LHC Status

If you want to keep up with the latest news on the LHC status, tomorrow at 3pm Geneva time there will be a webcast of a talk by Steve Myers. The abstract reads:

The status of the LHC will be presented. This will include the repair of sector 34, the ongoing consolidation work in the other sectors, and the progress with the new Quench Protection System. The results of recent resistance measurements of the copper stabilizers will be presented.
The plans for powering the LHC and the tunnel access restrictions will also be discussed. Finally the planning for the start-up and the programme for future operational consolidation work will be detailed.

One crucial piece of news will be what was learned from the resistance measurements in the sector that was just warmed up, and whether warming up of the other sectors will be required.

I’ll miss this since I’ll be on a plane.

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11 Responses to LHC Status

  1. Sorinis says:

    Let’s prepare for major dissapointments and hope for the best.
    Could it be that they are going to operate ahead of schedule? (I can even write that with a straight face.)

  2. Greg Sivco says:

    Major disappointments? You mean other than 2007 was to be start-up and 2010 is now presented as the soonest?

    How does 2020 grab you, realistically? I’m willing to take bets on the over/under as to when the LHC really takes off. I’m betting on 2020 personally, so we’ll set the over/under at 2018. Because my God gentlemen, if something as simple as WELDS are off, what the heck else is wrong that we (and they) don’t about yet?

    The defection/return of Austria is a bit telling IMO. Do they know something we don’t, but have too much class to admit publicly? Too many cooks, maybe? I don’t know, I’m just speculating, just like bootstrapping String Theorists.

    I am not criticizing LHC management. Nor am I being a pessimist or skeptic, just being Realistic. As a Mechanical Engineer, I assure you there is always this ONE guy who shows up at work in projects of this complicatedness (rather than complexity), and his name is Murphy. You may have heard of him, he has a Law ascribed to him.

    The Pauli Effect. It rules, alas.

    But the other particle accelerators were eventually developed, so don’t lose hope. The LHC’s day will come, sooner or later. Probably later, which is bad news for those putting all their particle physics eggs in the one basket that is the LHC.

    OK, so what do we spend our time on in the meantime, anyone?

    QCD? That would be my call. Quarks and Gluons are after alll …. 99.9 something percent of all there is (not called Dark Matter and Dark Energy by Mass/Energy), right? Much work to be on there I think. Who are the top people working on QCD?

    And what about LQG and CDT? What’s new there?

  3. Sorinis says:

    I think Frank Wilczec is the best source in OCD. LQG sounds like phrenology to me. Also I think the CERN management were abysmal. I’m thinking robert Aymar. This is project failing because of quality control issues and not “complicatedness.” And that is just not acceptable. Perhaps this idea of intenational cooperation in science is not the best way. If there was competion between nations you would see much bettrer and spectacular developments. At thus point even seeing a development (even if not a spectacular one) would be something.

  4. Greg Sivco says:

    Ah, thank you Sorinis, much appreciated. “Frank Wilczek, who along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.”

    Awesome, because Asymptotic Freedom is awesome. Mind blowing in fact, but there must be a reason. In the meantime, there is much David Mermin-ish “Shut up and calculate” work to be done, and if anyone is looking for someone to help in that regard, I am available.

    I assumed early management of the LHC would be abysmal, but I also assumed they would learn from their mistakes. I think they are (or am I just WISHing they are?). IMO it’s not a CERN thing, just a human thing. I am open minded enough to be proven wrong, pls advise.

    As far as “International Co-operation” goes, it seems to be working well enough for the ISS. Granted it will be slower than America with Mercury/Gemini/Apollo and the Soviet Union with their programs in the 60’s (less bosses, … less BS), but still …

    I understand LQG is speculation. The difference between the advocates of LQG and Strings is that the LQG guys admit that, and the String guys don’t, they promote their stuff as “fact.”

    Bull. I am SO grateful Peter wrote his book. What an eye-opener. I am especially happy that Ed Witten, who along with Schwartz and Green was responsible for the first Superstring revolution and singlehandedly for the second one, seems to be backing off from Strings, if not completely.

    Much diplomacy will be involved. These things have to be handled del-l-l-icately, so said the Wicked Witch of the West. 😉

  5. jks says:

    122 slides from the talk are available from the second link in Peter’s post. Interesting reading. Among other things, there is a new quench protection system being deployed along side the existing one. Maximum machine energy versus spice integrity seems to be an ongoing concern, but with much new data and understanding.

  6. Sorinis says:

    Am I wrong or did Myers basically say that there is no schedule any more? It is all up in the air?

  7. pessimist says:

    Greg,

    I am with you – from one engineer to another (I am electrical), I can testify to you that Mr. Murphy is always on the job, waiting for somebody to ignore him. In my business we call it de-murphizing the project – that means planning and checking to excruciating detail which reduces the probability of a Murphy event. Design teams are always doing reviews on each other and the project lead is making everybody do feasibility tests as a part of their design. Based on the report so far, I have a feeling Mr. Murphy has free run of the LHC! As painful as it sounds, the only way to solve the problem once a project has been hosed is to carefully pull each weed out one at a time without messing up the rest of it. It’s at least 4 years from turn-on time before all of the bugs are removed.

  8. Sheepdip says:

    Off topic for this thread but I thought you’d want to see this new claim:

    http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/06/physical.reality.string.theory.demonstrated

  9. Coin says:

    Sheepdip: Trying to respond in short because Peter seems to dislike taking threads too far offtopic, but: One thing I’ll note is that the grandiose and wildly inaccurate claim of the headline– “Physical reality of string theory demonstrated”– does not appear to be a claim anyone with Leiden University has made. It was added by ScienceDaily (where I think this article originated?). In fact, it wasn’t even a claim made in the ScienceDaily article itself– the claim appears only in the headline, and is in no way supported by anything in the article itself (which is much more conservative in its phrasing). A consistent problem in science journalism is that someone will write a decent article and then an editor will tack on an “exciting” but wildly inaccurate headline which changes the tenor or content of the piece itself. (Actually this is a frequent problem in many other kinds of journalism as well, especially in politics– most people writing in traditional journalism have no control over their own headlines.) If you ignore the headline and just look at what Leiden University team actually did you’ll find it doesn’t have anything to do with “demonstrating the physical reality of strings” (although what they did do sounds actually pretty awesome and like a legitimately positive development for AdS/CFT as a research program).

  10. Anonymous says:

    Here’s a better article on it:
    http://www.physorg.com/news166097923.html

  11. Marcus says:

    Here is the actual journal article:
    http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0904.1993
    It does seem that we’ve been hyped again by irresponsible pop-sci journalism. It’s not evidence of string “physical reality” at all. Just another application of the AdS/CFT mathematical tool applied to something else besides fundamental particle physics.

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