tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27361886469581059582024-03-12T21:34:53.720-07:00The Science of ConundrumsTHE IMPACT OF MEGASCIENCEAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-81798995950813815202012-07-17T13:23:00.000-07:002012-07-17T13:23:31.626-07:00Surreal Higgs Bumps The LHC<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Alan Gillis Reports</i> ¿Es macho el Higgs o no es macho? Did Alexander Calder discover the Higg's boson while inventing the Large Hadron Collider? Well, anything is possible in Quantum mechanics. Physicists at CERN have always been closet Surrealists. Their latest hat trick, Run Rabbit Run, a brand new particle, possibly the one they were looking for. Though it will take more analysis and more experimental data and maybe even a new cleaner very high energy electron-positron collider to find out. The Higgs is an important particle and central to Standard Model physics if it exists. The Higgs has to be nailed or the SM collection of interlocking theories is flawed. Without the Higgs the SM cannot account for the mass of the Universe. Ergo non fiat, no Ferrari in any CERN parking lot. And that's impossible and might start a trend if $10 Billion is not enough to prove anything.<br />
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All CERN has for sure is a new particle that looks like a Higg's candidate. And the Higgs may not be fundamental after all, only responsible for a small amount of the mass of the Universe. See the "Higgs Fandango" below.<br />
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<h3>
Chorus from The Rain In Spain ...</h3>
“As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it,” said CERN Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer (back row 2nd from left, Peter Higgs in front) announcing the preliminary results July 4. “It’s a historic milestone today. I think we can all be proud, all be happy.”<br />
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Anyway after 50 years of slaving over hot colliders, you can't blame physicists if they're partying now. It's great for morale and with the whole world watching the party, the applause from enraptured physicists, the Champagne flowing, well it's a relief for any physicist just to be human again.<br />
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Then it's the post-collider hangover and maybe we over did it. A heavy particle at 125 GeV or about the mass of an iodine atom looks good in the data but Dr Heuer clarifying "it" as a "fundamental scalar boson"? Sounds like Premature Collider Evacuation Syndrome where circumlocution pops out a Higgs, but with no conclusive evidence for scalar or zero spin from these bosons at the LHC.<br />
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The WW decay data channel should tell CERN that the Higgs decays into two W bosons indicating it is the SM Higgs with zero spin, but there is a deficit in this data both in the CMS and ATLAS experiments. <br />
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Lots of types of decays happen too and there are other puzzling deficits. Here's the <a href="https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/AtlasPublic/HiggsPublicResults">research from ATLAS</a> on what's been discovered in all channels.<br />
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There's an odd excess too. The diphoton decay channel for this new boson shows many more photon events than was predicted for the Higgs. Here's the latest <a href="http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=159&sessionId=53&resId=0&materialId=slides&confId=181298">diphoton data from ATLAS</a> in pdf.<br />
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<h3>
Higgs? Blasts Into 4 Muons</h3>
So it's premature to talk of any Higgs discovery. Maybe we have signals from one of a group of Higgs particles, but not from the Standard Model Higgs. Maybe it's just a new charged particle outside the Higgs group. Or even a composite particle. Two things we know for sure are more research is needed and CERN PR provides more spin than any known particle.<br />
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<h3>
A Simple Higgs Experiment For The LHC</h3>
The mysterious Higgs and all from a vacuum too. So why not study the vacuum? CERN already has a space-type vacuum at a space temperature of near absolute zero in its 54 km (27 km x 2) beam pipe system. This heavy Higgs field has to be inside it if it's real. Run the LHC without the protons and see if you can excite the Higgs field with the RF system used to accelerate protons. But CERN does this anyway in any proton run. Both protons and any fields in the vacuum are being accelerated. You could say the data is in. No Higgs field has been excited or accelerated or collided or found. So is there a real Higgs field that exists everywhere? Not at the LHC. <a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2012/28/News%20Articles/1459456?ln=en">No says CERN</a>, that's not how it works:<br />
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"Higgs bosons are quantum fluctuations in the Englert-Brout-Higgs field that are visible experimentally only when energy is “injected” into the field. Concentrating the right amount of energy in proton-proton collisions at the LHC excites the Englert-Brout-Higgs field, which resonates at a precise energy corresponding to the mass of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson appears momentarily before decaying into other particles that the LHC experiments can measure. Some theories predict the existence of multiple Higgs bosons."</blockquote>
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The fundamental Higgs boson decays? So far all big particles discovered at colliders decay. Why? Well the short answer is because they can. That's one answer from <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2012/jun/22/higgs-boson-particlephysics%20">Lily Asquith at ATLAS</a>. But maybe these fundamental particles aren't fundamental, but unstable composites from the bottomless pit of collider physics.<br />
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Maybe the E-B-Higgs field is unstable too. Then can CERN kick it with some energy to get a Higgs? Or is there another pathway if it is stable? An electron is stable and an electron field is stable. Do you need to kick the electron field with energy to produce an electron? Unstable particles would have no mother fields. <br />
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What CERN says above, can be translated in another way. CERN strikes a Higgs high C "energy" from its SteinwayLHC that is "injected" into the totally quiet and invisible high C E-B-Higgs field where the energy "resonates" and "excites" the field and out pops an excited real world high C Higgs note that suddenly decays into other minor notes, sometimes 4 bright photons or a trill of mi-mi-mi-mi's etc etc.<br />
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Nonsense, as we know the air here is the field that resonates with high C but there are no high Cs in it that pop out. Don't need a collider to prove that at least. In either case, with or without a collider, is there any proof of a Higgs field? <br />
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If you don't think a musical analogy works, well CERN started it. <a href="http://www.geant.net/Media_Centre/Media_Library/Media%20Library/Higgs_Boson_Atlas_Piano_Solo.mp3">Listen to "Higgs" for piano</a> at ATLAS (Bravo!) based on an actual data graph or read more first on <a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2012/28/News%20Articles/1460881?ln=en">data sonification</a>.<br />
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<h3>
Collider Artifacts Of The Universe</h3>
Back to work. Nice theory CERN (in quotes above) on how energy (125 GeV) knocks a Higgs out of Higgs Space for us to see, but it is true? Recall the Big Bang in a vacuum? No fields before then and suddenly some super-condensed energy ball the size of an orange explodes, eventually producing everything including the Quantum fields presumably now in Spacetime where everything else is too including the LHC. Unless the LHC is in some hyper-reality because 10,000 physicists concentrate the LHC into a Higgs Player Piano or anything else they agree on just by a collective observer effect you do see in Quantum physics. Which could also be interpreted as a mass delusion like dancing orbs of light over Phoenix and other UFOs the Army always flatly denies. If only the Army reviewed LHC data? Not convincing guys. Call it a night. Your wives are waiting. OK so labcoats are confusing. CERN says 9% of their physicists definitely have larger breasts. See Fabiola over at ATLAS for details.<br />
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<h3>
Shortfalls In CERN's Little Bang Machine </h3>
In reality however, the much hyped LHC Big Bang Machine or Little Bang frankly, is supposed to create similar conditions just a very tiny fraction of a second after the first BB explosion. Doesn't seem to be at all that similar. First thing you get is matter particles from high energy explosions that often decay into massless particles.<br />
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Blame that on the big Higgs field from the first BB. But then you really can't study the BB with CERN's Little Bang Machine. Fields from the BB are always interfering. Particles with mass seem to appear first and then some decay into particles without mass in these collider experiments. So the real object is not to make CERN PR a real world event, but to tease particles out from BB fields. Then why aren't there a lot of relatively low energy 125 GeV Higgs in all collider data? There aren't, indeed Higgs are extremely rare. Lower power but powerful enough colliders like the former Tevatron at Fermilab (RIP) and the still operating RHIC at Brookhaven should have seen them easily. Why does it take 8000 GeV (8 TeV) to produce a Higgs weighing 125 GeV? Well, there have been mysterious unconfirmed signals from other colliders including CERN's old LEP. But would the old data have been conclusive if it was processed by CERN's mighty computing center? Might have saved a few Billion dollars. <br />
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The new Mother Of All Colliders at CERN uses a sledge hammer to smash a mosquito to get one Higgs. Sorry, but CERN used to say they were smashing proton mosquitos together to make high energy physics look modest, familiar and safe.<br />
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Well CERN protons are heavy. When a proton at rest of 1 GeV (1 billion electron volts) is accelerated near light speed that adds a lot of mass. In the Higgs experiment CERN was using 4 TeV protons (4 trillion electron volts) meaning each proton punched 4,000 times above its rest mass weight for a collision energy of 8 TeV from just 2 protons. With on average 27 very very near simultaneous head-on collisions/explosions per 2 beam bunches crossing for collisions near twice the speed of light in a very tiny space, you get fireballs that explode. This isn't early days atom smashing. Though there is a lot of smashing due to focusing difficulties. <br />
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Millions of other collisions going on at the same time are off center elastic types, and these protons can smash each other to bits. What happens is already well known and this data noise is filtered and deleted. On a good day any of the 4 main experiments can achieve 100 million events each or more per second. But nearly all the data is noisy elastic collisions and so is discarded. Only interesting primary events are recorded for study.<br />
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Even so, there are mountains of interesting data that rush out so fast, the events have to be computer modeled if we want to see anything remotely like the original events. So it's complex software and vast computing power, that gives CERN its images and graphs and they are really only simplified schematics of strange but real events. An abstract of abstract events. How accurate are they? As good as the software, as clean as the original signals flowing through miles of fiber optics and copper wire and thousands of cores ganged together.<br />
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If you're a pro photographer working with RAW files and converters and then processing and enhancing images with various other software packages always being updated, you get the idea. No real definitive image of reality, just interesting versions. And if you didn't take the original shot yourself of something you've never seen with the shutter set to near light speed, capturing the very very insanely small, what is the image supposed to look like? What are we studying here?<br />
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<h3>
Safety First But First The Higgs </h3>
In 2 years the LHC should reach its design objective of 14 TeV collisions a little later than planned. Hot on the trail of the Higgs on a giddy July 4th, everything else can wait. A year-long shutdown of the LHC for safety retrofits including more tinkering with weak magnets, has been delayed again, now for 3 months more, so as not to stop the LHC before Spring 2013. Fine except more safety systems after the <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2009/10/lhc-beams-back-to-life.html">$40 Million accident of 2008</a>, were recommended and promised by CERN. Some safety modifications were made, and are working. But CERN is driving the collider hard, 24 hours a day. <br />
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Imagine an all electric Ferrari with an electrical short like last time. Imagine the mechanic says the liquid helium rad could still blow like last time. You want to go with a few tiny--don't mess with the collider--dimwit relief valves? You twist out some manometers for that? You need hundreds more of those in all 8 Sectors. Big ones are better remember? Gimme the big toot-toot ones you engineers said after the boom-boom-boom, when everything has got to be cooled down as cold as space. If not then it's boom-boom-boom again. This is a 10 Billion Dollar Machine. Safety first you say or gimme-dat Higgs? <br />
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As any old hand from the days of the Tevatron will tell you, every relief valve is a big problem. They leak all the time. And they blow all the time when helium pressure fluctuates as it does. And then beams dump and Cryogenic Havoc! <br />
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Could that be why CERN avoided installing them everywhere they should have before Catastrophic 2008? Nevermind, now we need them. A few tiny ones will do or maybe no collider for years. Safety, or as they might say in Collider Safety Committee meetings post-2008, Gentlemen we have a solution. Démarrons!<br />
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Vraiment? Well so far so good, but <a href="http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/beam.htm">to get an idea what power</a> one proton beam has at its eventual 7 TeV, imagine a Subaru travelling at 1712 kilometers per hour around the 27 km LHC ring tunnel. Then a second Subaru like the first but travelling in the opposite direction. All this from a little cc vial of hydrogen gas that's had its electrons stripped from its protons. <br />
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Fortunately it's very difficult to collide protons head-on. From a pokey though much celebrated start, the LHC is now blazing. CERN keeps <a href="http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/collisions.htm%20">working up the numbers</a>, hoping that at full power and luminosity it can get 600 million with hopes of a billion collisions per second. Though that's still a tiny fraction of the protons per beam. Yet if CERN loses control these beams can melt near a metric tonne of copper cooled to 2 degrees Kelvin (LHC beam vacuum is at 1.9 K) in a flash. Or burn holes right through the collider and spill liquid helium as instantly expanding cold gas that blows safety doors off their hinges. The LHC spilled tonnes of helium in the 2008 accident but due to other causes. Lost beams in a collider or runaway beams have happened before. A runaway beam of about 1 TeV at the Tevatron did cause major damage in 2003. See my article <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html">Major Failures At The Tevatron</a> that also covers 1200 faulty relief valves.<br />
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<h3>
Bottomless Pit Collider Physics</h3>
To return to what the LHC is for really. Evidently not a Big Bang Machine. No Big Bang yet, we're hoping. Not really a scalable model for the Big Bang either as BB fields distort experimental data. No way of extracting Big Bang data from a dingbat Little Bang Collider relying on Artificial Conditions that did not exist at the time of the Big Bang, like near light speed proton beams colliding head on in gigantic magnetic fields. American Baseball might be similar to English Cricket if you're a moron. So what kind of experiment is the LHC geared to?<br />
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Producing particles which it does. With more energy available than any other collider, then maybe new heavier particles. But perhaps this mania for the discovery of particles that need to be produced in colliders to be identified, as they cannot be found elsewhere in the real Universe, is an open-ended search that could produce an untold number of new particles that can exist temporarily in colliders and maybe exist elsewhere. Or don't exist elsewhere and may never have existed except inside rarefied and artificial environments like these gigantic fusion reactors that make them inside gigantic magnetic fields that CERN simply and modestly calls Detectors like CMS and ATLAS at the LHC. <br />
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If experiments are open-ended sooner or later the LHC could make dangerous collider objects like theoretically possible micro black holes. So far no experimental data show any being produced, but the race for higher and higher energy collisions at the LHC goes on. Up another big notch now from 3.5 TeV per proton beam to 4 TeV for collisions at 8 TeV and eventually to 14 TeV and that's Tera or Trillion electron Volts.<br />
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Proof positive of the Higgs is the main advertised event. But equally welcome to String theorists in the majority at CERN, are mBH from the LHC as Black Hole Factory, no longer advertised. Probable proof then of String theory and its extra dimensions and a chance to study elusive black holes, a quantum mechanical gold mine and a possible alternate for the Big Bang.<br />
