Large Hadron Collider "Fizzles"

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.

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

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.

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

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...

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...

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"?

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

[John Hurt in Contact]