Those unneccesarily worried about the world’s end next week when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was scheduled to begin smashing its first particles will be delighted to know that the test has been postponed after a significant fault was detected on Friday. A technician found that one of the accelerator’s superconducting magnets was out-of-sync during routine testing.
This is of concern because the supercooled helium that chills the LHC’s magnets to 1.8 degrees centigrade above absolute zero was released into the accelerator’s 17-mile tunnel in the incident. Engineers were still investigating the extent of the problem Friday afternoon, and CERN officials could not say how long it would take to fix it or how long of a delay this will cause in the proposed atom smash.
“It certainly means we will not have collisions on Monday,” stated James Gillies, CERN’s chief of communications. “We are now looking at the middle of next week at the earliest.”
Source: The Times of London
Big bang or big bug?
That sucks, but I’m sure they’ll work it out. I hope. Even the hubble space telescope didn’t work well out of the blocks.
Atomic testing will always result in flaws because its calculated theoretically to be a product of something not understood with too many variables. Once they run the experiment they want to they will draw the conclusion of a space time influence that disrupts its path. To do this correctly requires minimizing space time to less than
an atom must hold. Its not a good idea to conduct this experiment this way, and
carries more risk than reward. This can be simulated all the same and will not
only be harmless, but could also be consistently altered to retrieve feedback.