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<h3>
The LHC Demonstrates Einstein At Least </h3>
Waait a minute. Isn't something obvious going on at the LHC? About as simple as OxyClean on TV. Mysterious Quantum fields hiding in a vacuum are not needed to produce a Higgs or anything else. Just watch the LHC. Concentrate tremendous energies into a teeny bit of space and matter erupts from energy. The original Energy is transformed. <br />
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Happens all the time at the LHC. Isn't that what Einstein more or less implied with E=MC^2 ?<br />
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Do we even need a Higgs?<br />
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The Higgs Fandango </h3>
Sure a particle might make sense inside a theory especially that partially predicts it, but is that why it's there? Can't the same particle fit into a better theory no one has invented yet, that explains that Theory H is suspect, because Particle H is really Particle Y which may be the case with the new Higgs Candidate. Theory H also doesn't predict the Higgs mass so any new boson lurking in the future with Spin0 might be the Higgs. The spectacular Higgs field is even stranger, everywhere, but nowhere we can find it. Thinking about mass for a minute, how does it account for the mass of an astronaut on the moon, one sixth of what it is on earth? Aha! Well physicists and CERN can answer that but don't often in all the brouhaha about the Higgs. Yes, you guessed it. There are other more important forces and the Higgs only accounts for a small amount of mass, like 1% of your body weight.<br />
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That's what they say at CERN behind closed doors. Gian Francesco Giudice, a CERN physicist, mentions it in his new book, <a href="http://giudice.web.cern.ch/giudice/zeptospace/zepto-eng.html">A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC</a>. Though you'll have to dig deep pp173-175.<br />
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"... the Higgs sector is rather arbitrary, and its form is not dictated by any deep fundamental principle. For this reason its structure looks frighteningly ad-hoc". Then he drops the other shoe, "It is sometimes said that the discovery of the Higgs boson will explain the mystery of the origin of mass. This statement requires a good deal of qualification.” And goes on to say, “In summary, the Higgs mechanism accounts for about 1 per cent of the mass of ordinary matter, and for only 0.2 per cent of the mass of the universe. This is not nearly enough to justify the claim of explaining the origin of mass.”</blockquote>
I think I just heard an explosion at Building 40, is it? From the CERN PR Machine.<br />
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The fundamental Higgs is not as important as advertised. So why fill the Universe with a Higgs field that doesn't do very much? Would CERN do that even if it could? <br />
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No, it's just not simple and elegant enough. Not Premium Grade A Physics. <br />
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Then why the Higgs circus at CERN? Why all this categorical rubbish about the importance of the Higgs? Sounds like stamp collecting for physicists, the rare penny black Higgs, but there's a serious Nobel on the horizon and more funding, certainly. In the end it's the not very likely and in basic energy terms very expensive Higgs field with little effect on the cosmos, with the very big question of gravity, unresolved.<br />
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<h3>
The Higgs Key To Gravity? H to 4e</h3>
Unless the Higgs is really a graviton and in that case it can also account for the missing 1%, plus all the mass in the Universe which then also happens to be relative. Then we have an astonishing discovery and Alan Gillis should get the Nobel.<br />
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Nevermind, CERN Like Any Housewife Wants More</h3>
Let's face it Higgs are great but what every String theorist wants is funding and a real mBH for a thesis or a knock'em dead paper. In this Brave New World finally all String theorists are proved exactly right, and that's most physicists at the LHC. Except what would mBH do? Decay says Hawking and CERN. Or you can't produce mBH says CERN at the rock bottom On Sale Now new low power LHC, confidently invoking Einstein to cool down earlier PR and excited String theorists. Other worst case scenarios aren't taken seriously as real risks. <br />
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Anything new is interesting too. Some strange particles or collider objects may have been already created by colliders. If you don't know what to look for, you might miss them entirely. Always a career risk, but there are always more particles. <br />
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If the subdetectors in the big Detectors aren't specific enough to unknown particles or the magnetic fields aren't strong enough for containment, you could lose particles you never even dreamed of. Or maybe some physicists fast asleep have found Mt Blanc closed due to strange matter "tomato paste", leaving CERN ski teams baffled. We don't really know if it's strange matter yet. <br />
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CERN has built a CASTOR detector hitched to CMS for not expected but possible events, just in case. Then the unexpected can be familiar like a bus and yet knock you down, going the wrong way down a one-way street. Unexpected Symmetry breaking if you aren't looking both ways. Or something totally unexpected as we don't yet have an infinite number of theories to cover everything happening and anything can happen in Quantum mechanics.<br />
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No one wants that many theories of course, just one Theory of Everything that includes the big fields outside, like the gravity of the Universe and now theoretical dark energy and dark matter. <br />
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Or on the quest for ToE, have physicists simply reached the end of their mindset? Now padding reality with theories and inventing collider particles to prove them? Maybe it's as simple as going off on the wrong foot, in the wrong direction. Going into the maze that has no end, when maybe you should have stopped at the Starbucks first and had a double slim latte on ghiaccio with Amaretto and biscotti.<br />
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Italians are sensible. Neutrinos travel faster than light when they jump from CERN Geneva to Gran Sasso Italy and they make better and cheaper lattes. You would too if you were an Italian Neutrino working for CERN who just passed through a paper stupido cup of espresso americano from one of CERN's autocuppa machinas. But Slim in Italia, non subis est.<br />
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The LHC is all about human ambition and imagination like other extreme sports. With no more Everests to climb, there's the power of the surreal to conquer. Build a new fantastic Everest and climb it. And take the world with you. <br />
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Except the Maya didn't bring an end to the Long Count and all Long Counts, but CERN could, on or before December 21, 2012. Or after, if the Maya got it wrong. Time at CERN might be wrong too measured in bizarre units of 1 trillion collision events, but interesting as a proof of elastic time that might be real. So how many more Inverse Femtobarns to go you guys?<br />
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<h3>
Back To Square One </h3>
The Maya would be impressed with the magic of the LHC.<br />
Is this your temple? What are you doing? You don't know yet!<br />
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In the old Mayan days, the stars told them. Outside on a clear night in Spacetime.<br />
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--Alan GillisAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-16412383857761837822011-12-30T14:17:00.000-08:002011-12-30T17:12:01.955-08:00Fukushima In 40 Year Cold Shutdown<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FLwpuyUS3c0/Tv47JhcS9nI/AAAAAAAABrI/f6Fg0wQ9mtY/s1600/Flickr_5694957357_da9c40a16b_o_Minamisoma-12mileNoGoZoneFukushimaCCj808armada2011.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 400px; height: 268px; text-align: center; display: block; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692052013824800370" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FLwpuyUS3c0/Tv47JhcS9nI/AAAAAAAABrI/f6Fg0wQ9mtY/s400/Flickr_5694957357_da9c40a16b_o_Minamisoma-12mileNoGoZoneFukushimaCCj808armada2011.jpg" /></a><em>Alan Gillis Reports</em> Nine months after the 8.9 earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese Government claims that the 3 damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are in cold shutdown conditions. Yes, if you add "conditions" which they did. At best with all the jerry-rigging to cool down the melted reactor cores and melted spent fuel pond at Reactor 4, using a mile of rubber hose to patch in new pumps, also add Temporary to cold shutdown conditions and 40 years to dismantle the industrial carnage in the Japanese government's new plan. That is if all goes well and new technologies are developed to safely remove melted cores and rods and dispose of them somehow somewhere.<br /><br />At Chernobyl the solution was to cap the disaster with concrete. There was no way to cool the single exploded reactor with its mangled fuel rods scattered in a heap on the floor. With the aging sarcophagus steadily rotting, there is now a multi-billion dollar project underway to dismantle the cap and destroyed reactor complex (caused by a steam explosion during a safety test in 1986) and cover what's left with a giant containment building.<br /><br /><strong>The China Syndrome</strong><br /><br />With 4 nuclear nightmare meltdowns at Daiichi, 3 reactors and 1 cooling pond, the Japanese situation was beyond critical. What could happen was far worse than what did happen at Chernobyl. Though with reactor vessels still holding it was thought or at least their concrete casings, there was a chance for a safe cooldown. It was a desperate gambit, a bet with a nuclear devil with a potential of more than 4 times the fallout of Chernobyl if the Japanese lost control of Daiichi. In the end they almost did loose control of Reactor 1 according to The Wall Street Journal, December 1. The 100 tons of uranium metal that comprised the core did liquefy and burned through the stainless steel vessel and 3/4 the way through the concrete containment, on the way to a China Syndrome. How did that happen?<p><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 400px; height: 320px; text-align: center; display: block; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692063551163976882" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SGEsV9cWny4/Tv5FpFYTzLI/AAAAAAAABrU/MRHWGn2k0w4/s400/Flickr_5658369556_c6886ec0b7_o_17-52LegoProjectTchernobyl-Chernobyl_edit1resizeCCEricConstatineau2011.jpg" /><br /><strong>Shutdown Cooling System Reactor 1 (Operator Error: TEPCO Report)</strong><br /><br />The problem is no one knows if the temporary Cold Shutdown Conditions will hold while extraction of somewhere around a 1,000 tons of superhot nuclear fuel goes on for 25 years. The new 40 year plan appears to avoid the need for a new and permanent cooldown system while work goes on. "Maintain stable reactor cooling" says the plan. Stockpile duct tape, hai.<br /><br /><strong>Fukushima 40 Year Cleanup Or More Cheapo-Screamo</strong><br /><br />The first target is the spent fuel rods stored at 4 reactors starting with the more dangerous melted and damaged rods from the pool at Reactor 4. That extraction of hundreds of tons of spent fuel should start in 2 years and would take around 10 years to remove. Meanwhile reactor cores would be examined and properly flooded with heavy water before workers start the even more difficult and dangerous extraction of melted cores to take another 10-15 years, then another 10 years to dismantle and decontaminate the site. That's 40 long years if all goes well.<br /><br />And what do you do about general Daiichi contamination and current radiation leaks so workers can safely extract the hot uranium? A makeshift shed for Reactor 1 now in place, but no secure containment for the old exploded reactor buildings that are dangerously radioactive with flooded basements too of radioactive water, 90,000 tons in all onsite, including some in tanks above ground.<br /><br />Use robots, build robots first, design robots before start, checkout American MIT in lunch teams for exploratory session, no try unJapanese solution first, bake many meetings, try remote Honda Prius fly in 5000 for gang-bang enemy reactors.<br /><br />Then like Chernobyl, shouldn't Fukushima Daiichi be fully shielded by a vast containment building over the entire site in case of other accidents like cooldown failure or another tsunami? At least stop any radiation release. It might be the permanent solution after all if there's major trouble with the Plan. In the end what do you do with all the nuclear waste?<br /><br />Bury it somewhere else of course, though more safely. That's possible if you could ship it all to France (Japanese problem solved) where the French have the expertise in reprocessing and permanent storage. Or of course bury it at Daiichi and go Cheapo-Screamo to save a few billion bucks. Cleanup number 2 around Daiichi is way more gigantic, over 1500 square miles of primary contamination and thousands more of secondary, and could sink Japan too as every last Yen falls into the bottomless Fukushima money pit.<br /><br /><strong>Not Saving Fukushima</strong><br /><br />It wasn't thanks to a mature nuclear industry (in surprise mode) or a wise government that had plans and answers. There was however some serious (don't panic the public) lowballing of the disaster from the authorities including low estimates on just about everything from reactor damage to radiation released and food safety. Another nail after nail in the coffin of public trust, we're so used to on this side of the Pacific, though shockingly new in a modern Japan that thought it had recovered from Samurai movies and feudalism. Suddenly safe friendly nuclear is only safe if you lowball the risks and PR the percentages to death. </p><p>Fukushima was the <a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QwtVBhT_G4w/Tv5JsD5bjLI/AAAAAAAABrg/vVUzFkx2qyE/s1600/Flickr_6017809258_6234871b54_o_Fukushima25km_SafeCastDotOrg_edit1contrast_CCxeni2011.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 320px; height: 320px; float: left; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692068000352144562" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QwtVBhT_G4w/Tv5JsD5bjLI/AAAAAAAABrg/vVUzFkx2qyE/s320/Flickr_6017809258_6234871b54_o_Fukushima25km_SafeCastDotOrg_edit1contrast_CCxeni2011.jpg" /></a>devastating wakeup call for Japan.</p><p>The national psyche where paternalism and conformity were the usual pillars of success took a hit. After the earthquake and tsunami the third nuclear shock was too great to be a game-changer. The public reaction was eerily quiet. The Japanese did not take to the streets to stop nuclear or call for the collapse of the government, apart from some mild demonstrations in Tokyo. Did not even remind the government that it failed to protect them as is the primary function of any government and why powerful central governments came into being in the first place. After all private industry can do most everything else including get us into trouble. Even TEPCO the utility in charge was not raked over the coals.<br /><br />What did happen to Japan was a kind of national paralysis. First the great tsunami from nature and then on its heels the greater man-made nuclear threat for a generation. The Japanese public could only wander through the tragedies we watched on TV. In other countries there might have been panic and riots. In Japan the nuclear disaster and menace to the future didn't need a voice of thunder. The disaster seemed to be everywhere as high as the sky, as deep as the water.<br /><br />Still who is to blame? What needs to change? Can Japan go forward if it re-builds on the sands of the past? Has the world gone forward after the financial meltdown? Still melting. You can blame the banks for the global financial meltdown as Occupy Wall Street has done and you can blame TEPCO for the meltdowns of Daiichi, but governments create the conditions for exploitation and disaster or safeguard the land and the people. Governments must change and that means the people who make the decisions. The easiest way? Make them liable for stupid mistakes like the rest of us. In most any country politicians walk away from their jobs with pensions, deserved or not. Shrugging off stupid policy or dumb do nothing that can cost us Billions is part of the political game: Public Service, win some loose some. Let the next guy fix the mess and let the public pay.</p><p>A Ray Of Hope Or Back To Square One<br /><br />At least the Japanese government did respond by shutting down other nuclear plants at risk of similar failures pending new safety reviews and went as far as suggesting that nuclear power would be phased out within 40 years. Other governments took notice of nuclear reality and international protests and followed suit. At least in Germany, the waffling over nuclear is at an end. Other smaller nuclear powers like Italy might call it quits too, but the big players like the US, Russia, China and France are still in the nuclear game at least until the next accident.<br /><br />After the initial soul-searching the picture that is now emerging in Japan is nuclear plants coming back online with some committee rehashing of alternative energy sources like wind and solar, some promises of funding for more green energy.<br /><br />In the East they say The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step. In our non-Confucian age we say Too Little Too Late. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hasn't Japan and the world been on the wrong road to power? Who built the bombs that can burn the Cauldron of the World? Who subsidized a nuclear power industry that threatens the well-being of every plant, animal and human on the planet? A thousand corporations or a handful of governments?