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Cern Podcast

admin — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 01:03:42 +0000

You can now get your CERN info in PODCAST form via the Cern Podcast Website.

I post this in good faith that you will still come here to Hadron Hater because you love the witty comentary.

WDATAM: What Do All Those Acronyms Mean?

admin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:04:44 +0000

The Columbus Dispatch has a nice article by Kevin Mayhood called Rock The Universe where among other things they spell out what all those crazy detector acronyms stand for, and what each detector aims to do.

LHC: Large Hadron Collider (duh?)

ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC Apparatus

CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid

ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment

I think it is really hard to argue that evil conspiratorial scientists would knowingly take any odds to end the universe in a machine called Alice or one whose name is self referential acronym. (ed. note: Save the self referencing names for PHP and GNU. Heh.)

I guess you could make the argument for ALICE referencing Alice in Wonderland and her time- and space-bending trip through the rabbit hole being the same as how the LHC is a time machine that is going to suck us all into a black hole or portal to another dimension… Wait, never mind.

Two Month Delay Due To Helium Leak

admin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:26:35 +0000

For the haters out there, add two more months to wait for Armageddon.

For everyone else, add two more months to the time we wait to find out if the Higgs Boson exists.

Ctv.ca Damage to new collider forces two-month halt

Doesn’t helium always leak? It is the second smallest atom! Hydrogen is smaller but since it hangs out in pairs diatomic hydrogen is slighly larger than helium. According to Wikipedia: “…due to the small size of helium atoms, helium’s diffusion rate through solids is three times that of air and around 65% that of hydrogen.^[34]“, It would be harder to keep a 27km long tube full of hydrogen. Well, thank the engineers the LHC uses helium.

LHC Hits Electrical Snag

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:37:58 +0000

Swissinfo.ch reports Electrical fault halts “Big Bang” machine. Scientists at CERN report that a failure in an electrical transformer has affected a refrigeration plant at the LHC. Without proper refrigeration the Super conducting magnets that steer the proton beam cannot function. The issue has been fixed but CERN has not stated when the beam will be up and running again.

hadron hating hackers attack!

admin — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:50:07 +0000

Telegraph.co.uk reports that Hackers attack Large Hadron Collider. The ne’er-do-wells, a group calling themselves the “Greek Security Team”, posted files on one of the LHC systems and changed the web page at the cmsmon.cern.ch website which was, and still may be, unreachable from the outside world for security purposes. The bad men, I don’t like calling them hackers unless it adds to my alliterations, came close to compromising the network of the Compact Muon Soleniod Experiment, or CMS, and possibly gaining entry to the control system of the 12,500 ton apparatus.

The white hat part of me speculates that the intruders only wanted to test the security of the network and would not have purposefully caused any harm; however, they left a rather nasty calling card up on the website to announce their intrusion. Regardless of their possibly good intentions, the LHC researchers do not need any wrenches in the works. Their jobs are complicated enough without worrying about who has access to their systems. I suppose that, had they really wanted to harness the power of the LHC’s high power computing for their own purposes they likely would have not made their presence known.

You can see an image of the web page by visiting the Telegraph.co.uk story directly.

LHC Successful Test!

admin — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:58:56 +0000

From the associated Press, Largest particle collider conducts successful test