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As I mentioned earlier the Large Hadron Collider’s (the most exciting scientific research project) launch had been postponed until October. Nonetheless, yesterday, September the 9th, all news-services were hit by the news that LHC would be launched on September the 10th, 2008 and the hype began again. The news came strictly from CERN

The first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. This news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reaches a successful conclusion.

Short reminder for all the mortals who don’t know about micro black holes and sucking the Earth into 1pixel size particle.

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype.

The reason of all the postonings are not clear enough - it’s all linked with the fact that there should be absolutely no leakages on 27km long magnets, so the particles would move with the maximum speed.

As claimed by russian scientists, there is absolutely no danger in launching the LHC, because at this particular moment there are hundred billions particles collide above our heads in the atmosphere and guess what? No black holes 250 million light years away from the Solar System have been noticed.

Fear. Hope. Faith.

Regarding to a comment in recent post about LHC I made a little research on whether the LHC is a real danger to human being or just a science project aimed to help us understand how the Universe was made.

The comment was posted by Jason:

[…]these “geniuses” already made a gigantic miscalculation and destroyed, nay, shattered one of their magnets due to a design flaw that was undetected by everyone since the original drafts were made. This is not something to take lightly. Anytime there is human involvement there is a large chance for human error. We are fucked. Don’t forget about Murphy’s law.

Although taking into consideration different factors around any project scientists can measure and estimate the error percent, but there is always a human factor that leads to an error and then… No one can estimate the consequences.

The same happened to the LHC when it was in a building stage (April 2007):

[…] The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the CERN particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded.

Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.

“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by CERN researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments. Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626728.ece

At some point Jason is right - even taking into account huge experience of engineers and scientists there is always place for disturbance, boredom, depression, frustration, nervousness, tension - conditions where any human being can make a mistake, even irretrievable one. But who doesn’t make mistakes? Only those who do nothing and solution for not making a mistake is simple - just sit in a corner and do nothing.

Latest posts related to CERN’s project LHC:

• LHC interesting facts, why the launch is delayed again?

• Interesting links about LHC + pictures

• CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Going Colder than Outer Space

• A brief overview of LHC history or what is the past of the largest scientific research project

In the series of LHC we had a short history of what’s the giant that is developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The LHC series first began on delay of the project’s launch - it should has been launched in the first days of July, then it gets postponed until August 8th, a few days before the theoretical launch the new delay has been set for October 21st. Quite a long time for an “engineer’s routine” as the news claimed it.

The history of CERN itself began due to needs of governments to invest in the progress of particles accelerators that would drive economics as the part of a huge progress in science, especially during confrontation between USA and Europe.

A quote from official CERN’s history:

While scientists in Europe still relied on simple equipment based on radioactivity and cosmic rays, powerful accelerators were being built in the US.

So the CERN was born.

CERN exists primarily to provide European physicists with accelerators that meet research demands at the limits of human knowledge.

Some of first inventions from CERN:

Notable “firsts” were the Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) proton-proton collider commissioned in 1971, and the proton-antiproton collider at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

After a few inventions from CERN in the field of particles acceleration the LHC was born, being the most aspiring invention of 21st century:

LHC experiments are, of course, being designed to look for theoretically predicted phenomena. However, they must also be prepared, as far as is possible, for surprises. This will require great ingenuity on the part of the physicists and engineers.
T he LHC is a remarkably versatile accelerator. It can collide proton beams with energies around 7-on-7 TeV and beam crossing points of unsurpassed brightness, providing the experiments with high interaction rates. It can also collide beams of heavy ions such as lead with a total collision energy in excess of 1,250 TeV, about thirty times higher than at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) under construction at the Brookhaven Laboratory in the US. Joint LHC/LEP operation can supply proton-electron collisions with 1.5 TeV energy, some five times higher than presently available at HERA in the DESY laboratory, Germany. The research, technical and educational potential of the LHC and its experiments is enormous.

Here are some cost overviews of the projec:

Magnets

CERN LHC surroundings

LHC view from the top

Inside of LHC

The total cost of the project is anticipated to be between €3.2 to €6.4 billion. The construction of LHC was approved in 1995 with a budget of 2.6 billion Swiss Francs (€1.6 billion), with another 210 million francs (€140 million) towards the cost of the experiments. However, cost over-runs, estimated in a major review in 2001 at around 480 million francs (€300 million) for the accelerator, and 50 million francs (€30 million) for the experiments, along with a reduction in CERN’s budget, pushed the completion date from 2005 to April 2007.180 million francs (€120 million) of the cost increase have been due to the superconducting magnets.

LHC related topics:

• LHC interesting facts, why the launch is delayed again?

• Interesting links about LHC + pictures

• CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Going Colder than Outer Space

First of all, let me say that none of scientific researches have made such a hype about itself and as so many people are interesting - let me post some interesting links about the CERN’s giant project + pictures

LHC launch was postponed until 08.08.08.

Short intro:

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator collider being built at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva. It should be completed and ready to start producing data sometime this summer. In it, scientists will be able to smash protons travelling at more than 99.99 percent of the speed of light with protons traveling in the opposite direction at the same speed.

WIKI’s article on LHC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

Huge archive of high-res pictures: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

About particles: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525979330&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

More photos: http://chemistry.about.com/b/2008/08/03/large-hadron-collider-photos.htm

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Going Colder than Outer Space

Based underneath the line that separates France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider has become the center of scientific endeavor for the general public to focus on. First prophesied to bring ruin to the whole universe (or at least that little bit that surrounds us), the LHC has now been deemed safe. Subsequently, knowing that it won’t blast us all (or suck us all) into a black hole, the LHC has begun commissioning.

Set to have its first particle beams injected in August of this year, the LHC must first bring its temperature down, so as to obtain the highest possible magnetic fields while consuming the least amount of power.

In other words, the over 1600 magnets that make up the 27 kilometer long tunnel must be brought to low temperatures so that the electrical current being channeled along its length experience zero resistance and very little power loss.

Currently, six out of the eight sectors making up the LHC have been brought down to between 4.5 and 1.9 Kelvin, which equals out to be around -270C and -454F. The commissioning cooling will be complete when all eight sectors reach 1.9 Kelvin. For comparison, the temperature in deep space measures in at about 2.7 Kelvin.

Needless to say, given the time that it takes to cool these objects down, and the delays that could occur if a mistake is made, the LHC teams are meticulous. “We have a very systematic process for the commissioning of this machine, based on very carefully designed procedures prepared with experience we have gathered on prototypes,” said Roberto Saban, the LHC’s head of hardware commissioning.

“Our motto is: no short cuts… exchanging a single component which today is cold, is like bringing it back from the Moon. It takes about three to four weeks to warm it up. Then it takes one or two weeks to exchange. Then it needs three to six weeks to cool down again. So, you see, it is three months if we make a mistake.”

Obviously one of the most high profile searches that the LHC will be conducting is for the fabled god-particle, the Higgs Boson. The discovery of this particle would go a long way towards the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

But there are other discoveries hoping to be made through the whizzing and crashing particles bouncing around inside the LHC; questions such as “are there extra dimensions indicated by theoretical gravitons?” and “what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?”

Posted by Josh Hill.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7512586.stm

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Going Colder than Outer Space

Note:

Collider’s launch was postponed for a whole month and now it’s to be launched on 08.08.08.