</p><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 400px; height: 258px; text-align: center; display: block; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692077975914025042" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Gt6mwRH3Y_M/Tv5SwtwuEFI/AAAAAAAABrs/3mBMCC-qS7w/s400/Flickr_6233311423_d83c1292c4_b_IAEA-visit-Date-TominariElementarySchool_ModelRemediationProjectDecontaminationStudies_Fukushima_CCIAEAImageBank2011.jpg" /><br /><strong>Bring On The Experts</strong><br /><br />Even now the experts still don't know the condition of damaged cores and containment. As late as November there were reports of more nuclear fission products detected meaning more nuclear fission. According to the Plan the reactor vessels and concrete are assumed to be stable, but will they deteriorate further, maybe breaching during the very long cleanup? It depends not only on continuing cooling but the corrosion of the concrete. A recent experiment at MIT suggests that concrete can corrode in the presence of seawater and uranium. Emergency seawater injection was already used as a stopgap coolant with boric acid. Is it still inside the reactors or has it been replaced with the usual safer heavy water (not available in drug stores) or purified water at least? Dasani, hai.<br /><br /><strong>Saving Fukushima</strong><br /><br />When it came down to saving technological Japan from itself, it was seawater and fire trucks and firemen and the Fukushima 50 and the workers that followed, the brave few, that stood alone with a little luck behind them battling forces that could have destroyed Fukushima.<br /><br />If 'cold shutdown' holds at Daiichi (the winter will be the next stress test on the makeshift cooldown system) there's a better future for Fukushima, though there are no guarantees. Not yet for the 88,000 still displaced from their homes and farms in the 12 mile No Go Zone and the larger 20 mile exclusion zone around Daiichi. Considering the scope of the damage, both from tsunami and nuclear contamination, at best there's little hope of a return to what residents had. A promise of a large scale Fukushima cleanup starting next Spring that could allow some into the outer zone, but how do the Japanaese decontaminate thousands of square miles and thousands of buildings exposed to about the equivalent of 60% of the fallout released from Chernobyl?<br /><br />The reality so far is an abandoned Fukushima in cold shutdown and slow decay with police checkpoints about the only safety system in place. For something to do while waiting they can always read the TEPCO Report, the Government Plan and the new interim 500 plus page brick of a Government Report suitable for throwing, just out. Enough fallout there to kill every hope for no sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The usual disaster B movie stuff where you want to scream in Japanese: Everybody 'ron' 'ron' 'ron'. Stupid Daiichi, lucky monkey SOB!<br /><br /><strong>The Probable Future When Money Makes Policy</strong><br /><br />Is the Japanese government like most governments promising what it cannot deliver? If you look at the EPA's long list of old nuclear sites in the US needing decontamination at millions of dollars an acre, if you look at the vast Chernobyl hinterland how do you scoop up billions of tons of contaminated topsoil and where do you put it? You don't. Of course you can study how to do it. Remove a little cesium contaminated topsoil, plant some new rice, wait. Burn the rice and measure radioactivity left, as is being done in a few test zones called Model Rehabilitation Projects. Or tag wild monkeys with dosimeters to see how much and how dangerous the radiation is. Never mind the radioactive groundwater contamination which keeps on spreading and is impossible to stop. Gone for awhile like the hypothetical badass rapper $40Million. Back as $40Billion, on your back and in your fn water tap.<br /><br />From lessons learned, it is highly unlikely that the Japanese government can do more for Fukushima than a superficial cleanup. At present the government's plan is superficial. The first stage for the most contaminated zones, about 1500 square miles, the top 2 inches of soil (actually a little less or 4 cm) will be removed, as if there are no plants, trees and debris around. If that can be done the amount of dirt alone would fill 12,000 Olympic swimming pools. Supposedly that will remove about 3/4 of the radiation. But then where do you put that soil or are you going to try to wash it first, and with what? Then if that's the best you can do, are the former residents really going to want to have their children play in partially decontaminated zones running the risk of cancers as they grow up? Will these families actually return? Would you? Well the less fortunate who don't have friends outside or money to move are nearby in prefab makeshift housing bravely waiting to return. How long, who knows? Thousands of square miles of secondary contamination is all around Fukushima. The government has also promised to clean that up.<br /><br />The Japanese will try their best, but if this goes on for years and years at 10,000 Yen a shovelful at a time, you might be seeing fences around old Fukushima and very few people in the ghost towns and villages until the next generation decides it's safe enough to return.<br /><br />All of this could have been avoided as everyone knows. You don't build a nuclear plant in Japan near a well-known fault zone and if you do, then it has to be bullet proof and safe from tsunami, or better still you don't build any nuclear plants at all. There was no earthquake at Three Mile Island or at Chernobyl either. These were cases of Operator Error. You know the guys behind the buttons at the consoles, like Homer Simpson, often bored and half asleep, but before you laugh, it's fact-based TV according to Inspectors from DOE on surprise visits to real US nuclear plants.<br /><br /><strong>Government Nuclear Action And Inaction On Nuclear</strong><br /><br />Thanks. Now the whole world is between a rock and a hard place. For cheap clean nuclear? Since when? 40 years, maybe 40,000 vacuum cleaners and just how much cash is that Daiichi-san? You can run rural Fukushima Prefecture for 4,000 years on Duracells for that kind of money.<br /><br />Back home it's the same thing. Can't we do better than Homer Simpson For President or South Park For The Senate? Dunno. Maybe if we roll the dice like the Ancient Greeks did and elect our functionaries by lottery. From the folks that brought you Democracy. Power Ball Your House. $5 gets you the chance of a lifetime, one long 4 year lunch in Washington and your own mike on live TV. Play hard! Forget your 15 minutes of fame on Youtube with Fido. Dare to win it all!<br /><br />That'll get governments truly democratic. Might even follow the will of the people since they won't be all lawyers. The boys and gals (50-50 too) on Capitol Hill could even stop pretending there are complex issues that have to be studied to death before anything is done, if ever, like lawyers do when padding accounts.<br /><br /><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 266px; height: 400px; text-align: center; display: block; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692079241784191010" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c-0m7zXRLLc/Tv5T6Zfr6CI/AAAAAAAABr4/wTvvL_jE-EA/s400/Flickr_5606363080_4d8b1eeb38_b_AntiNuclearFukushimaProtestKouenjiTokyo_CCSandoCap2011.jpg" /><br />Stop all nuclear now, start the big shutdown of all reactors. Also the cheapest and safest solution in the long run. Follow the Kingdom of Heaven or die in fire. No metaphors needed. Ask the children of Chernobyl, the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.<br /><br />--Alan GillisAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-27993255217409396012011-03-20T11:58:00.000-07:002011-03-20T17:15:26.423-07:00Cooling Down A Nightmare: The TEPCO Daiichi Top Kill<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X7p-mhGha2I/TYZvP0QxyWI/AAAAAAAABq0/tHQPvGesUwY/s1600/ChernobylPlant_ChernobylReactor4SarcophagusUnderConstructionCirca1986_CCGnome2010.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 198px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5586274705317415266" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X7p-mhGha2I/TYZvP0QxyWI/AAAAAAAABq0/tHQPvGesUwY/s320/ChernobylPlant_ChernobylReactor4SarcophagusUnderConstructionCirca1986_CCGnome2010.jpg" /></a><em>Alan Gillis reports:</em> Use firetrucks. Hai! Concerns by outsiders like physicist Michio Kaku and <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/">NewsHammer</a> expanded in <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2011/03/fukushima-get-ready-for-chernobyl.html">The Science of Conundrums</a>, that the Japanese government and the nuclear plant operator, TEPCO have underestimated the scope of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi and so have been slow to act, are now confirmed. Unprepared for the unthinkable nothing was done the first day to cool the reactors until 4 hours after the first hydrogen explosion the following day. Overheating spent fuel ponds were ignored until fire hit Unit 4 later. With temperatures and pressures soaring, pumping in sea water was the only option, but it seems TEPCO didn't want to sacrifice Daiichi by ruining what was left of the plant. Now there's less left to worry about. Reminiscent of Chernobyl in this photo of late 1986 at the start of entombment operations.<br /><br />Using seawater would destroy their multi-billion dollar investment. The Bridge on the River Kwai dilemma, the financial meltdown of TEPCO dilemma, and the political end of the myth of safe nuclear. Not the dilemma of the destruction of life in Japan.<br /><br />The New York Times article of March 19, 2001 "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/world/asia/20time.html?_r=1&hpw">Executives May Have Lost Valuable Time at Damaged Nuclear Plant</a>" makes a compelling case for more bungling. The house is on fire? Should we use seawater? It will ruin the rugs and furniture.<br /><br />But consider the four lives lost and other workers at the plant exposed to deadly radiation, the other hydrogen explosions and fires that might have been prevented, if these reactor buildings had been vented in time. The other day TEPCO did do some venting of buildings at risk to prevent hydrogen from collecting inside. Seems big holes were punctured. Why not that first day, before the hydrogen buildup, why not after the first explosion, the second, the third and before the smaller explosions and fires in Unit 4 that threatened its spent fuel pond? Consider the blasts of radioactive smoke and dust and steam released in massive plumes that could have been avoided. If these buildings hadn't been heavily damaged, they would also still act as a considerable barrier to continuing radiation release. Why no safety systems in place to vent these buildings? Why not louvers or vents that could be manually opened when the buildings were intact? Physicists and engineers knew the hydrogen formation/ explosion risks since Three Mile Island. A much more massive containment building there withstood similar explosions.<br /><br />And now a senior government official admits Japan was caught off guard by the overwhelming scope of the triple disaster, see AP: "<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake">Japan official: Disasters overwhelmed government</a>":<br /><br />Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano: "In hindsight, we could have moved a little quicker in assessing the situation and coordinating all that information and provided it faster," he said.<br /><br />More than a week into the meltdown crisis, the experts have failed us over and over again. If Daiichi has shown us anything, once a disaster happens, those in charge not only fail to prevent it, but continue failing. This after last year's Gulf Oil Spill, where BP, the entire oil industry and the US Government were unable to prevent a simple accident, and in the first weeks were totally unprepared to deal with it, preferring to lowball the disaster and see what happens. Start the PR Machine first. Go through the motions. Look concerned.<br /><br />Is this a repeat? A rerun with new footage and an alternate ending for DVD? So where is the vast Nuclear Industry's vast response to a nuclear emergency? Where is the Task Force that should have been flown in by the IAEA? Where are the Nuclear Navy Seals? Aren't any. A few talking heads on TV. Here is an industry that thinks nothing of spending $5 to $10 Billion on one new nuclear plant, that has a thousand more reactors deployed throughout the world, but won't spend a dollar on an Emergency Strike Force. It's even afraid to stress test its reactors after the stress test at Chernobyl in 1986 that caused the meltdown and radiation destruction of a zone of Ukraine the size of Switzerland.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Nuclear Safety Today: We're Perfectly Safe Until The Next Accident</span><br /><br /><img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="http://c.gigcount.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEzMDA2NjQ1NzkzODQmcHQ9MTMwMDY2NDU4MzcyNCZwPTEyNTg*MTEmZD1BQkNOZXdzX1NGUF9Mb2NrZV9FbWJlZCZn/PTImbz1lNTE3MzIwMjA2Yzg*ZjJjYTZkNmJhOTA*ZDdkYjU1OSZvZj*w.gif" /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,124,0" width="344" height="278" id="ABCESNWID"><param name="movie" value="http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_65.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="flashvars" value="configUrl=http://abcnews.go.com/video/sfp/embedPlayerConfig&configId=406732&clipId=13173717&showId=13173717&gig_lt=1300664579384&gig_pt=1300664583724&gig_g=2" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_65.swf" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" allownetworking="all" allowfullscreen="true" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="344" height="278" flashvars="configUrl=http://abcnews.go.com/video/sfp/embedPlayerConfig&configId=406732&clipId=13173717&showId=13173717&gig_lt=1300664579384&gig_pt=1300664583724&gig_g=2" name="ABCESNWID"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Physicist Michio Kaku:"Japanese government clueless"</span><br /><br />Better to start the Top Kill of Daiichi now, but there is little discussion of a Chernobyl Sarcophagus option and no political will yet to do so. There is some tinkering though like better delivery of seawater via low-tech fire trucks hosing down Daiichi. Will this stabilize the emergency? Yes, somewhat. Steam pressure in reactors that was threatening to explode reactor vessels seems to have eased. Attempting to restore electrical power for electric pumps that may or may not be damaged that also depend on piping that may or may not be damaged, is more problematic. One new electric line to only one unit might be turned on soon once everybody is satisfied that electrical arcing in damaged components and circuits won't occur and spark more hydrogen explosions. But with miles of wiring, how long could that take? In a nuclear hot zone with the Fukushima 50 working in the dark with no power? Though more technicians and engineers are on it, about 300 called in for re-establishing electrical power to Daiichi, but how many of them on site? You might recall remote crisis management from BP Houston in the early days where tremendous but invisible resources were deployed. One cleanup crew one shovel at a time spent half a day in a media glare cleaning a piece of beach for President Obama's press conference. If Obama went to Daiichi we'd get some action. "Weather's kind of hot but we're working on AC for the media trailers as you can see behind me. Plenty of ice-cold Coors if anybody wants some?"<br /><br />If by a miracle we do get more cooling systems operating, well that's great. Except what's happening to the cooling water. Like hosing down your burning car, the water spills into the street, into the sewers and water table, out to sea, but here it's in tons per hour of dirty radioactive water contaminating the environment. Even if the old closed loop cooling system at Daiichi can be salvaged and its electrical system patched, it's bound to leak with the piping and valves cracked or smashed by the hydrogen explosions and fires. What about a permanent solution? Why not plan for the worst?<br /><br />No planning to prevent a worst case scenario at Daiichi caused the real damage in the first place that now can't be fixed. It's radiation release. At best the Daiichi Nuclear Disaster can only be contained.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Lessons From Chernobyl</span><br /><br /><img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="http://c.gigcount.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEzMDA2NjU3NTA5MDEmcHQ9MTMwMDY2NTc1NTk2OSZwPTEyNTg*MTEmZD1BQkNOZXdzX1NGUF9Mb2NrZV9FbWJlZCZn/PTImbz1lNTE3MzIwMjA2Yzg*ZjJjYTZkNmJhOTA*ZDdkYjU1OSZvZj*w.gif" /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,124,0" width="344" height="278" id="ABCESNWID"><param name="movie" value="http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_65.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="flashvars" value="configUrl=http://abcnews.go.com/video/sfp/embedPlayerConfig&configId=406732&clipId=13164457&showId=13164457&gig_lt=1300665750901&gig_pt=1300665755969&gig_g=2" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_65.swf" quality="high" allowscriptaccess="always" allownetworking="all" allowfullscreen="true" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="344" height="278" flashvars="configUrl=http://abcnews.go.com/video/sfp/embedPlayerConfig&configId=406732&clipId=13164457&showId=13164457&gig_lt=1300665750901&gig_pt=1300665755969&gig_g=2" name="ABCESNWID"></embed></object><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Physicist Michio Kaku: "Catastrophe in the making"</span><br /><br />The Chernobyl sarcophagus is now being entertained like an unwelcome guest at Fukushima Daiichi by TEPCO, see Reuters: "<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110318/wl_nm/us_japan_quake">Japan weighs need to bury nuclear plant; tries to restore power</a>":<br /><br />"It is not impossible to encase the reactors in concrete. But our priority right now is to try and cool them down first," an official from the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co, told a news conference.<br /><br />But some <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110318/ap_on_sc/us_japan_nuclear_burial">experts in Japan scoff at realistic containment</a>:<br /><br />"We believe it is not a realistic option," said Hidehiko Nishiyama of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.