics, & fated to wither away. The cutting edge is a space-oriented concept of gravitation.
Going back to the obvious, in another context: “Be suspicious about anything that is too obvious. In this business, progress is made by those who refuse to take something for granted.” This warning in a physics textbook is applicable to the idea that gravitation issues from the objects themselves, or “bodies”. The opposite viewpoint –space-rooted gravitation– might not be as simple & obvious, yet it underlies an idea as old as the atomic theory.
It’s called “plenism”, from the Latin “plenum”, meaning “filled”, the doctrine that all of space is filled with matter, & thus nature has no vacuums, & so there is no such thing as a vacuum, that Aristotle developed to refute the belief in atoms in a void. It led to the phrase, “Natur abhorrs a vacuum.”
The confusion goes that far back, & it survives because the term “matter” is still being used in different ways, so it’s best to say “stuff”, which would be anything (matter & energy, or radiation) except space. Even so, space, too, is “stuff”, meaning “something”, because it’s there, as opposed to “nothing”, but it’s PRIMORDIAL, homogeneous, undifferentiated stuff, so that there’s basically two stuffs: differentiated & undifferentiated.
A space-rooted theory of gravitation does away with the need for dark matter. It furnishes a “dark matrix”, which is space. It springs from the idea that space is the Womb (or one step removed from it, about which more later on maybe). Everything pops up out of it, i.e., both matter & energy, which are one & the same thing, in various degrees of dilution.
Quantum physics agrees with this when it talks about the “living void”, a “nothingness”, figuratively speaking, from which particles appear briefly, & to which they revert.
In the beginning it was assumed that gravitation was a feature of objects, but there was a second option never chosen: that it emanated from space. The matter of how this force was exerted across “empty” space remained. This “action at a distance” was magical & puzzling. Then it was said that objects “distort” the space around them, creating a “field” that conditions the behavior of neighboring objects & passing radiation, much like magnets. No longer do we have forces, but fields, & this solves the action-at-a-distance problem.
This no longer sounds very much like a body-rooted gravitation, but like something intermediate between that & the other point of view. It looks like a step forward, & half a step backward. The next step is to see that space is like a “dark matrix”, packed with whatever stuff it happens to be, which accounts for the effects that dark matter is blamed for.
Simple logic shows that this medium that is space has to be infinitely dense, since nothingness is, by definition, nonexistent. No matter how finely you chop space into bits, or blow it to smithereens, you’ll never obtain a bit of nothingness or true emptiness. You can’t have a speck of nothingness surrounded by all that is, nor can you have, by the way, “all that is” surrounded by a sea of nothingness, or claim that 1) the expanding blob of the universe creates existing space as it moves on, & that 2) existence beyond that is simply “undefined” & asking what lies beyond expanding space, or what it expands into, makes no sense. All that exists has to go on forever, i.e., space is endless, inescapably & inexplicably, & Hoyle was right after all.
Space, then, as reason tells us, is a matrix that is unimaginably dense, harboring accretions of its stuff that we perceive as matter & energy. It’s as though space were a uniform thing, like milk, that curdles for unknown reasons. Waves going back & forth betray this ghostly matrix, because waves are nothing in themselves, but merely disturbances in a medium.
Black holes, too, reveal the underlying matrix, or the Mother, because they partake of its infinite density. They are matter reverting to the primordial state –matter going back to the Wellspring to be recycled. A black hole can legitimately say, “He who has seen me has seen the Mother, for the Mother & I are one.”
This is a return to the “ether” concept, but so is the Higgs field, for that matter. They’ll be looking for it with the LHC. This hypothetical field encompasses the entire universe. Moreover, it implies that space furnishes gravitation, since the stuff of the field (bosons) is not subtle enough to be massless. According to the current Standard Model, photons & gluons alone are massless. Interactions with the Higgs stuff is supposed to account for the masses of all elementary particles.
Finally, the only thing that brings up doubts about the primordial nature of space is this: that just as matter is inconceivable without space to hold it, so, too, space seems to be unthinkable with no objects in it, because, if there is not even a pair of objects, from each of which the other can be pointed at & a distance posited, or at the very least a single extended body, on which you can establish a distance, & point at a “here” & a “there”, could anybody (a pure, disembodied consciousness), in utter emptiness, relate any place to any other, & talk about a here & a there?
Space would thus seem to be on the same level or category as matter. This suggests that the only truly primordial thing is eternal, uncreated consciousness, without which nothing is conceivable, & from which everything else issues.
If all this isn’t enough to make them take dark stuff off the LHC task list then I have failed. Should we make a bet?
September 25th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Really wierd stuff coming out. It appears the Null Physics and Mirror in the sky crowds are really getting steamed.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:04 am
The dark prince satan cannot be involved with Cern because I play cards against him every friday night. Despite him pretending to be human, I know who he really is!
September 26th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
who is paying the electricity bill for this ?, thats a question id like answered .
September 28th, 2008 at 4:56 am
"Silly Christians, colliders are for physicists!"
