\"Doomsday machine\" fault found
 

Plans to begin smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be delayed after a magnet failure forced engineers to halt work.

The failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C.

The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.

The LHC beam will remain turned off over the weekend while engineers investigate the severity of the fault.

A spokesman for Cern told the BBC it was not yet clear how soon progress could resume at the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator.

While the failure was "not good news", he said glitches of this kind were not unexpected during testing.

Delays

The first beams were fired successfully around the accelerator's 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring over a week ago.

Superconducting magnet (Cern/M. Brice)
Superconducting magnets are cooled down using liquid helium

The crucial next step is to collide those beams head on. However, the fault appears to have ruled out any chance of these experiments taking place for the next week at least.

The quench occurred during final testing of the last of the LHC's electrical circuits to be commissioned.

At 1127 (0927 GMT) on Friday, the LHC's online logbook recorded a quench in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors.

The entry stated that helium had been lost to the tunnel and that vacuum conditions had also been lost.

It added that the Cern fire brigade had been called to the scene.

CMS (Cern/M. Hoch)
The LHC has been in construction for some 13 years

The superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9C above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit.

As a result of the quench, the temperature of about one hundred of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C.

A spokesman for Cern confirmed that it would now be difficult, if not impossible, to stage the first trial collisions next week.

Further delays could follow once the damage has been fully assessed over the weekend.

The setback comes just a day after the LHC's beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.

LOL!!!!!

i knew this would fck up

Stop smashing particles and start making tiger-eagle hybrids is what I say.

They say it was not to be unexpected... so basically, it was to be expected?

They've been in the late stages of this development for at least 5 years, because I remember seeing seminars about this about that time ago. So how can faults be expected? Faults would not be expected if they just did things properly.

ah well, they did say it was to be expected. But they will make sure they fix everything and test everything before they stArt smashing anything together, so no worries. :)

i would be worried

be prepared for the worst

Oh god, do you ever shut up?
This was to be expected in the testing stages. It's not even a major fault. And please stop saying the things you say because clearly you know nothing. You having a very negative effect on here. This machine isn't going to kill us. So please read up before you start posting false allegations and utter crap.

stop crying

am only hyping the situation up

why so serious???

:pat:

Um crying? Not quite.
Your the one looking like a idiot, nothing is going to happen so stop making a big thing outta it. Your posts have made other members anxious about this and it's. Unfair that you are causing some distress for them. There is never going to be a situation so stop posting crap about were going to die when we aren't. :pat:

am sure reading my forum posts will make members seem very anxious

for god's sake's man!!!!!

get a grip :shocked:

they dont care what i say

why make a big deal out of it

What idiots, they should've put you in charge.:hello:

mark people like you make this country a better place to live in

we need more people like you

people who will choose a good honest leader like myself

And one day before the LHC switch on, due to the Indian news coverage spouting garbage that the LHC would bring about the end of the world, a 16 year old girl in India killed herself because she did not want to see the people and places she loved sucked into a black hole that was never going to happen.

There were children terrified on that day and bawling their eyes out because of this coverage about a doomsday machine.

I even find the thread title tedious

So when people go hyping things up and playingon fears, do they ever think about the consequences of their spouting of utter garbage.

Remember a 16 year old girl was frightened into killing herself. As she was dying from the poison she took, that was why she did it. No other reason, just what the Indian media had been spewing out about the LHC.

As for the LHC, this is essentially a large civil engineering project and you expect to hit snagging issues when a system goes live. This is a non-story.

:mad::mad::mad:

i cant believe this :joker:

someone will kill themself after reading my comments about the world ending

soooo

serious

come on guys

you can't live life this seriously

it's not good for you

It did happen :sad:

Pfft for someone to commit suicide over something stupid like this... I have no sympathy. What a complete over reaction!
Anyway will people stop saying its a failure or anything if you read the whole thing properly you would of noticed that this is a "Test run" and a test run means that they are testing it for faults! This machine has never been turned on before... its the first of its kind, there is obviously going to be problems.

The machine wont be used for experimenting until spring! They are just making sure its safe and everything is working before then! Its a big machine so it needs lots of testing. That just proves how much the media twists things, read between the lines and you would understand that the machine wont even be on enough power to smash particles until spring.

If she comitted suicide for something like that is she any great loss to the world?

She was 16.

She had obviously led a sheltered life and was very naive.

To say she was a pointless life is going a bit far and is very garish.

She's a loss to her mum, her dad, her family, people who cared for her, people whose lives she was involved with, people who say may have said hi to on her way to school etc.

How sheltered can it be if she knows about the LHC?

This girl was obviously so stupid she should've been locked up for her own safety.

Not sheltered as in the literal sense. I mean emotionally.

She wasn't exactly stupid. At the age of 16 and in a completely different culture you can't comment on how you'd judge her reaction. Of course it'd different to yours, but that doesn't deem her outright stupid because you said so.

This girl was a loss to the World. She was an innocent life who made a mistake based on her values for her family and the World.

What helped contribute to her death was the despicable way the LHC was covered in the Indian media. If you look at the news piece, many people were frightened by what they had seen on the television.

The media were into sensationalising a physics experiment and giving air time to people who did not know what they were talking about.

Of the two people bringing the law suit in Hawaii, not one of them was a physicist. One was a chemist!!!

We also had this puerile nonsense when they built the Large Iron Collider in the US, and that has been running since 2000 with no ill effects.

Everyday, we are bombarded by particles at higher energies than will be produced by the LHC.

Did they tell her that? I think not, just salacious stories of the end of the world.

This girl was a vulnerable teenager, who in spite of her family trying to steer her away from this garbage being churned out by the media, ended up taking her life. As I said before, she was not the only child frightened by this irresponsible news reporting. I have read on the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today website accounts of eight year old children in utter tears and petrified that they were going to die, so to say there was something wrong with the girl is utterly insensitive.

My first degree was BSc Physical Sciences, and I did my major in physics, and one of my interests was particle physics, and I find it deeply upsetting that this branch of Physics has been so misrepresented by the media to the point that a vulnerable child was frightened into drinking poison.

I would appreciate it if the title of this thread could be changed to "LHC fault found" , or "Large Hadron Collider fault found".

It is not a doomsday machine, it never was, and to call it that is a gross insult to many of those who worked on this project and on all of us in this branch of science.

:mad:

That is a cruel inhuman and ridiculous comment. Not everyone has the advantage of a sophisticated education. Some are brain washed to be lured by superstition.

If I had to decide which was the greatest loss to this world. Yourself or the girl in question.......The choice would be very easy to make.......

The whole thing is fecking pointless. :conf:

second that.....meat headed thing to say....... even worse than this line
"I have no sympathy. What a complete over reaction!" ... talk about king of the bleeding obvious. ... nice work mate.

Is this machine going again yet? I think its completely pointless because noone knows for certain there even was a big bang, its just a theory. Its entirely possible that the universe has just always been here (even if we can't process that thought), so whats the point in trying to create conditions of something that might not have even happened in the first place?