<br /><br />Yeah, why not? He didn't say but other experts don't want to see further damage to the reactor cores and steel vessels reinforced with concrete. Duh? So don't drop heavy sandbags or bags of lead from helicopters. Use parachutes if you're that dumb. Hey, maybe there are other options, like spray your sand and concrete?<br /><br />Others say encasing the reactors and spent fuel ponds without a cooling system would allow meltdown to continue and perhaps aggravate it like adding an insulation layer to the fire, raising temperatures inside. Yes, but you could go higher tech and allow for heat to travel throughout a thick concrete shell. So you could have passive convection cooling if you did it right. Maybe add a refrigeration plant on top? Why not work on engineering now? Hire Bechtel who designed the new confinement shell for Chernobyl that's under construction. A sarcophagus could stop most nuclear radiation from releasing, though you have to consider the "core on the floor scenario" where the fuel rods could continue their burn through the floor and rock underneath. Instead of officials saying no, better ask the best engineers what can be done. It's not a small problem unless you think that firetrucks can fix it.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Small For Profit Thinking And The Big Picture</span><br /><br />And how do we get into these disasters? As long as politicians and CEOs make the ethical decisions for us based on what an oil well or a reactor should cost to be profitable. Engineers are asked to design and build within straitjacket budgets. They see the risks, they warn the client, they warn the operator, they warn their own company, but what do $80,000 guys in hardhats and jeans know? Not as much as suits and ties pulling in $6 million a year and $12 million in perks and options and bonuses, who know they can fire engineers for breakfast.<br /><br />But there are exceptions. Some engineering firms like <a href="http://www.bechtel.com/projects.html">Bechtel</a> insist on safety and won't work for nickel and dime clients. They don't cut corners and they don't come cheap. Bechtel has the best safety record in the industry, over 20 million man-hours without a fatal accident. What they build is first class. Contrast that with BP for instance and the BP spill, with hundreds of safety violations on other projects and workers dead and seriously injured since the Texas City Refinery disaster. The stakes at Daiichi are way higher. Daiichi threatens northern Japan and Tokyo, maybe Korea and China.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">4,277 Tons Of Nuclear Fuel Can Burn</span><br /><br />The scale of the potential disaster of a full meltdown at Daiichi is now clearer, see AP: "<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110318/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_earthquake_plutonium">Plutonium in troubled reactors, spent fuel pools</a>":<br /><br />"The Fukushima Dai-ichi site has a considerable number of fuel rods on hand, according to information provided Thursday by Toyko Electric Power Co., which owns the atomic complex: There are 3,400 tons of fuel in seven spent fuel pools within the six-reactor plant, including one joint pool storing very old fuel from units 3 and 4. There are 877 tons in five of the reactor cores. Officials have said that the fuel in Unit 4's reactor vessel was transferred to its spent fuel pool when the unit was temporarily shut in November."<br /><br />---Although the earlier news on Units 5 and 6, that these 2 reactors had been previously shut down for maintenance as well as Unit 4, suggesting fuel rods had been removed, seems only true for unit 4. So five reactors could melt down as well as 7 spent fuel ponds, for 4,277 tons of fuel rods, with significant levels of extremely dangerous plutonium especially in spent fuel and in the Unit 3 reactor that uses MOX fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium. Plutonium which is produced anyway in the other fuel rods in reactors as a by-product, is way more deadly. All 4,277 tons of Daiichi fuel has some plutonium in it. How much they don't say. A pinhead of plutonium can kill a human. How many pinheads in one ton?<br /><br />Contain the radiation now or more of Japan will be threatened including the world's largest city of Tokyo, only 150 miles away with a total sprawl of 35 million people. Better start design now. It took 6 months of mobilization and engineering to seal just <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster">one damaged reactor at Chernobyl</a> in 1986 in a quick and dirty operation that cost many lives, the firemen, the soldiers, the workers on the cleanup and construction. The official numbers of dead at the site and in the hot zone and beyond in Belorussia were lowballed by the PR Machine. Claims today run as high as a million dead. Many are still dying of slow cancers.<br /><br />Unfortunately the old sarcophagus shell has been cracking for years. The <a href="http://www.nuclearpowerdaily.com/reports/Work_begins_on_new_sarcophagus_for_Chernobyl_reactor_999.html">new replacement for Chernobyl containment</a> is taking 4 years to build. Work started last year.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Japan Can't Wait And See</span><br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="344" height="288" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jvEDVuGOJ6Y" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">7 Years For The New Chernobyl</span><br /><br />With about 50,000 soldiers or half of Japan's army, its Self Defense Forces, devoted to Earthquake/ Tsunami relief and cleanup, it already looks like its entire force will be needed to help its stricken people. For the nuclear emergency too Japan needs massive International Aid, not just a handful of nuclear experts flown in from the IAEA, the US and France.<br /><br />Japan should ask for the UN to intervene. Japan can't wait and see. A consortium of the world's best engineering firms needs to study Daiichi and how it can be safely sealed, without exposing workers and the general population to lethal radiation. If tinkering fails, without a backup plan, what's the option? Total meltdown? An open nuclear fire pit threatening Japan and its neighbors?<br /><br />Michio Kaku has said that the possibility of a hydrogen bubble forming at Daiichi and blowing up nuclear cores and nuclear material into the air, is still possible, for another Chernobyl type disaster. The potential in Japan for destruction with 5 reactor cores and 7 spent fuel ponds is up to 12 times the radiation release of Chernobyl. It could kill millions.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Stranger Than Fiction</span><br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="344" height="224" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/zyHvDhILYl8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The Less Horrific BBC Version: Chernobyl 1986</span><br /><br />If Japan said yes today, and the best and brightest, the bravest, were on it now, an all out effort could still take months to stop Daiichi. The new entombment of Chernobyl has been an extreme 3 year design and engineering challenge for Bechtel and its partners. How to build on a radioactive hot zone? You don't. Bechtel designed an ingenious solution. Construction after years of bickering on who will pay, is underway to 2013, budgeted at a cost of $1.17 Billion, with delays adding to costs, now $1.4 Billion.<br /><br />Instead of risking the health of on-site workers in a nuclear hot zone, the project minimizes exposure. A monumental movable arch-like containment building 32 stories high and 3 football fields long will be dragged into place in sections on skid-like roads to secure Chernobyl for the next 100 years. It's an amazing engineering solution from Bechtel that no politician or bureaucrat would dream of.<br /><br />Still only the second installment on a long nuclear mortgage. The site will be hot for thousands of years to come.<br /><br /><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110320/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_earthquake_food_fears">Breaking News</a> from the Japanese PR Machine. Radioactive iodine 3 times normal levels in Iitate tapwater, a village 19 miles from Daiichi. It's "no danger to humans". But don't drink it, according to the same official at the same Japanese Ministry of Health. True story. Is that like Chernobyl isn't dangerous unless you're planning to visit? The gun is not loaded but do not use it for Russian Roulette. To catch a monkey you need a banana?<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Updates And Resources</span><br /><br />For updates on the International Nuclear Emergency, see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/">The New York Times</a> and check out NYT timelines and interactive features that make it easier to follow what's going on.<br /><br />The latest NYT <a href="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/latest-updates-on-japans-nuclear-crisis-and-earthquake-aftermath-4/?ref=world">The Lede Blog</a> is an overview of major developments.<br /><br />Here are 3 NYT Interactive Features: The GE Mark 1 Reactor or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/19/world/asia/reactordesign.html?ref=weekinreview">Deconstructing a Controversial Design</a>, Spent Fuel Poised For Meltdown or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/12/world/asia/the-explosion-at-the-japanese-reactor.html?ref=weekinreview">Hazards of Storing Spent Fuel</a>, and the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/16/world/asia/reactors-status.html?ref=weekinreview">Status of the Nuclear Reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant</a>.<br /><br />--Alan GillisAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-85207680637469202262011-03-17T19:17:00.000-07:002011-03-17T21:40:16.054-07:00Fukushima: Get Ready For The Chernobyl Solution<span style="font-size:130%;"></span><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fj5Hx84W72k/TYLFpNRNxZI/AAAAAAAABqs/HaiF8L3XfTE/s1600/japan_earthquaketsu_fukushima_daiichi1_march16_2011_dg_%25C2%25A9DigitalGlobeInc2011.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 232px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585243799620011410" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fj5Hx84W72k/TYLFpNRNxZI/AAAAAAAABqs/HaiF8L3XfTE/s400/japan_earthquaketsu_fukushima_daiichi1_march16_2011_dg_%25C2%25A9DigitalGlobeInc2011.jpg" /></a> <em>Alan Gillis reports: </em>Time is running out for a permanent fix to Japan's 6 Daiichi reactors in Fukushima. With major damage to four of the units, and core damage to three, the EU's Energy Commissioner said yesterday that the situation is "effectively out of control". A look at the satellite image above courtesy <a href="http://digitalglobe.com/">DigitalGlobe.com</a> makes it abundantly clear, though not clear enough to authorities in Japan.<br /><br />Japan's nuclear energy giant, TEPCO, that operates this and other nuclear plants, backed by the Japanese government is still proceeding on a heroic mission to save Daiichi from total meltdown with last ditch attempts to cool the reactors and their spent fuel ponds. Seawater injection, the only coolant option, led to the hydrogen explosions and more seawater dumped later by helicopters over the wreckage hasn't been effective. Water cannon couldn't get close enough because of high radiation levels. Most of the support staff have been evacuated leaving behind about 180 workers in the hot zone to do what they can. To limit their exposure to radiation they work in rotating shifts of 50 risking their lives in a fight that looks like it's been ripped out of the pages of history. It's the Alamo again, but if these Japanese heroes fail, it will mean many more dead, and a dead zone that could spill into Tokyo and cripple Japan for a generation or more.<br /><br />Huge gas-fired pumps have been ordered to augment cooling, the electrical line to Daiichi is being repaired, a new power line should be working today, but even if the reinforcements get inside, the earthquake and tsunami, and the hydrogen explosions, no doubt have reduced the old diesel pumps, the miles of piping and wiring on site into a tangle of rusted industrial scrap.<br /><br />If Daiichi wasn't a nuclear plant and a dangerous nuclear hot zone an army of 5,000 would have to work for 6 months to get it running again. There's no time to save Daiichi from itself. It's nearly 40 years old and failed miserably. Scheduled for decommissioning soon, but not soon enough, it's now another tragedy that was almost avoided.<br /><br />To rig it as a tomb for the reactors and their spent fuel ponds which are installed stupidly on a floor above the reactors; to arrange for round the clock cooling for even a hundred years, can't be done in a few days while a catastrophic meltdown threatens Units 1 through 4. Units 5 and 6 could be saved as the reactors had been emptied of fuel rods for maintenance before the mega 9.0 earthquake, the latest estimate of the violence of the cataclysm. Unit 4 could have been saved as it too was under maintenance but the spent fuel pond there has caught fire twice, and threatens a meltdown by itself that would also destroy its empty reactor underneath.<br /><br />So why go this route when it's extremely unlikely that a full meltdown in 4 units can be prevented? Ask the IAEA, ask CERN, ask the DOE in the USA. Obviously the Japanese are in shock or in controlled panic mode. "Endure the unendurable" as the Emperor of Japan told his people on national TV the other day. Laudable and understandable, but the Japanese can't evaluate their own tragic situation when it consumes them on every front, three disasters in one, earthquake, tsunami and now meltdown. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12765859">BBC Video on the Fukushima no man's land.</a><br /><br /><p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OZ7LXao5iOY/TYLD4J3i5PI/AAAAAAAABqk/76yzuqvVV80/s1600/Flickr_5519733290_99999bbe33_b_FukushimaTsunamiMarch12_CCBeaconFlyer2011.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 266px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585241857381819634" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-OZ7LXao5iOY/TYLD4J3i5PI/AAAAAAAABqk/76yzuqvVV80/s400/Flickr_5519733290_99999bbe33_b_FukushimaTsunamiMarch12_CCBeaconFlyer2011.jpg" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;">The Search For Survivors In Fukushima</span></p><p>The only real way to contain Japan's nuclear disaster, was proposed 2 days ago by the eminent physicist Michio Kaku. Like at Chernobyl, to stop the continuing escape of radiation, to save what you can of the land and the people, you need to act now and entomb the reactors of Fukushima Daiichi with sand and concrete, the Chernobyl Sarcophagus solution. So far no one in authority has been willing to discuss his ideas in public, and even the large community of physicists who must see the handwriting on the wall are strangely silent. Michio Kaku seems to be standing alone while his colleagues, perhaps fighting with their own internal PR demons, are strangely silent. Everything's fine. Experts are in charge. It's not my fight. Why look foolish if I happen to be wrong?<br /><br />What's not happening, is also news. And nothing much is happening. An army of physicists like 10,000 at CERN are not on the march to save Japan.<br /><br />The whole dirty nuclear industry spawned by physicists is at stake. So ignore or tangentalize or minimize any unpleasant connection to noble theoretical and experimental physics. It's all Politics and Public Relations and we are scientists. If that's not it, what is the truth? Physicists don't fcare?<br /><br />Well the same sort of selfish thinking might be going on within the nuclear industry. Admitting defeat and burying a nuclear embarrassment in low tech sand and concrete would be the end of a nuclear Japan. Motivations never admitted by the major players, but then the media doesn't ask for elemental explanations either. The best we get is a Japanese monster movie.<br /><br />"Uncontrolled burst of nuclear radiation reported, Mr Prime Minister."<br />"Hai".<br />"Strange giant sea creature in Sea of Japan."<br />"Whaaaat?"<br /><br />For the best overview of the damage to Fukushima Daiichi with before and after satellite images, see this <a href="http://www.digitalglobe.com/downloads/DG_Analysis_Japan_Daiichi_Reactor_March2011.pdf">9 page pdf from DigitalGlobe</a>.<br /><br />For excellent technical and readable updates on what's going on at Fukushima Daiichi, see this special MIT website, <a href="http://mitnse.com/2011/03/17/progress-update-at-fukushima-daiichi-31711-330-pm-est/">mitnse.com</a><br /><br />Also on the special MIT website an article "<a href="http://mitnse.com/2011/03/17/on-worst-case-scenarios/">On worst case scenarios</a>" shows that water cooling may slow the destruction of reactor vessels of steel shielded with concrete during a meltdown as at Daiichi. </p><p>In the article below from <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/">NewsHammer</a>, you'll find my first impressions of the cascade of disasters that have hit Japan so brutally. Also included the compelling ABC News video interview with physicist Michio Kaku where he warns Japan to act now.<br /><br />--Alan Gillis </p><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A_vy4XNcuzA/TX_XL5I-2YI/AAAAAAAABqU/xb2l6TxnD8Y/s1600/FukishimaJapanNuclearPowerPlant_ScreenshotExplosionEdit1_March12_2011.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 267px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584418662279731586" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A_vy4XNcuzA/TX_XL5I-2YI/AAAAAAAABqU/xb2l6TxnD8Y/s400/FukishimaJapanNuclearPowerPlant_ScreenshotExplosionEdit1_March12_2011.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;">Fukushima Daiichi Out Of Control</span><br /><br /><div><em>Alan Gillis reports:</em> The shock of Japan's mega earthquake and tsunami has paralyzed not only Japan but the rest of the world. It has been so fantastic and overwhelming, our response has been the Japanese response, a mesmerising flood of emotions staring from the blank faces of the survivors. A wonder far beyond the moment, as though time itself had stopped and entombed them and us.