You know, it's not so proper to say that, while you have a point for Fundamentalists. I am Christian with a leaned belief of Old Earth Creationism (For those that do not know what that is, it's a belief in the creation of all that is but a Deity, but not int eh form of Genesis in the Bible with 7 days, it actually leans to the scientific ideal of The Big Bang theory, the age of the universe being what science says it is. It's basically everything in the belief of Atheists or believers of Science, but with a belief of a god. Everything from Dimensions, to the ideal of the universe to intelligent life beyond our planet, all believed the same as Science, but just belief in a Deity behind the start.) and as such, I excelled and loved Science since grade school, and I'm looking towards expanding my education and beyond beyond in the field of Physics.
October 9th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
hey rogue
u shud contact me
i like talkin to fellow conspiracy theorists
heart.throb619@yahoo.com
October 9th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
heyy
amazin ehhh
October 15th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Quoting a.k.a. Timber…
“Timber Says:
September 25th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Really wierd stuff coming out. It appears the Null Physics and Mirror in the sky crowds are really getting steamed.”
————————————————————–
The discussion here ended some time ago, so maybe nobody will be reading this, ever. I’ll have to send it anyway because something unexpected came up. Ultimately it has to do with what C.P. Snow, back in 1959, talked about: the wall that divides “the two cultures” (but only in the West).
I thought that “null physics” & “the mirror in the sky” were creative insults, coming from someone who was trying to be cute. Maybe he was saying it was all just “smoke & mirrors”. Talking back to someone with hit-&-run tactics, who can’t break down an argument & show the contradictions, if any, was out of the question.
Then, a few days ago, I came across an old Universe Today report –"Research Uncovers New Kuiper Belt Mystery”– written in 2002. It must’ve been the last word in the title that urged “pradipta”, years later, to invite us to his Space Mirror Mystery website.
That’s how I found out about this new theory. It’s incomprehensible, & his bad English makes it even more incoherent. This led me to do a Web search on “null physics”. It now seemed like it could be another weird idea, not a derogatory remark. (Remember: it’s “I before E, except after W”.)
…& that’s how I found out about this other new theory, put together by a Mr. Witt, who’s supposed to be an engineer (not the kind who drives locomotives). The foundation for his brand new physics is the idea that space is an “array of points”, & since points are nothing, then space, hence the universe, is nothing.
This means that the entire book ($59, 479 pages, 73 color plates, 30 color graphs) rests on a fallacy. Only someone with a knowledge of philosophy will notice this.
It’s the same kind of mistake Zeno of Elea made when he came up with his paradoxes relating to movement. He thought he’d shown how it’s impossible to move across space without getting bogged down right at the start, yet it can be done. What he did was imagine that space is infinitely divisible, so the moving entity must cross an infinite number of segments, and thus it will never be able to reach the goal. The arrow never hits the target, & Achilles never overtakes the turtle.
He’s making an illegitimate move. The mistake is to confuse the “sensible world” –the world we perceive through the senses, which is the world “out there”, or the “real” world, if you like– with the “intelligible world”, or the mind (to use the same terms they used in those days). Only in the latter can something be divided “ad infinitum”. In the former, SPACE IS CONTINUOUS, & so it can be easily crossed, as any turtle will notice.
Mr. Witt, too, like Zeno, is using imaginary things (points) to describe the nature of real ones (space). A point is a mathematical object, & so entirely imaginary, or ideal: “position without magnitude”. (In fact, that’s just what black holes are supposed to be, so the plot gets messy at this point…in history, that is. You, who might be reading this years from now, will have to figure it out. I won’t be here to help you out!)
This makes him think that, since space can be THOUGHT of as an arrangement of points, then it’s nothing actually, since a sum of nothings is nothing at all, so the universe is simply nothing. Then he tries to back it up with equations. It’s an ignotech playing around both with philosophy & physics, & coming up with an ugly chimera.
He might just as well have used line & planes to prove that the universe is nothing. Those are two other purely ideal, geometric objects: “length without breadth” & “length & breadth without depth”, respectively.
(He might’ve taken his hint from the idea that our reality is an illusion (“maya”), & not really there, but just in our minds, but he can’t prove this with his numbers, since mathematics can only describe the illusion, not what lies beyond it.)
C.P. Snow was first to discuss the underlying difficulty, which is social. Most people in the Western world belong to one of the two cultures, & they can’t understand the other one. Cosmology, in spite of itself, crossed over to the other side –from the sciences to the humanities– as it went deeper & deeper. (Actually, it RETURNED to the humanities, since it used to be in the field of philosophy, as was also the case with psychology, before the sciences started to set up shop elsewhere.) This explains the misunderstandings, as can be so clearly seen on websites such as this one. Insults are the only kind of communication that is possible between members of the two sides.
There’s only one way out. Nowadays you can’t feel your way forward unless you’re acquainted with both cultures. Nobody’s trying because it’s hard work. This is disastrous since a lopsided mind is only half a mind, & this will distort anything you try to work on.
October 20th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
so are we safe and I'm not gonna hear about the lhc being fired up right? 6 more months?
November 26th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Heheh Silver Thread, great post and very funny, you used all the conspiracy theorists tricks against him, even the CAPITALIZATION of words to indicate some sort of importance.
On Topic, sad news about the LHC, I can't wait until she is cranking again!
have a nice day
-Dan