IEET readers have weighed in with their opinions about why the LHC project kept running into seemingly endless delays on its way to running protons into each other. Now that it’s back up and operating, perhaps some of our more far-fetched conjectures will be proved wrong.
But then again, maybe not. Until the machine is able to work at full capacity, which won’t be for another several years, we won’t know for sure whether it can achieve what it was designed to do: smash protons together in tiny fireballs to replicate the conditions of the Big Bang.
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.
Thousands of the troublesome junctions will have to be rebuilt during a year-long shutdown in 2011, and engineers have to figure out why several dozen of the superconducting magnets seem to have lost their ability to operate at high intensities.
In a recently concluded poll, IEET readers were asked, Why has the Large Hadron Collider repeatedly failed to begin operating?
Other answers given included:
- Future generations are protecting us
- Divine Intervention
- Wait a minute! The universe hasn’t ended yet?
- Some amateur ramblings involving the anthropic principle, doomsday arguments
- Extraterrestrials are preventing us from destroying life
- Nobody’s said the magic word: PLEASE
IEET Board Member George Dvorsky has offered some related thoughts on what the LHC’s troubles might mean, and how our ongoing existence could appear increasingly absurd.
Feel free to speculate in comments.
I wonder how many people voted “the universe will end” for humors sake.
I think, just for shits and giggles, CERN should bring it up to full power on Dec. 21, 2012. Just to get people’s panties in a bunch.
Physics has been in the doldrums for some decades now with no fundamental advances (see Lee Smolins’ excellent book “The trouble with Physics”).
It would therefore be quite marvellous if the LHC gave new impetus to our basic understanding of the universe in which we live.
I am not phased by the teething troubles the project has faced: they were to be expected. I know of no-one who has written a computer program of moderate complexity and have it work first time. The LHC project is millions of times more complex. It would have been miraculous had ther been no hitches!
It’s a wonder to me that people get so worked up about the LHC, which at full power may be able to generate a paltry 14TeV center of mass energy, while every second of every day we are bombarded by cosmic rays with energies many times that. The entire field of cosmic ray astronomy relies on collisions that are sometimes millions or billions of times this energy, because highly energetic collisions are necessary to produce the particle showers that the larger ground based cherenkov detectors are sensitive to.
What the LHC scare really indicates is a media that would rather sell scare stories about the end of the world. After all, Doomsday is good for ratings…
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