<br /><br />Unstoppable forces suddenly come, suddenly go while unleashing a cascade of events as bewildering as all the destruction. Inevitable consequences wash over those of us still left standing like a tangible fate that won't stop until there's nothing left. What can we do anyway, especially behind a TV or laptop? Yet there are some who can act and have the power to save Japan from a second wave of disaster. But as part of the usual status quo that rarely acts in time, are politicians and scientists going to ignore the obvious or help us this time?<br /><br />The big event still to come is not obscure, not buried in disaster upon disaster. It explodes literally at Fukushima near Tokyo, from a 6 reactor complex, that while we watch, explodes and explodes three times in a row sending out great clouds of dust and smoke and nuclear particle radiation. A 30 km radius evacuation of 180,000 people but radiation now detectable beyond Japan in the adjoining Russian Islands. Many Japanese stay put without other clear and better options. Go where, do what?<br /><br />What do we do? We watch. We talk. Foreigners scramble to fly home. Many remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Low levels of radiation still, but for how long? The best guess of an ultimate disaster brewing is that one of the three most damaged nuclear reactors, Number 2 is breached and Number 2 is likely at risk for an actual full meltdown of its core. </div><div><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">American Physicist Michio Kaku Warns Japan</span><img style="visibility:hidden;width:0px;height:0px;" border=0 width=0 height=0 src="http://c.gigcount.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0NXC/bT*xJmx*PTEzMDA*MjEwMTYwNzUmcHQ9MTMwMDQyMTAyMjgyNCZwPTEyNTg*MTEmZD1BQkNOZXdzX1NGUF9Mb2NrZV9FbWJlZCZn/PTImbz1lNTE3MzIwMjA2Yzg*ZjJjYTZkNmJhOTA*ZDdkYjU1OSZvZj*w.gif" /><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,124,0" width="344" height="278" id="ABCESNWID"><param name="movie" value="http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_65.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowNetworking" value="all" /><param name="flashvars" value="configUrl=http://abcnews.go.com/video/sfp/embedPlayerConfig&configId=406732&clipId=13138100&showId=13138100&gig_lt=1300421016075&gig_pt=1300421022824&gig_g=2" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed src="http://abcnews.go.com/assets/player/walt2.6/flash/SFP_Walt_2_65.swf" quality="high" allowScriptAccess="always" allowNetworking="all" allowfullscreen="true" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="344" height="278" flashvars="configUrl=http://abcnews.go.com/video/sfp/embedPlayerConfig&configId=406732&clipId=13138100&showId=13138100&gig_lt=1300421016075&gig_pt=1300421022824&gig_g=2" name="ABCESNWID"></embed></object><br /><br />"Sandbag the reactors" or do what the Soviets did to stop Chernobyl. (<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/how-likely-is-full-scale-meltdown-in-japan-13138100">Alternate video link</a>)<br /><br />The worst case now is not like Chernobyl, not a sudden and catastrophic steam explosion of the containment building and its reactor, releasing a enormous cloud of deadly radiation that drifted across Europe into the British Isles. Something more like Three Mile Island so far except there's no safe way to cool down Number 2. Injecting seawater to cool the overheating reactors caused the hydrogen explosions at Fukushima. Physicists knew it could happen and warnings were given, but there was also no choice they said. Something had to be done to prevent the meltdowns.</div><br /><div></div><div>At Fukushima the worst case could be an even greater disaster. </div><div><br />With failures evident and failures spreading, it seems we are waiting for a worst case scenario before we act. Then it could be too big and too late. Not one nuclear meltdown but six. Telling the Japanese who haven't left the Fukushima disaster zone to stay inside their homes and wash and dry their laundry indoors won't work for long. Watching some experts say it's too early to tell and it can't happen here is no help either.</div><div><br />Perhaps the other 10,000 nuclear physicists watching the resumption of experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider today, were too busy to notice what's been happening in Japan.<br /><br />Seriously, why the wall of silence around CERN? The foremost nuclear lab in the world always chatting up its nuclear safety at the LHC every chance it gets, and the great discoveries always over the horizon? CERN has nothing to say to Japan? No CERN plan to save Japan? Not CERN's job? Fiddle while Rome burns?<br /><br />There are pictures and video and commentators telling us what they see, but no real discussion of the events at Fukushima. Details are sketchy they say. Why? Is it the Charlie Sheen effect? No time for the real world? So we should wait? It's an International Emergency that can wait? One more day, one more explosion can change everything. If the Japanese aren't prepared to act now and entomb Fukushima Number 2, they may never be able to contain the meltdown that would also threaten the other 5 already damaged reactors nearby.<br /><br />Besides 3 explosions another had a fire around its heavy water swimming pool spent fuel storage pond. A lot of extremely hot rods close to the reactors, way more fuel waiting for a fire. The 2 of the 6 reactors not in the news, not hit with explosions or fire, also suffered some coolant loss. All this damage in one space that could fit on a big shopping mall parking lot.<br /><br />According to Dr Kaku there is only one solution and that is to bury the reactors now including the most dangerous Number 2 in sand and concrete like Chernobyl. If not Number 2 at least we could see a more dangerous Nuclear Fire and Meltdown. At Chernobyl it seems the reactor was destroyed and its fuel rods were smashed and scattered into something of a deadly hot heap of nuclear material and rubble.<br /><br />At Fukushima Number 2 it would be hotter still. You have concentrated fuel rods still aligned and close to each other, though separated by graphite rods inserted during automatic shutdown to slow down the fission reaction. The extremely hot and probably partially melted rods are all in a tight fitting mass within the jacket of a 6" thick stainless steel vessel that has partially<br />ruptured. When the steel melts away opening a nuclear fire pit how would you get close enough then to use the Chernobyl sarcophagus option? How close can you get to an open nuclear fire? Then if you're still alive try dumping sand on a fire that melts stainless steel.</div><br /><div><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iUFppoNF8YA/TX_re-9UWYI/AAAAAAAABqc/y0bCopzc7xg/s1600/Flickr_2273277067_1879aaa517_o_ChernobylSarcophagus_CCPedroMouraPinheiro2008.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 194px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584440980491491714" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iUFppoNF8YA/TX_re-9UWYI/AAAAAAAABqc/y0bCopzc7xg/s200/Flickr_2273277067_1879aaa517_o_ChernobylSarcophagus_edit2_CCPedroMouraPinheiro2008.jpg" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/uk-nuclear-chernobyl-facts-idUSTRE72E69R20110315">Chernobyl RIP 1986</a></span></div><div><br />Many first responders died horribly after extreme radiation exposure at Chernobyl and many others in the disaster zone later of slower cancers. That could be avoided now in Japan. Wait and see from physicists and government could mean six nuclear fires on Tokyo's doorstep. The scientific community which is often in its own catatonic state of theoretical R&D and pension plans needs to wake up to this emergency. After all didn't the physics and engineering branch give us Chernobyl in the first place?<br /><br />Remember the 1950's PR that started the nuclear industry? "Harnessing the Atom" as they called it. And this soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What next? "It can't happen in America" commercials and "tell your Congressman about today's safe nuclear option"?</div><br /><div>Are you watching too Mr President? How about last year's Obama on video? No nukes but go nuclear? <a href="http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/u-s-official-affirms-nuclear-loan-guarantees/?ref=science">Loan guarantees of $36 Billion to the nuclear industry</a> for new nuclear plants. What about all the unsecured nuclear waste and the old nuclear plants in the US like the General Electric design used at Fukushima? What guarantees do we have? What guarantees in Japan? And who will pay? Us too?</div><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">This Story Starts To Break</span><br /><br />Reuters Video: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=196125642&newsChannel=REMP-Article-ALL-6h">IAEA: Japan nuclear plant damage "worrying"</a><br /><br />Reuters: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-japan-nuclear-chernobyl-idUSTRE72E5MV20110315">Chernobyl clean-up expert slams Japan, IAEA</a><br /><br />Reuters: <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-japan-quake-timeline-idUSTRE72E2HQ20110315">Timeline: Japan's unfolding nuclear crisis </a><br /><br />--Alan GillisAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-32567978088496856602010-11-14T09:43:00.000-08:002010-11-15T17:55:48.556-08:00LHC Rockets Into Big Bang Space<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/TOCbRxU_ArI/AAAAAAAABpk/4w7ebtBof0c/s1600/r150431-e541464-3dv4_CMS_LHC_FirstCollisionsHeavyIonsNov8_iSpyFireworksCMS_CERN2010.png"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 225px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539598271267144370" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/TOCbRxU_ArI/AAAAAAAABpk/4w7ebtBof0c/s400/r150431-e541464-3dv4_CMS_LHC_FirstCollisionsHeavyIonsNov8_iSpyFireworksCMS_CERN2010.png" /></a><em>Alan Gillis Reports</em> As usual CERN physicists at the Large Hadron Collider have been <a href="http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1935251/cern_physicists_see_parallel_universe_possibilities/index.html">excited by finding nothing yet</a>. That's months after the <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/04/lhc-x-files-cern-achieves-1400000-of-7.html">big media event</a> March 30, 2010 for the first proton collisions at 7 Tera (or trillion) Electron Volts that smashed a few thousand protons. Like 10,000 CERN mechanics starting your new car and how-about-that bonus puffs of proton smoke out the exhaust. Not the full power perfectly safe 7 TeV proton collider from hell we were led to expect from CERN PR. Or the 14 TeV fire-breathing dragon delayed to 2013 because of safety issues and the need for a year's worth of further repairs and upgrades, after the LHC crashed in a spectacular <a href="http://physicsworld.com/blog/2010/02/_httpiopscienceioporg0953-2048.html">$40 Million accident</a> back in 2008.<br /><br />Suddenly all that's changed. From the purring collider slowly reving up in CERN's 27 km garage, there's more bang per buck from the $10 Billion LHC. From protons as fuel CERN jumps to the heavy ion run, from say an octane rating of 1.0 for protons, the new heavy lead fuel delivers a whopping 82.0 octane (82 protons in each heavy ion) and the LHC smashes all records for power.<br /><br /><a href="http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR21.10E.html">Lead ions are now colliding at the LHC</a> since November 7 and will continue for a month through December 6, 2010. A look back at <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-large-hadron-collider-protons-phase.html">this year's LHC performance</a> improvements and data highlights shows what a slow slog it's been. Lead ion collisions could radically change all that before it's back to protons and repeat the ion run for another month about this time next year, and then shutdown to rejig the LHC for all of 2012.<br /><br />The big change? No Big Bang Party for the media.<br /><br />What we get are some great snapshots of collider fire power. No champagne, no paper hats. Ion collisions more or less in line with expectations. It's of course too early to say what happened exactly, so CERN is still excited by finding nothing yet. Back to square one data analysis but with more excitement. Suddenly we have to wait again for results that could be way more exciting if there's any evidence of New Physics at these colossal new energies. That's the big deal right now: tremendous LHC power equals tremendous excitement. It's roulette on a new wheel and the sky's the limit. Wow!<br /><br />The first few lucky Pb-Pb collisions happened during the set-up phase before stable and focused lead ion beams, at in ordinary proton power terms, a low for the LHC collision energy of 2.76 TeV recorded at ALICE (bottom image) still far higher than at other ion colliders. Though the LHC is poised to go to the max soon or 7 TeV.<br /><br />Sounds too low to make a fuss at 2.76 TeV ? Yes and no. What the bigger and heavier lead ions absorb in energy and release is far higher than that. These first heavy hadron or ion collisions rocket the Large Hadron Collider into high orbit, well beyond anything done so far anywhere. According to Fermilab/SLAC's journal <em><a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/11/08/first-lead-ion-collisions-in-the-lhc/">SymmetryBreaking</a></em>, the real energy per lead beam was 287 TeV and so collisions were double that, releasing 574 TeV.<br /><br />Not exactly or maybe unofficially. CERN hasn't revealed what the highest energy collisions were. <em>SymmetryBreaking</em> bases their numbers at, in proton terms, 3.5 TeV so knock off about half those 287 TeVs per beam until CERN Big Bangs the max and says it's official. Even so CERN achieves a formidable power though why not make it clear even to Fermilab/SLAC? ATLAS shows collisions with stable beams at whatever TeV. At CMS, well pick a number. CERN has kept us guessing before during other earlier (modest as it turns out) LHC milestones. It's the simplified CERN PR approach to success: We did it! (Not at 1/400,000 of what we wanted.)<br /><br />Should get the 574 TeV full monty later this year. In 2013 in any case with a fully amped LHC or 14 TeV proton energies, lead ion collisions will be around double 574 TeV, or 1148 TeV. Even so each ion today packs an unbelievable punch.<br /><br />The applied LHC energy and acceleration to very very near light speed, makes each heavy ion much heavier and enormously powerful. A beam of these ions can bore through say a dozen meters of solid stainless steel, producing a small peephole big enough to see through to the other side. And when beams collide?<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">A Swallow Does Not A Summer Make</span><br /><br />First result: We're still here but how long will that last? CERN has only started the big adventure into the unknown with a modest display of heavy ion collisions. What we do have before the evidence is in, is apparently what physicists are calling an ion furnace where the spectacular heat of heavy ion collisions is so great as to dwarf the core temperature of our own sun, and produce a new state of matter a 100,000 times hotter than inside the sun, an undifferentiated absolutely slippery state where particles melt into a new Quark-Gluon Soup. It could be called the ultimate plasma state of matter that physicists think formed in the blink of an eye after the Big Bang. Though apparently not a CERN first or second. Recently re-analyzed data shows Quark-Gluon Plasma was produced at much lower energies at about 0.9 TeV in proton terms during gold ion collisions at RHIC. That's another but much smaller low power collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Labs.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2010/11/12/lhc-basics-what-we-can-learn-from-lead-ion-collisions/">The LHC ion run discussed in <em>SymmetryBreaking</em></a> is shooting for much higher power or effectively 14.7 x RHIC and temperatures double RHIC's or 500,000 times the core temperature of the sun. And maybe double that to a million times hotter in 2013.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The Known Unknown And The Unknown Unknown</span><br /><br />Unofficially CERN thinks they've nailed the Soup Theory and should be able to produce their own data to support it sometime in the future, if there is still a CERN around in a new altered reality being engineered by CERN now. The more collisions coming at these and way higher energies, the more data for research but also more risks of producing the unknown or some expected and maybe dangerous particles or collider objects like Micro Black Holes and Strangelets that if metastable will affect ordinary matter or even destroy it and the planet.<br /><br />Then there is always the unexpected in any new experiment and if you believe CERN they're hoping for the unexpected too. Anything would be good it seems. Nothing can be bad, as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/space/02cern.html?_r=1&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all">Dr Fabiola Gianotti</a>, team leader of 3,000 scientists at ATLAS implied recently in The New York Times:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>“We have been waiting so long,” she said. “Only good and beautiful things are coming."</blockquote><br />The problem is even if CERN gets bragging rights on more and more collisions at higher and higher and higher TeV energies thanks to greater to spectacular luminosities still years away, even without apparent damage to the collider and the world, safety is not assured by any means. For one thing particles ejected from collisions at other colliders are not all contained and some escape. At much higher LHC energies so could dangerous collider objects. Detected or not they might or might not decay harmlessly outside the LHC. If stable they could slowly grow over months and decades or who knows how long and when big enough, then we'll see the threat without the need to agree on theories and complex and mesmerizing data, too late to do anything about a matter destroying object in CERN's big backyard chomping on Geneva and threatening the earth or maybe popping out into space and destroying the moon. It's speculative but what about "Only good and beautiful things are coming."?<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/TOCcc335mII/AAAAAAAABps/MxqhLMOHxEg/s1600/1011255_01-A4-at-144-dpi_ATLAS_LHC_FirstCollisionsHeavyIonsStableBeamsNov8_ATLAS-ExperimentCERN2010.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 244px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539599561514391682" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/TOCcc335mII/AAAAAAAABps/MxqhLMOHxEg/s400/1011255_01-A4-at-144-dpi_ATLAS_LHC_FirstCollisionsHeavyIonsStableBeamsNov8_ATLAS-ExperimentCERN2010.