Big success at Large Hadron Collider | Hacker News Reader

Big success at Large Hadron Collider

itwire.com

19 pointsmixmax8 comments

Given that the LHC is literally the most complex piece of machinery and electronics ever constructed by man, having beams properly travelling throughout the system without problems is an amazing feat in and of itself. I fully expect more break-downs, but here's to a successful first full collision in the next few months!

> having beams properly travelling

It's certainly an achievement to be celebrated, but the beams are more like limping along:

"CERN’s director, Rolf Heuer, said in a statement, 'It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,' but he and others cautioned that there was a long way to go before the collider started producing the physics it was designed for.

"When the collider begins to do real physics next year, it will run at half its original design energy, with protons of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The energy will be increased gradually during the year, but it could be years, physicists say, before the machine reaches its full potential."

The machine will "soon" be at a level slightly above the Tevatron.

From the title, i thought they found something, but a skeptical first read indicates they just got it working again apparently, but haven't found anything. The success is, they unbroke it.

This was reported yesterday with a more accurate title, and promptly ignored:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954066

Par for the course. That is the reason you get these link bait titles to begin with, a normal title doesn't stand out on the new page in all the spam and the rest of the linkbait.

So the balance shifts towards more 'sexy' titles.

Unfortunately.

Maybe we should all spend more time on the new page to catch the good articles.

If you actually want to know all of this when it happens, they appear to be tweeting: http://twitter.com/cern I've been reading these since they started up again.

The article is sort of boasting about being ahead of schedule by a couple of hours, when originally, they were supposed to be at this point over a year ago. I'm glad they're able to get on with the creation of ultra tiny black holes and all, but it really doesn't seem like much to brag about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com