zeptember

Glitch shuts “Big Bang” collider for two months
Sun Sep 21, 2008 12:03pm EDT

By Anne Richardson

GENEVA (Reuters) - A technical glitch has forced scientists to shut down the huge particle-smashing machine built to simulate the conditions of the “Big Bang” for at least two months, they said on Saturday.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said there had been a major helium leak on Friday into the tunnel housing the biggest and most complex machine ever made.

Just 10 days ago, scientists had celebrated the successful start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under the Swiss-French border, hoping it would revamp modern physics and unlock secrets about the universe and its origins.

In order to fix the problem, the machine will have to be warmed up from its operating temperature of minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit), spokesman James Gillies said.

“Because the LHC is a superconducting machine that works at very low temperatures, in order to get in and fix it we’ve got to warm it up, then we go and fix it, and then we cool it down again, and that’s a process that’s likely to take two months,” he said.

The organization said strict safety regulations had ensured there was no risk to people from the malfunction.

The project has had to work hard to dismiss suggestions by some critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.

Since the machine started up earlier this month, scientists have successfully sent particle beams around the accelerator.

The next step will be to smash the beams into each other to trigger tiny collisions at nearly the speed of light.

This will be an attempt to recreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang, the explosion generally believed by cosmologists to be at the origin of our expanding universe.

CERN said it thought the leak was prompted by a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current, leading to mechanical failure.

When the LHC starts up at full speed, it will be able to engineer 600 million collisions every second between protons traveling around its 27-km (17-mile) underground chamber at 99.99 percent of the speed of light.

CERN officials said minor glitches were to be expected, given the intricacy of the $9 billion machine.

“It’s a very complicated machine, we’ve always known that there’s the possibility of this sort of incident in the start-up phase and if it happens, then it’s a two-month off time,” said Gillies.

(Additional reporting by Michael Kahn; writing by Emma Thomasson)

Large Hadron Collider.

First I’ve heard about it was in reading my LJ friends list today (courtesy ego-likeness).

Google’s homepage is even featuring it today as today was the test firing in Sweden.

“If all goes according to plan, the Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic particle accelerator underground near Geneva, could re-create the very moment 13 billion years ago when scientists believe a tremendous explosion known as the “big bang” created the universe.”
http://www.courant.com/news/local/hc-cthadron0910.artsep10,0,6923966.story

Apparently doomsday-minded people have been terrified of this device for some time. Glad I didn’t know about
it til now cuz thanks to my upbringing, I’m prone to ‘the sky is falling!’ outbursts myself.

So as this historic moment is marked with the first firing today, what say you all about the LHC?

I stand fascinated so far. Not afraid…yet.

7:14am Edit: Hah! I stand self-corrected! This is not the first time a collider has been built. I found and reposted info on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider back in 1999.
According to wikipedia, “At present, RHIC is the second most powerful heavy-ion collider in the world behind only the LHC”.

Old email w/ article about the RHIC:

Subject: [More of "The end of the world as we know it"]
From: september at bogon.net (me way back then)
Date: Thu Sep 16 13:31:41 EDT 1999

—– Forwarded message from JasonF —–

Special to ABCNEWS.com
by Fred Moody

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/moody.current.html?POLL27=800000
000000000000000000000000000000

David Melville is an eccentric physicist and thinker, and a friend of mine. He
’s also terrified.

Melville is preoccupied with what he regards as the most dangerous event in
human history: an experiment, scheduled for November, at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. Brookhaven has a device, called the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, that has the world’s physicists tremendously
excited. Scientists believe they can use the collider to duplicate the
conditions that prevailed milliseconds after the Big Bang, when the universe
consisted of a primordial soup called the quark-gluon plasma. Brookhaven
scientists think that by colliding gold ions at extremely high speed, they can
create a tiny, fleeting version of quark-gluon plasma to gain a better
understanding of the origins of the universe.

Sounds like fun. The only problem, according to David Melville’s panicky
e-mail, is that, “It has been theorized by Steven Hawking that from this
quark-gluon plasma other forms of matter are also produced. The most dangerous
being a black hole.”

Consumed From the Inside Out
All I know about black holes is that they have zero volume and infinite
density. They sit in deep space, trapping everything that comes near enough
(crossing inside what’s known as the “Schwarzschild radius”) and letting
nothing escape, even light.

So I am perplexed. What happens if you create one in a laboratory?

Melville says he believes it would be microscopic at first but would grow
exponentially, eventually obliterating Earth. “The black hole would first eat
its way down toward the center of Earth and consume from the inside out. It
would not be a good time to be around to see this. In the end ALL of Earth
would be consumed.”

When I started looking into this, I was stunned to find that other physicists
are speculating along the same lines as Melville. The July 1999 Scientific
American contains letters debating the possibility Melville raises, and the
July 18 Sunday Times of London reported on and editorialized against the
experiment, which it considers frighteningly dangerous. So it’s not just
paranoid physicists and rogue journalists concerned about the RHIC.

Hoping to forestall the end of the world, I contacted Brookhaven immediately.
“We certainly do not wish to destroy the earth,” sniffed spokeswoman Diane
Greenberg, who clearly has been fielding plenty of questions like mine. Then
she sent me a statement by Brookhaven Lab Director John Marburger, entitled
“On Consequences of RHIC Operations.”

“The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small -
only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision,” Marburger states.
“Our universe would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small
amount of energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe
appears to be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy
that occur in astrophysical processes.

“RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by
naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects in
our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray collisions with
no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject of speculation in
connection with RHIC.”

Playing at God
Why am I not reassured by this? The short answer is that the experiment is
conducted by human beings - the same folks who brought you the internal
combustion engine, which threatens to destabilize the planet’s climate, and
powerful antibiotics, which ultimately created an invincible staphylococcus
bacterium. In other words, technopride goeth before the fall.

The longer answer is that Melville’s scenario is perversely seductive in a
Kubrickian sort of way. Think of Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are few things quite as persuasive as the vision of humans, their thirst
for knowledge and progress insatiable, stumbling on a way to destroy the
planet. It is an end-of-the-world scenario that has launched a thousand movie
scripts.

Human progress has always had a nasty habit of producing unintended
consequences - usually because the prideful progenitors of progress insist on
pooh-poohing any possibility of danger. Now, in recreating the beginning of
the universe, we are essentially playing at being God - an unforgivable
offense, punishable, as tragedians in the Bible and other literature have
prophesied for centuries, by annihilation.

The Doomsday Machine
This Doomsday scenario dovetails creepily with the speculation put forth by
the late Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos. Sagan believed that we could never
find evidence of life anywhere else in the universe because the pattern of
evolution has been the same everywhere: Life begins and evolves through
millions of years to the moment when it destroys itself. The nature of
consciousness is such that evolution itself is a doomsday machine.

Sagan considered nuclear war the likeliest cause of destruction, but the
creation of an annihilating black hole is more plausible. Not only does it
explain the apparent absence of life anywhere else in the universe, it also
explains the absence of any ruins of past civilizations. A black hole removes
all traces of everything - including of the creating civilization’s planet.

“So why am I telling you this?” Melville’s message to me ends. “I think this
should be brought out into the general public’s view. For once, maybe once in
the history of the universe, we can avoid THE END. Have a nice day.”

Rapture

—– End forwarded message —–