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;">The LHC Gateway</span><br /><br />It's Reality Sci-Fi. We don't know what the LHC can do and we don't know if disaster will strike. We do have the gateway, a very real $10 Billion experiment. Besides that all we have are a few theories on safety and some reasonable assurances from other low power collider experiments plus some preliminary and minimal results from the LHC. And a lot of don't worry PR from CERN to convince us that the LHC is a perfectly safe Dream Machine that will one day unlock the secrets of matter and the cosmos.<br /><br />Not perfectly safe yet. What's not being yodeled by the Happy CERN Wanderers a stone's throw from Ja! de Alps, is the very real need for big time upgrades to make the LHC safe beyond the $35 million for the 2012 shutdown and fix, like another <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/02/higgs-discovered-at-large-hadron.html">$1 to $2 Billion extra to protect the LHC from its own mounting radiation damage </a>(another problem largely ignored by CERN when the LHC was designed and built, like those other problems of poor quality control of the busbars and poor design of the Quench Protection System that both caused the $40 Million 2008 catastrophic failure of the LHC that still needs that $35 Million in 2012 for repairs and upgrades to take a full year to go to a safe 14 TeV).<br /><br />CERN's lederhosen are down around their knees but they're still not embarrassed in public, because there's no CERN Press Release on that, so no CERN butt showing on the cover of the Rolling Stone.<br /><br />Yet the sexy LHC has another surprise in its gigantic PR closet. This one better on the accordion and ump-pa-pa if money and beer are no object, but these are hard times. Is $10-12 Billion enough and a Billion more for operations per year for the new already super expensive (so far empty) frontier of High Energy Physics? Probably, actually certainly not, but not in print please. Shhhh we need the PR first, danke. Then comes the shiny new VLHC with something like the mind-boggling power of the <a href="http://summerofscience.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/whos-afraid-of-the-superconducting-super-collider/#more-197">abandoned Texas SSC</a>, the Superconducting Super Collider now recycled into a perfectly safe (no PR intended) hole in the ground. What a collider that would have been, a ring 50 km around almost big enough for Dallas? What a terrible blow to particle physics. No wonder CERN has so tenacious a hold on its Ring of Power.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">VLHC Anyone?</span><br /><br />We still don't know if we'll get any mindbending results from this LHC and will in any case have to go higher to a galaxy very far away to give particle physicists another shot at SSC glory. Why not a souped-up version of the LHC or the Very Large Hadron Collider? Another $X Billion or more? Sure for 33 TeV. CERN has been betting on this upgrade before LHC construction ended, looking 10 years down the road, now 20 after all the Big Bang headaches. Had <a href="http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20101013/local/scientists-meet-in-malta-for-cern-conference">a big quiet meeting</a> about it in Malta recently. In for a proton, in for a Bigger Bang. But first ramp up the PR research. Develop info mazes where journalists will fear to tread. Don't say needy deserving physicists and poor unhappy half-finished VLHC. Start with Wunderbar Collisions of course. With important spinoffs for BMW and Mercedes in CERN's other bumper-to-bumper network, no better not. Life Ja! is not easy in der Furorbunker, sorry the VLHC Group Think Tank where wistfully <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2009/11/colliders-are-forever.html">Colliders Are Forever</a>.<br /><br />If all were well at CERN maybe we wouldn't mind being kidded by CERN PR. Might enjoy the thrill of the promised unknown while duped into serenity. Problem is a great deal of effort expended on CERN security and safety is largely from the clattering of keyboards at CERN PR trying to get that just right. There are of course machine safety systems aplenty and they can fail as we've seen in 2008. In the real world at CERN we can only hope that the unsung heros of the Maintenance Department and when all else fails the 2 man teams of Pompiers, can provide safety on the fly as they stand between a rock and a hard place, a stone's throw from Geneva.<br /><br />The other sort of safety is hard science, but safety papers and arguments regarding experiments are sparse and theoretical and some need revision as there are internal inconsistencies and errors. Other studies are missing. Subsequent new theories and research that bear on possible LHC results have yet to be fully considered. Worse, there are also other possible spooky interpretations of CERN's House of Cards. Here's another rare insight from the CERN shop floor, again from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/space/02cern.html?_r=2&ref=science&src=mv&pagewanted=all">Dennis Overbye's recent article in The New York Times</a>:<br /><blockquote>In interviews recently, scientists and managers said that they had been too eager to get the collider running at full power in 2008. “In perspective, we may say we started too ambitious,” said Lucio Rossi, a superconductivity expert who joined CERN from the University of Milan in 2001. One reason, in his opinion, was arrogance.</blockquote><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">A Brief History Of The End Of The World</span><br /><br />Start here. While we're waiting for new revelations there's a backlog of papers on the curious evolution of the hard science of safety at the LHC. There's Professor Eric E Johnson's monumental and entertaining study of CERN's soft safety mythos and other mystifications from a legal perspective in "<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.5480">The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World</a>."<br /><br />A summary and further comments by Professor Johnson and some CERN feedback like Why didn't you talk to us first? in New Scientist; Professor Johnson interviewed on World Radio Switzerland; these and several major articles on Johnson's 90 page paper by journalists like Kevin Hassett of Bloomberg, can all be found via links from Johnson's blog, <a href="http://www.pixelization.org/2010/02/press-coverage-of-the-black-hole-case.html">Pixelization</a>.<br /><br />Then there are dozens of my articles here in The Science of Conundrums, <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/02/large-hadron-collider-waiting-for.html">NewsHammer</a> and elsewhere, and many of them syndicated in the Chicago Sun-Times and USA Today that cover new and similar shakey ground under the LHC going back to 2007. Here's a sardonic favorite from the Alan Gillis archives: "<a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-hand-of-dr-cern.html">The Black Hand Of Dr Cern</a>". Wacky? Well compare this with Professor Johnson's coverage of bizarre safety assurances by CERN's LSAG and SPC, in section IV.G "The Rise of Certitude" pdf pages 31 to 34 from the above link to "The Black Hole Case...".<br /><br />Other major studies critical of LHC risk can be found at <a href="http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/links.htm">www.Risk-Evaluation-Forum.Org/links.htm</a><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/TOCe-c3DrFI/AAAAAAAABp0/NfWZQ9iltmI/s1600/1011251_01-A4-at-144-dpi_ALICE_LHC_FirstCollisionsHeavyIonsLowTeVNov8_ALICE-Team_CERN2010.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 294px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5539602337401908306" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/TOCe-c3DrFI/AAAAAAAABp0/NfWZQ9iltmI/s400/1011251_01-A4-at-144-dpi_ALICE_LHC_FirstCollisionsHeavyIonsLowTeVNov8_ALICE-Team_CERN2010.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;">Strangelets Yes We Have No Strangelets</span><br /><br />If it can't get any more self-serving at CERN, well there's more sauce from the gander, in Eric Penrose's recent startling and comprehensive review of CERN's creative cookie cutting strategy on Strangelets, "How CERN’s Documents Contradict its own Safety Assurances: Plans for "Strangelet" Detection at the LHC" at <a href="http://heavyionalert.org/">http://heavyionalert.org/</a><br /><br />CERN minimizes risks of whatever sort, but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet">Strangelet dangers</a> are here now if uncertain. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangeness_production">Strangelet production</a> starts with Quark-Gluon Plasma discussed above and likely produced in this first ion run. With more and more lead ions colliding at the LHC at higher and higher luminosities now through December 6, Strangelets are the new frontier in planet disaster and Micro Black Holes might show up as well. No, says CERN and CERN might be right.<br /><br />But if CERN's credibility is an issue and it is, why should we believe what CERN says? As far as Strangelets go, why build a separate super CASTOR detector specifically to detect Strangelets from collisions at the CMS experiment? To detect Centauros with CASTOR of course because CERN says Strangelets won't be produced but Centauros might be. Then why look for Strangelets? The sky cannot fall down but maybe it will. It's as goofy as that and deadly serious. Yet science journalist <a href="http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/04/5408660-physicists-get-set-for-little-big-bangs">Alan Boyle in CosmicLog</a> gives CERN a sympathetic hearing:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>The CASTOR researchers themselves voice no concern about a catastrophe. Instead, they see their experiment as a straightforward effort to find evidence of exotic phenomena previously associated with cosmic-ray collisions, including centauros and strangelets. The doomsday connection is being made by the doomsayers themselves ... plus maybe a few physicists exercising their imagination.</blockquote><br />CASTOR researchers work for CERN like BP researchers work for BP. Doomsayers work for both but won't risk being censured or banished by speaking up in public. We all wait for a maybe/maybe not accident to happen and that includes journalists. Doom scenarious don't materialize out of thin air as we find out later from journalists when it's too late. There are causes and dismissing all risk or saying nothing starts the ball rolling. Before knocking doomsayers there is perhaps a deeper pathological syndrome attached to saying or doing nothing in some cases, a conscious or unconscious death wish that gets doomsayers talking too.<br /><br />If that's unfair then we can go back to the usual argument used again by CERN outlined in Boyle's article for the shifting ground under CASTOR: That was then and this is now. CASTOR was designed a long time ago during the interminable LHC time warp or a few years back in real time. In terms of physics as understood then. To sum that up, Strangelets are not expected due to recent data analysis from RHIC's heavy ion research. "The theoreticians are changing their minds." said Yasar Onel who works on CASTOR, as quoted by Boyle.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">CERN Logic: That Was Then. So What?</span><br /><br />Fine, but think that through. CERN was building a detector for Strangelets that CERN thought could be produced at CMS then, that clearly demonstrates a disregard for safety at the LHC. CERN was going ahead regardless of consequences.<br /><br />What has changed is not CERN attitudes to safety but the theoretical nature of Strangelets, from hints at RHIC. So CERN is off the hook for Strangelet production if CERN is right about RHIC data, that Strangelets shouldn't form in very hot heavy ion collisions at the LHC. But what happens when QGP cools and decays?<br /><br />How are any of these twists and turns down the CERN maze reassuring?<br /><br />CERN didn't understand hypothetical Strangelets but now they do? Uncertainties then in physics, but not these uncertainties now? How can we be confident about the present state of theoretical knowledge when according to CERN or any physicists, physics is a science in progress? What can we know for certain? That theories change, that the sometimes dangerous unknown can rear its head? Doesn't this happen daily in all the sciences?<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Collider Good. Results Good.</span><br /><br />Not at CERN it seems. At the LHC no matter what happens we're safe from hypothetical knowns and unknowns. This at the world's biggest and most powerful machine, the biggest experiment ever, engineered for a very different scale of cosmic discoveries forced into being by colossal LHC energies, with no possible planet shattering impact or local threat? No chance? That's PR/BS. CERN has bet $10 Billion on a scaled down Big Bang. This is an event that physicists say can produce some of the expected hypothetical and maybe the unknown at the LHC. That's why CERN built the LHC to find out what will happen at the LHC.<br /><br />The amazing collider and its cleverly engineered bigger and better firestorm also has an infectious <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/rhett.html">back-reaction</a>. CERN's heady confidence in the machine spills over into the unknown results that can't be bad. Collider good, results good.<br /><br />If tiny Strangelets and tiny Black Holes (expected by CERN but also denied by CERN) shoot out of the LHC, will they ever be detected? Even if they are, what can stop them from devoring and transforming matter into more and more Strange Matter and bigger and bigger Black Holes if they are merely detected? CERN has no magic box to collect them and no charms and chains to rattle to spook them out of existance and certainly no anti-mBH or anti-Strangelets to sprinkle on them to destroy them. There's only mumbo-jumbo for planet destroying collider objects that might surface years later, though I suppose CERN's PR department is up to the challenge.<br /><br />You might read this yet in the CERN The Bulletin: Strangelets and mBH are keeping CERN physicists awake all night . . . <a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/47/News%20Articles/1306150?ln=en">but scientists have taken up the challenge and are ready for the future.</a><br /><br />--Alan Gillis<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">CERN Studies On The 2008 LHC Accident<br /></span><br />Risk Panel Report<br />Executive Summary<br />"It cannot be refuted that issues with quality and a complex and complicated design are responsible for the incident of September 19, 2008."<br /><a href="http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=0&materialId=2&confId=53467">http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=0&materialId=2&confId=53467</a><br /><br />The Sector 3-4 incident at the LHC:<br />fault tree and corrective measures<br /><a href="http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=2&resId=1&materialId=slides&confId=53467">http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=2&resId=1&materialId=slides&confId=53467</a><br /><br />Task Force Report<br />Safety of Personnel in LHC underground areas following the accident of 19th September 2008<br /><a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1184225/files/CERN-ATS-2009-002.pdf">http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1184225/files/CERN-ATS-2009-002.pdf</a><br /><br />Report of the External Advisory Committee with respect to the report of the Task Force on Safety of Personnel in LHC underground areas following the sector 34 accident of 19 September 2008<br /><a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1186208/files/CERN-%20ATS-2009-003.pdf">http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1186208/files/CERN-%20ATS-2009-003.pdf</a><br /><br />Superconductivity: its role, its success and its setbacks in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN<br /><a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-2048/23/3/034001">http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-2048/23/3/034001</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-92092482644353194932010-02-14T22:22:00.001-08:002010-04-07T15:55:29.605-07:00CERN Escape Pod Ready At The LHC<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/S3iY-pLCy4I/AAAAAAAABhk/1AVjROEqcC4/s1600-h/magnet-2007-001_LHC_HeliumColdboxTransferToCMS_CERNoutreach2007.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/S3iY-pLCy4I/AAAAAAAABhk/1AVjROEqcC4/s400/magnet-2007-001_LHC_HeliumColdboxTransferToCMS_CERNoutreach2007.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5438264752021359490" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">"Yellow Submarine" Prepared For Launch Just In Case</span><br /><br />Collider safety has always been a hot button issue at the LHC. Now we know just where that button is connected. CERN of course will say that their Escape Pod is the CMS Coldbox, and it does look suspiciously like the CMS Coldbox. That's what you would expect. Helium cryogenics are mandatory in any OMG Pod scenario. CERN like it's been telling us all along is now <span style="font-style: italic;">finally</span> ready for any safety issues.<br /><br />Hot hadrons, <span style="font-style: italic;">pas de problème</span>.<br /><br />The "Yellow Sub" project was fast-tracked years ago when rumors from RHIC of signals suspiciously like Quark-Gluon Soup, were circulating at collider conferences confirming earlier rumors from CERN's old LEP.<br /><br />Now <a href="http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1074">Hot Quark Soup</a> has been definitely confirmed by RHIC at RHIC. The soup of course is served very hot at 7 Trillion Degrees F or in Europe at 4 Trillion C.<br /><br />Enough to melt a collider or a planet or pick any star. Fortunately the RHIC ran out of collider juice before physicists could cage a sample. Though the LHC has plenty of juice, 70 times more at 14 TeV and when it comes to those heavy hadrons in the RHIC formula, the LHC can cook them up at 1150 TeV or 5,750 times RHIC's total power.<br /><br />Not exactly good news for CERN's mega-collider, outclassed by a little shrimp collider from Brookhaven. Not for long though. CERN will be making its own soup soon enough with fancy hors d'oeuvres to start maybe this March, unless some birdbrain drops another baguette.<br /><br />On the more farcical side of collider safety, I'm publishing a new series of reports on the Large Hadron Collider in <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">NewsHammer</span></a>. For collider fans and people who read science papers upsidedown like anybody at CERN who needs to find out what's really going on.