The LHC has restarted for its 2017 run | Hacker News Reader

The LHC has restarted for its 2017 run

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192 pointsJumpCrisscross44 comments

There's still a chance they can get us all back into the correct timeline.

Now I'm curious how much someone's chance of having seen/played anything Steins;Gate goes up when preconditioned on visiting Hacker News at least once a week.

I watched SG but I read the timeline reference in terms of "Community". I.e. this is the darkest timeline.

That's very interesting; I've watched both but I read it in terms of Leibniz: this is the happiest of all possible timelines.

Leibniz didn't say happiest did he? I thought he meant the best of all possible timelines, compromise-wise.

With a little luck, in about two months we'll finally get to watch Shazam again.

For those of you wondering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3l8idr9QFE

Save the Berenstein Bears!

Ok taking bets now, missing muons are..

[ ] issue with calculations [ ] go away with more data [x] new physics! [ ] other

I'm hoping it's some kind of temporal fuzzing where particles are going backwards in time and causing interference with both past and future events.

No reason other than because that'd be awesome.

You mean like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb...

They just need to reverse polarity on the LHC!

Would it even be possible to measure this?

Exactly. It'd be so downright bizarre and difficult to pin down that we'd probably go nuts thinking we were all delusional to imagine such a thing could exist in the first place.

Then when we have proof we'd be even more confused.

I'd settle for figuring out how to send an email to a previous point in time. I'd like to email myself in 2009. Something about buying a bunch of ASIC's and mining something for a long-term hold.

No need to mine it. Just buy in bulk at $1 and hold.

Bitcoin market cap is still pretty small as far as global financial markets go. I'd have doubts at being able to extract serious amount of money from it. I'd bet you can find something much more conventional to invest in that'll produce big gains that can be extracted easily.

You know in that timeline you'd spend a fortune on ASIC mining hardware and the market would tank because Murphy's Law could not possibly resist showing up and ruining the party.

[X] other

Some interesting patterns in the data which don't quite line up with accepted theory but aren't statistically conclusive.

Well, that's the story at the moment. The question is what will it turn out to be once the analyses are repeated with more data.

Which event/study/? are you referring to here?

https://indico.cern.ch/event/580620/attachments/1442409/2226...

There are several independent anomalous results in measurements of b-quark decays which all seem to point to a violation of lepton flavour universality. Specifically a reduced coupling to muons.

[x] issue with calculations [ ] go away with more data [x] new physics! [ ] other

or the general answer: [x] italians

Nah, they're not missing, they just arrive earlier than expected

(ah it seems some old prejudices are still alive ;) )

I'm using CAEN (Italian company) digitizers in nuclear research, and I've expended at least 6 months sussing out firmware problems for our simple experiments.

[x++] italians

I wonder if there was another human sacrifice under the Shiva statue to mark the restart.

Only half joking. Has anyone heard any more about why scientists performed a mock ritual like that?

Because the summer students thought it would be funny to joke about the insane conspiracy theories regarding CERN

Some may be tempted to call fake news, but there was a snopes article about this stating that it was a prank: http://www.snopes.com/human-sacrifice-captured-at-cern/.

Letting loose 200 summer students will result in some sort of event. When we were getting ready for the 2008 startup of the LHC someone sent a crowbar guess how many Gordon Freeman themed youTube videos came out of that.

Specially after one of those memorable summer students parties.

I was a summer student last year, and from what I've heard it actually wasn't summer students.

As it happens, it was students, but they weren't enrolled in any sort of CERN student programme.

It's rational - it's for the greater good.

> Has anyone heard any more about why scientists performed a mock ritual like that?

Because it seemed like a funny idea at the time, they didn't think they would get caught, and they didn't think it would receive as much media attention as it inevitably did. They were laughing right up until CERN IT identified two of them as watching the original uploaded video from their network suspiciously early.

> right up until CERN IT identified two of them as watching the original uploaded video

I've never really got over that blog post[1] a couple of years ago where they smugly described passing on identifying details for an individual that pirated simulation software so they could be slapped with an enormous fine. If this one is also true then CERN IT are beginning to sound awfully eager to go straight for reprisal at the personal level.

[1] https://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2015/28/News%20Arti...

Are they homing in on anything that would excite the general public like the Higgs did?

I'm still not sure what about the Higgs excited the general public. Or why it hasn't applied to e.g. gravity wave detection, especially since that one is much easier to explain and understand.

Blame it on the decision of the publisher of a certain book to take a phrase from an early draft "that goddamn particle", drop a syllable and change anotherone and make it the title of that book "the god particle".

It catered to a certain part of the population, and snowballed from there.

Add the success of "Da Vinci Code" which has no specific relation. But then add it's prequel "Angels & Demons" which uses antimatter from CERN to destroy Vatican.

Then add the crap about LHC creating a black hole and destroying the universe and you have 500 TV stations at the launch of a particle accelerator. The specific experiment that was happening at the time didn't matter much.

Is there a chance the track could bend?

not a chance my underground swiss friend

Happy science ya'll!

Everyone don your aluminum foil hat... lol

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