<br /><br />The final updated Doomsday Report will be published here in The Science of Conundrums. Check back for the latest episode of<span style="font-size:100%;">:<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Doomsday Report: New Physics At The LHC</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >NewsHammer</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Part 1: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/02/large-hadron-collider-waiting-for.html">Large Hadron Collider Waiting For Doomsday</a><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >NewsHammer</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> Part 2: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/02/fantastic-lhc-energies-may-be-higher.html">Fantastic LHC Energies May Be Higher Than Expected</a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">NewsHammer</span> Part 3: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/02/higgs-discovered-at-large-hadron.html">Higgs Discovered At The Large Hadron Collider / More Delays</a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">NewsHammer</span></span><span> Part 4: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/02/scrubbing-cms-data-at-lhc.html">Scrubbing CMS Data At The LHC</a></span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span><span style="font-style: italic;">NewsHammer</span> Part 5: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/03/lhc-lords-of-ring.html">LHC Lords Of The Ring</a><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style: italic;">NewsHammer</span> Part 6: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/03/cern-fires-collider.html">CERN Fires The Collider</a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">NewsHammer</span> Part 7: <a href="http://newshammer.blogspot.com/2010/04/lhc-x-files-cern-achieves-1400000-of-7.html">LHC X-Files: CERN Achieves 1/400,000 Of 7TeV Potential<br /></a></div><span style="font-size:100%;"><span><br />--Alan Gillis</span></span>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-30702930650462263112009-11-28T14:50:00.001-08:002010-02-03T08:10:54.875-08:00Colliders Are Forever<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SxGpiAgUxfI/AAAAAAAABbM/iYCccLEAIuE/s1600/DysonBallVac_edit1_2009.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 263px; CURSOR: pointer" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5409291029164901874" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SxGpiAgUxfI/AAAAAAAABbM/iYCccLEAIuE/s400/DysonBallVac_edit1_2009.jpg" /></a>M's OFFICE LONDON<br /><br />What do you know about CIRC in Geneva, Commander Bond?<br /><br />Not much sir. Centre International pour la Récherche Circulaire. About says it all. They've built the world's largest Dyson Ball Vac according to CIRC PR, but physicists are a canny bunch. Half the time they don't know what they're talking about. It might look like a giant Dyson Ball Vac but it might not work like one.<br /><br />Good. That confirms our intelligence. Might not be a Vac at all. Find out for us in case it's anti-British. This is the beast, a hundred meters underground. (unrolling a giant schematic) 27 km around. A great deal of suction.<br /><br />$10 Billion to date, sir.<br /><br />Not a total waste we're finding. Picking up dust as far as London. But where are they going to put it all eventually when they shut it down for cleaning? Not our problem fortunately. Touch and go on other fronts. Accidents, some new theories on what might happen at the Doomsday Machine. But they say they've got more baffling concerns. Seems they've found a physicist in the blower, but he's not one of theirs. Looks like the spitting image of one of the Cenral Vac Café waiters, who has suddenly disappeared. Uppity sort who always wanted to be a physicist. It's probably him having a lark at their expense or he's simply lost his marbles. In any case we have a security risk. CIRC wants some answers. Problem is the waiter's spinning stories that are so fantastic they might be creditable like quantum physics theory. CIRC is bamboozled.<br /><br />Surely it's rather obvious. A personnel problem. CIRC fires the waiter. He finds another job. Hardly a security issue.<br /><br />In the best of all possible worlds. Not sure where CIRC fits in. Thing is there's a Russian connection. Our friend Dimitri Obolin, the waiter, has some support from the Russians working at the Dyson Ball from FermiBall the rival American Vac. The new Russian Upright Vac project has expressed interest in trading him for one of their waiters. Rather complicated. Camilla and HRH the Prince of Wales are due to visit CIRC tomorrow. Something about Hitler's New Bunker, no not the National Library this time. It could be a new chapter in the Cold Vac War we thought had blown a fuse. Where you come in 007.<br /><br />GENEVA, HOOVER NOVOTEL LOBBY<br /><br />Welcome to Geneva, Mr Bond and the Hoover Novotel. I see you're on Dyson business. CIRC will be covering all your expenses. There's a delegation waiting to receive you in the Poussière Dorée Bar. Your suite is ready if you'd like to shower and change. Should I say you'll be down soon?<br /><br />Bit early. Don't know if I can face physicists before supper. How many?<br /><br />Four I believe.<br /><br />Is this standard procedure? A welcome committee?<br /><br />For VIPs yes and government people.<br /><br />Then the Hoover is a CIRC hotel?<br /><br />No, it's a public hotel but we cater largely to a CIRC clientèle and the airport. The Dyson is just down the road.<br /><br />Very convenient. Think I'll look in on the delegation now. Is the suite big enough for entertaining? Do you have a penthouse available?<br /><br />Usually booked, but I can check. Yes, we have one coming up. It won't be ready for an hour or so.<br /><br />Fine, I'll have it then. Rather quiet for a big hotel? Apart from the Dyson noise and dust. I suppose people in Geneva are a bit nervous? Are you?<br /><br />About the Dyson? It's the press stories, you know, end of the world. We're used to that. Though the Dyson energies are going way up soon, Mach 3.5 if that's what you mean.<br /><br />Sorry. (turning) Is that you Q--ing? Splendid surprise.<br /><br />What on earth are you doing in Geneva, James?<br /><br />Consulting, sightseeing. Time for a drink?<br /><br />Yes, rather a good idea. Why not?<br /><br />It will have to be a quick one in the lounge. Otherwise engaged. (to the concierge) Send over a vodka martini shaken not stirred and a Pimm's Number 1 or if that's too arcane, make it a Long Island Iced Tea.<br /><br />(walking to the lounge) Sorry about barging in. Happened to be shopping at the bijouteries, clocks and watches, partly professional interest, and then I get a call. You know your car at Heathrow? Blown up. Your flat in Kensington burglarized, and you're being audited by Inland Revenue, but we think we can fix that. We don't know who's behind it.<br /><br />No, but we do have (sitting) a security breach, Q. Well? You have nothing. Is that all?<br /><br />Isn't that enough? There's a bit more from M if you'll stop being testy. We know now that CIRC owns this hotel. Novotel just runs it. Under the circumstances, better ask for another room. I'll have it hoovered for you later.<br /><br />Hoovered? Don't forget a box of chocolates and flowers for the maid. No. Listen closely. Don't. CIRC is supposed to be on our side. In the field, things aren't just technical. What else did M say?<br /><br />Your Dimitri may be from a parallel universe.<br /><br />Which parallel universe Q? The one in London? Might have mentioned it earlier. I see. Some aliens, some Russians check into the Hoover? To pick him up and take him home?<br /><br />Cubans, a trade delegation. You might recall the big Vac projects started in Cuba in the 1950's.<br /><br />Looks like there's a lineup for CIRC's Loony Bin. There's a welcome committee of four from CIRC waiting for me at the bar. Know who they are?<br /><br />From CIRC evidently, unscheduled it seems. Hadn't heard. Not on your schedule?<br /><br />Exactly. Are they official or unofficial?<br /><br />Splitting hairs aren't we?<br /><br />What do you think field agents do while you people have your endless meetings and cucumber sandwiches?<br /><br />Besides crashing cars and blowing things up? Can't say. Plenty of sweaty sex? Don't envy you Bond. It's a hard life. Not a casino girl in sight. (drinks arrive) Alright, I've finished. You're right. Looking tiresomely suspicious, this CIRC business. Did you know a CIRC helio landed on the roof here about 40 minutes ago?<br /><br />Is it still there?<br /><br />Was 10 minutes ago. Ingenious really, a special helio screw to avoid turbulence. Modified Sikorsky--<br /><br />Why the helio? CIRC is a stone's throw away. There's the Dome out your window.<br /><br />Traffic snarl. Security is very tight around the Dyson. Been here a few days. Shouldn't have bothered really. All roads closed. Some protesters packed off in Police vans. CIRC said they might try Mach 3.5 today. Rather more dust around. And that nerve-wracking woo-woo-woo. Imagine all this nonsense to save the environment? Anyway, no choice but to fly in your delegation.<br /><br />Then everything makes sense. Everything's fine. Just some extra security for their Dyson and the VIP, me. I don't like it.<br /><br />If that's all, I'd better be off. Bond? Maybe it's all routine, except for your Morgan.<br /><br />Blast you Q, you're a big help. Is M convinced I've walked into a trap? Have my orders changed?<br />Don't think so?<br /><br />Can I trust CIRC?<br /><br />Can't say.<br /><br />Think back. What did M say?<br /><br />Hornet's nest, don't spare the horses, provide assistance. 005 fell off a building.<br /><br />Fine. Now cover my back and tell London it's Jack. Do you have a wire with you? Any sort of transmitter? Can you track me?<br /><br />No, not officially on duty. Brought my wife along. She still thinks I work in insurance.<br /><br />I'm activating you Q. Now provide assistance. Think.<br /><br />Think? You mean I'm Triple-0? This is a nice surprise. Or is it? You've got your mobile? Good. Call Universal Export and slip me your Bluetooth earpiece. It's only good for 10 meters, a bit dodgy, not encrypted but keep talking and London and I will know what you're doing.<br /><br />Charming. I've changed rooms by the way for a penthouse suite, but I might be in the bar next. Keep in range if you can. I don't want to disappear. Hang around the gift shop. Buy a paper. Company's coming. (both stand to shake hands) Nice to see you again. Do keep in touch.<br /><br />Right you are, James.<br /><br />(as Q leaves the concierge brings a woman over) Mr Bond, this is Dr Ersuite from CIRC. She's with the delegation.<br /><br />(shaking hands) A pleasure Mr Bond.<br /><br />Just on my way. An old school friend waylaid me.<br /><br />We're running late. The café is full of some noisy Cubans. Hope you don't mind. Our delegation has gone up to your penthouse. Just follow me. (walking to the elevators) We'll be changing elevators up on the last public floor. You'll like the DG's suite. It's very private.<br /><br />A nice bonus. (Q comes up) Oh it's you again old boy. Feeling your oats?<br /><br />You'll never guess. Forgot this bit. Manchester United is in town. Can't make out when they're playing. It's these French papers. (unfolds his newspaper for display) Imagine, calling them boozy bastards. See about tickets if you like and call me.<br /><br /><strong>Manchester United en faillite. Les comptables en justice, ces «Boozy Bastards»<br />Alien décovert à CIRC<br />Nouvelle scandale Dyson, la «X Machine»<br /></strong><br />Sorry my French isn't up to yours. More meetings on tap. Call me in London when you get back.<br /><br />Right you are. Thought I'd hang around for supper. Superb brasserie on the tenth floor with a view, tables outside when the Dyson's off. Think I'll call Doris and make a night of it. Drop by if you can old sport. Did I tell you I found a Rolex for 50 quid? So real it might be hot, probably a knockoff, but who can complain? Here it is. A beauty. The Swiss must be slipping. Knockoffs in Geneva, what next? Here's an idea! What about going to the island later to watch The Spout? They light the thing up, rather splendid.<br /><br />Not on I'm afraid. Give Doris my regrets. If you like let's try tomorrow. Meet me here at the bar 2 PM.<br /><br />Ever try the Grosvenor for high tea and croquet? Camilla and Charles might drop by. Doris would love it.<br /><br />Perhaps the hippodrome. Now if you'll excuse us? Can't keep the lady waiting.<br /><br />So sorry. (to her) Dreadfully sorry. Thought you wanted the elevator. (smiling, wandering backwards) Well tomorrow then. I'm off.<br /><br />I can't seem to shake him. Have to keep him happy. He's on the Board of my Club. You were saying, Dr Ersuite?<br /><br />(elevator arrives) Yes, I hope you're enjoying Geneva? CIRC knows how to make their guests very comfortable. After our meeting, I might have a surprise for you?<br /><br />PUBLIC ELEVATOR INTERIOR<br /><br />(doors close) Quite. While I freshen up, you can shave your moustache, Dr Borovda.<br /><br />I don't know what you are talking about.<br /><br />Who's with you? (Bond shoves his Beretta into her neck) Where is Dimitri?<br /><br />Don't shoot.<br /><br />I'm trying not to. What's in your shoulder bag? A Glock. Not standard CIRC issue. Talk. (karate chop, she falls heavily) Three seconds.<br /><br />Oow. You hurt me!<br /><br />Broken collar bone. Anything else I can do?<br /><br />Please! I'm not with them. I was raised in the State Orphanage, indoctrinated. There are two of them. The CIRC people are dead by now. You're the fall guy. Shoot Gyorgi when the door opens.<br /><br />(elevator door opens, Gyorgi waiting) It might be a seizure. She just fell. Take her down to the lobby and call an ambulance.<br /><br />(Gyorgi leans into a kick, knocked down, Glock to his head) Ooooh.<br /><br />But he's not dead.<br /><br />HOTEL HALLWAY<br /><br />(Bond throws her flying over the body) Move. No one is dead yet as far as I know. Fix your hair. I'm right behind you. Where's Dimitri?<br /><br />(she stumbles to her feet) In the helio on the roof. CIRC wanted us to transfer him to you.<br /><br />(Bond jabs the Glock into her back, shoving her across the hall) Talk!<br /><br />They panicked, CIRC panicked. The alien story is all over the papers and they want deniability.<br /><br />Why!<br /><br />Dimitri might be genuine. He says he works for CERN Geneva, a nuclear lab, a particle accelerator, that he thinks will blow up his world.<br /><br />His world?<br /><br />There is no CERN Geneva. Only in his world. We have his ID, we have strange plastic cards, some phony Euro currency and diamonds, lots of diamonds, large stones, clear and uncut, but polished like ice.<br /><br />From where?<br /><br />We don't know. Not from the Dyson, not from CERN.<br /><br />They're genuine diamonds?<br /><br />Highly radioactive.<br /><br />What's going on at Dyson?<br /><br />I don't know. I'm with CIRC PR. They don't tell us anything. It's supposed to be about carbon capture, global warming. The Dyson collects carbon dioxide, dust, cosmic dust is what they want. That's all I know.<br /><br />Is this the elevator? Who's the Russian waiting for us in the penthouse?<br /><br />He's an American. Tall, strong like a football player. Wyman Follers. Big W.<br /><br />Just him?<br /><br />Yes, just him.<br /><br />The helio pilot, is Wyman the pilot?<br /><br />Yes.<br /><br />The helio, what make?<br /><br />Sikorski.<br /><br />Tell Wyman you had to kill me. Tell Wyman I killed Gyorgi. Tell Wyman you have to take the helio and get out with Dimitri. Will it work?<br /><br />Yes. Maybe.<br /><br />How many real CIRC people?<br /><br />Just one, a physicist.<br /><br />One too few I think. You want Dimitri and me or is it just me? But I'm the fall guy? How many are there!<br /><br />Two!<br /><br />(bang) You're finally probably right. (pulling out his phone) Bond here. Backup requested now. Hoover penthouse, Hoover roof. Intercept Hoover helio. Are you deaf!<br /><br />(phone) We don't cater parties. Strictly on our premises.<br /><br />Yes you do.<br /><br />(phone) Not on the Hoover Dam.<br /><br />Hoover Hotel blast it, in Geneva now. Call Q, call the Geneva Police and shut up.<br /><br />(phone) Geneva New York?<br /><br />Geneva Geneva, Dyson Vac Geneva, Switzerland! I'm going in. I'm taking Dimitri and the CIRC helio.<br /><br />PRIVATE ELEVATOR TO PENTHOUSE<br /><br />(door opens to W waiting) Is there some mistake? You seem to be in my suite.<br /><br />Where's Dr Ersuite?<br /><br />No idea. Are you with CIRC?<br /><br />You met her, you saw her?<br /><br />No. (Bond shoots through his jacket pocket 3 times) I'm in a bit of a rush.<br /><br />PENTHOUSE HELIO PAD NIGHT, HELIO LIT AND READY<br /><br />(Bond running) We have to go now! Bond shot W! The police are coming!<br /><br />Gyorgi!<br /><br />Get out now! We have to run for it! (a man jumps down, Bond fires twice, kicks him over) I'm a British agent with CIRC! Dimitri! Stay inside! I'm coming in!<br /><br />HELIO INTERIOR LIT NIGHT<br /><br />(Bond climbs in, two bodies slumped at the back) Anyone dead?<br /><br />Not dead, we are drugged, don't shoot us.<br /><br />Dimitri?<br /><br />Yes. Dr Dimitri Obolin, CERN. Are those CIRC people dead? They're crazy. That one said he would kill us if something went wrong.<br /><br />You're safe with me.<br /><br />We have to get out of here now. The Dyson Vac. CERN will blow it up.<br /><br />(a hoarse whisper) It's Q. It's me Q! Bond, it's Q. Don't shoot.<br /><br />Not now Q. I'm busy.<br /><br />Busy!<br /><br />Trouble?<br /><br />Not my department. Just a mad scramble. Four penthouses, yours the blasted last.<br /><br />Did you see Gyorgi? Anyone?<br /><br />Georgi the one stuck in the elevator?<br /><br />That's him. Dead?<br /><br />Gurgling a bit. And your girlfriend, dead I think.<br /><br />Any police?<br /><br />Not yet.<br /><br />Here, take the Glock Q. Watch the roof. (Bond aims his Beretta) Don't move a muscle Dimitri. No time to be nervous. We're British agents, not CIRC.<br /><br />We must leave now! Get us out of here. The danger is real. Our Large Hadron Collider is a matter transporter. It wasn't designed for that, but that is why I am here. I'm from CERN. I'm here in your world.<br /><br />That's a matter of opinion.<br /><br />How else did I get here?<br /><br />People believe strange stories. People tell strange stories. Especially in my line of work.<br /><br />Your Dyson Vac, isn't it dangerous?<br /><br />Not if it's a Vac.<br /><br />Is it a Vac? Ask Dr Vander here. He's with CIRC.<br /><br />Yes, Vander, Dr Vander. I'm a nuclear physicist. Who are you? Let me think.<br /><br />Is the Dyson a Vac?<br /><br />Not exactly. The Dyson captures dust and CO2 but there is some strange cosmic energy that CIRC claims it is capturing. It makes no sense to me.<br /><br />Let me speak, I'm Dr Vander. I think we have found some new energy. We can condense it, but we can't analyze it yet. It is something physical and unknown.<br /><br />Is it dangerous?<br /><br />We don't know yet. In our detectors diamond becomes highly radioactive. We call it dark energy.<br />Dr Vander, do you believe Dimitri?<br /><br />Yes and no. Well his quantum chromodynamics are interesting. They might apply to ours but it would take weeks of computing and analysis. What he says only a physicist could invent. CIRC is embarrassed. They don't want to find out if he is right or wrong. They want to get rid of him. The DG told me at the last minute we had to transfer Dr Obolin to the British. No one will take us seriously if we have an alien at CIRC.<br /><br />So we can't trust CIRC?<br /><br />Of course you can trust CIRC. We are scientists. Our goals are more science, more knowledge. Certainly the Vac is not perfectly safe. It might fall through the earth like a stone through water. Anything is possible in quantum physics. But is the impossible likely? Dr Obolin has to be a fake, but is he lying?<br /><br />What about CERN, Dimitri? Is what they are doing safe?<br /><br />Last week I would have said yes. Now I'm very worried. At never before seen energies, the LHC could surprise us. ALICE especially when we fire heavy lead nuclei beams at each other. It is an enormous particle collider, but the end is nuclear fusion. We didn't know, we still don't know about your parallel world. Our physics doesn't predict it. Our physics is obviously incomplete as is yours. If our worlds share the same matter we are mutually interdependent. It might only be clear in nuclear events, the destruction or creation of matter. When something nuclear happens at CERN, the Dyson will be affected. And vice-versa. Dr Vander, do you get unexplained nuclear events?<br /><br />Listen everybody! (Dr Vander was yelling) Maybe we can prove what Dimitri says! We know about nuclear fission and fusion, but we think it's too dangerous to apply. Everyone knows there are strange events in many places. Energy vortices we cannot explain all over France. Some in Italy, in England, in Russia, China, in the United States. In 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki disintegrated and many people vanished, many were horribly sick.<br /><br />In my world, we have about 2,000 nuclear reactors, fission reactors using enriched uranium. We're producing plutonium! With nuclear fission weapons in 1945 we destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.<br /><br />Dr Obolin, this is theoretically possible. Technically possible. Many years ago we had an experimental reactor in Chicago. We made some plutonium.<br /><br />Bond! Time for a reality check. Are we waiting for more trouble? CIRC is bloody well going to change their minds about dumping Dimitri when they find out how desperate the Russians are to get him. And what about the Russians? What are they doing now? They're expecting our CIRC helio and Dimitri. Let's get out of here!<br /><br />(rotors start turning) Right Q. You're making sense. Hop in, we're going. Helmets on everyone. Pass them around Q. Buckle in. Radios on. Hear me?<br /><br />HELIO LIFTOFF AND FLIGHT<br /><br />Fine, yes, OK.<br /><br />Bond, what's Jack anyway?<br /><br />A bolthole in Evian. We fly south over Lake Leman. We land at the Grand Hotel. We drive away. Just don't want us shot down. Wait! I've still got Universal on the line. Bond here! Do not shoot down CIRC helio! Yell back! Heading for Evian. Take off your helmet Q. Talk to Universal!<br /><br />You didn't tell them to shoot us down!<br /><br />Of course I didn't. I asked for backup, for intercept. See anybody Q?<br /><br />Your phone is dead, Bond. Look! Blinky light flying, port side high. Kill all your lights. Would CIRC shoot us down?<br /><br />It's their helio.<br /><br />Good point. Rather expensive piece of equipment. What's the radar say?<br /><br />(a tense moment) Blinky light closing. We're changing course for Lausanne. Know of any Russian presence in the area?<br /><br />Small jets fly into Geneva all the time, UNESCO and another half dozen UN agencies. That would be it. Occasional private yacht might have a helio, but I'm guessing.<br /><br />Yes. It's the Russians. No radio contact. It's their getaway jet. They're fast, faster than us, flying loop the loop to keep behind us.<br /><br />Why don't they shoot us down?<br /><br />Maybe they're not sure it's us, or they don't have a missile. If we give them more time, they'll think of something. An RPG, or buzzing us into the drink. Burn us some way. I'm going to radio the airport Lausanne. Mayday! Mayday! Medical emergency. Requesting permission to land. Lausanne, do you copy?<br /><br />Roger that. Identify yourself over?<br /><br />UN helio B7471, Uncle Norman Bob 7471 from Geneva. United Nations flight. Request permission to land, over.<br /><br />Roger that UN B7471. You are cleared to approach. Proceed to helio pad 1, main terminal roof, over.<br /><br />Roger that Lausanne.<br /><br />Proceed due west, via runway 40 airspace, over.<br /><br />Proceeding due west via 40, four zero runway space, do you copy?<br /><br />Roger.<br /><br />ETA in 11 minutes, over.<br /><br />Roger. Light winds 5 knots North by North West, over.<br /><br />Winds North by North West 5 knots. Radio static, static building, static total, over. Can't hear you Lausanne, radio static over.<br /><br />It's not the radio Bond. It's the Dyson Ball. Fire! It's bleeding orange. Over there! The sky is cracking!<br /><br />Copyright (c) Alan Gillis 2009 All Rights ReservedAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-64949130545570090722009-10-26T13:30:00.000-07:002009-10-27T01:40:41.150-07:00LHC Beams Back To Life<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SuaovTm7UXI/AAAAAAAABZw/HABAgfuSxSY/s1600-h/LHC_TestWeekEnd_26OctoberCERN2009.png"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 273px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397186734120980850" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SuaovTm7UXI/AAAAAAAABZw/HABAgfuSxSY/s400/LHC_TestWeekEnd_26OctoberCERN2009.png" /></a>After a major accident a year ago and $40 Million to fix it, <a href="http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2009/091026.html">CERN quietly announced today that the LHC has passed some preliminary tests</a> on its way to a restart this November. Some low power proton beams generated by the pre-accelerators were injected into parts of the LHC 27 km magnetic ring, one travelling into the LHCb detector. Like turning on the tap to see if a mended pot will leak. So far so good.<br /><br />Good news for the army of some 10,000 engineers, technicians and physicists who have been sadly busy for a year fixing broken and damaged equipment and redesigning some of the safety systems that failed and some that were inadequate to signal an impending failure.<br /><br />In one of the 13,000 Amp power circuits last year a single poor busbar splice between two giant cylinder magnets melted without warning, among thousands of other such splices. That burned a hole in the cooling system and with the tremendous amount of pressure in the liquid superfluid helium, there was an explosive eruption of 4 tons of 1.9K ultracold coolant that the few safety valves nearby couldn't handle. Fortunately no one was hurt and doubly fortunate there were no beams running at the time. This was a Massive Quench at the collider where not only 50 or so 10 meter and longer ring magnets were damaged in the exploding cascade, but the Quench Protection System failed to stop it. If there had been beams they would have gone astray no longer contained by the dead magnets, cutting through anything in their path in the blink of an eye.<br /><br />It's the kind of accident The Science of Conundrums has been warning CERN about for a year before it happened. No other news outlets and not even science magazines and journals contacted by us were interested in following this lead until after the accident. Even CERN was reluctant to reveal its scope and seriousness, still as of this August calling it "the incident of 19 September 2008" and dismissing it as collider "teething troubles" soon after "the incident" while suggesting repairs would suffice to get the LHC online again soon.<br /><br /><div><div><a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-quench-stops-cern-re-start-delayed.html">Even on the day of the accident, according to Scientific American, "CERN said on Friday that "The LHC is on course for [its] first collisions in a matter of weeks", just a day later it announced the minimum two-month repair job."</a></div><br /><div>Not soon, and not just repairs. A long and closer look at the collider by CERN determined that there were thousands of similar defective busbar splices that could fail. That to avoid another accident equipment will have to be installed to monitor the resistance developing in any high tension splices while the weakest ones would have to be replaced, eventually all defective busbars replaced so the LHC could run at design energies. That many more safety relief valves would have to be installed, indeed the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8270427.stm">Quench Protection System would have to be redesigned</a>. Even so a recent <a href="http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1028389">CERN Press Release of August 6, 2009 </a>cited also below, avoids a full account and plays down some loose ends. "However, there remain a number of cases where the resistance in the copper stabilizer connections is higher than it should be for running at full energy." . . . "This means that no more repairs are necessary for safe running this year and next."</div><br /><div>Are they all fixed or not? OK, good enough. But The New York Times reports, finally getting fed up, August 3, 2009 in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/science/space/04collide.html">Giant Particle Collider Struggles</a>, that Steve Myers, Head of Accelerators said in a recent interview that 5,000 splices will have to be redone. Does Dr Gillies also have a law degree he's not telling us about?</div><br /><div>In any case the accident shouldn't have come as a surprise to collider men. Back in 2000, <a href="http://cernsearch.web.cern.ch/cernsearch/Default.aspx?query=Minutes%20of%20EEWG%20Meetings%20held%20on%2003/05/2000%20and%2017/05/2000">CERN's EEWG</a> had been experimenting with a new type of busbar design for easier much more rapid production. Minutes of their meetings demonstrate the team was well aware that busbars were crucial elements and could fail in various ways even unexpectantly after 4 years in service as one had at DESY. In their discussions full testing of each splice was difficult, costly and time-consuming. Testing at superfluid helium temperatures was also ruled out as impracticable. Sample testing was done using much warmer liquid nitrogen even though they wanted to avoid a "black sheep" getting through. </div><br /><div>If CERN could have tested each of the 10,000 busbars, all in fact unique, because soldered together by hand one at a time, they would have avoided "the incident" aye an' forsooth Jim, and saved $40 Million and a year's downtime.<br /><br />Even just before the accident and the big First Beam media event, CERN was sanguine nothing would go wrong, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. 5 TeV before winter shutdown and 7 TeV before that magnet trouble. (See NYT above.) The media event cemented grins in place. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing went wrong! Even if the much feared test was really no test of the accelerator accelerating and the collider not colliding anything that day, CERN had the media and the public in its lap, tails wagging all day long. A triumph.</div><br /><div>Then 8 days later the LHC failed catastrophically with no beams.</div><br /><div>Now after a sober reapraisal and with a <a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000704">new Director General of CERN, Dr Rolf-Dieter Heuer </a>from DESY taking office this January, there's a new spirit of caution. Like the low key unannounced LHC tests this past weekend. The modest report of their success. Much more important, more openness, more communication at CERN on the progress of repairs and an announcement this summer that 3.5 TeV would be the maximum per beam, until later. Presumeably modifications to design and equipment would have to be installed along the way to ramp up to higher energies safely. A breath of sanity at last.<br /><br />How long will that take? According to the <a href="http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1028389">August 6, 2009 CERN Press Release</a>, much sooner than I think, well before what is humanly possible.<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><blockquote>The procedure for the 2009 start-up will be to inject and capture beams in each direction, take collision data for a few shifts at the injection energy [0.45 TeV], and then commission the ramp to higher energy. The first high-energy data should be collected a few weeks after the first beam of 2009 is injected. The LHC will run at 3.5 TeV per beam until a significant data sample has been collected and the operations team has gained experience in running the machine. Thereafter, with the benefit of that experience, the energy will be taken towards 5 TeV per beam. At the end of 2010, the LHC will be run with lead ions for the first time. After that, the LHC will shut down and work will begin on moving the machine towards 7 TeV per beam.<br /></blockquote><br /><br /><br /><div>That's still a guns blazing shootout at Boot Hill. Injection accomplished [September!]. Circulate beams [November?]. Collisions at 0.9 TeV [December?], then let her have it boys: 3.5 TeV and 7 TeV collisions and maybe a slow draw for 5 TeV and 10 TeV collisions, with some real heavy lead shot at [???? TeV?] for the [2010!] finale. Go for broke y'all at 7 and 14 TeV in [2011?]</div><div><br /></div><div></div><div></div><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 230px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397186416686852450" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/Suaoc1Eu6WI/AAAAAAAABZo/SAZOj5cP6lM/s400/buergle_mathe_KnarsBuch1966.jpg" />Sure about that? Nope.<br /><br /><div><a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1187270">At a CERN meeting recently on LHC Status you can watch here</a>, Steve Myers goes on at length on repairs, retrofits and modifications that are expected to take place over 5 years at an anticipated cost of $275 Million, of which the $40 Million already spent is but the down payment on LHC Safety at 7 TeV. </div><br /><div>CERN giveth and CERN taketh away. If there's a <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article6879293.ece">backwards causality wave</a> that's been making some journalists smile lately about the jinxed LHC, then I think it's being generated by CERN. Hope they figure it out before it gets 'em.</div><div> </div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>At any rate we're still waiting for the first low power circulating beams at 0.45 TeV or about half of what the Tevatron delivers routinely, projected for mid-November. Nothing new as the LHC had already passed this test September 10, 2008 in a media frenzy before it crashed 8 days later.<br /><br />These beams will be generated by the pre-accelerators and the object is just to contain them so they don't go astray. The real test of the LHC is not the next stage either, maybe this December, when the LHC modestly collides beams at 0.9 TeV. Old hat at the Tevatron where collisions are running at 2.1 TeV. When the LHC finally starts accelerating beams itself beyond its own injection energies and beyond the Tevatron's 1.05 TeV per beam and then collides them, we'll see some real action early 2010.<br /><br />But once the LHC generates more than a hair above 1.05 TeV per beam, it will be in Terra Incognita. How sure can we be that the LHC is safe? Well Dr Heuer who's a collider man from DESY and that's reassuring in itself, as under his watch DESY didn't blow up Hamburg, said in an interview this summer <a href="http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1028389">"The LHC is a much better understood machine than it was a year ago."</a> That's refreshingly honest and so must be true.<br /><br />I'd say knowing Germany and the people there well, not only do Germans make great cars and drive fast responsibly, they have inherited a mantle of caution from their unfortunate 20th Century history. They really do want to avoid another cataclysm for themselves and the world.<br /><br />If you've been following LHC protests, most of them have been coming from Germany, Austria and Switzerland along with the leading critics of the LHC like Dr Otto Rössler. There's still a suit before the ECHR, the European Court of Human Rights brought forward last year by them and other Europeans to stop the LHC. And now I've been informed by Markus Goritschnig of <a href="http://www.lhc-concern.info/">LHC Kritik </a>that a new human rights complaint will be lodged with the UN soon.<br /><br />These protests and court actions have been focused on the possible formation of dangerous objects at the LHC, like micro black holes, strangelets and magnetic monopoles with a potential for catastrophic destruction as well as a possible fatal disruption of the Universe's vacuum state. Lately more scientists have been taking an interest in this debate as well as in risk assessment and have been publishing their findings. Do CERN's safety arguments hold water? Not according to them. More on these doomsday scenarios next time and another one of my own, where I discuss the potential for ionization of superfluid helium at the LHC and possible small nuclear events. Sorry Bob McElrath.<br /><br />But add the real world dangers of conventional collider accidents (like we've had at the LHC and Tevatron but at much higher energies) to the hypothetical production of strange matter etc, then what could happen? An unstoppable event as CERN PR might call it.<br /><br />I'd still be very cautious if I were at CERN. Beyond 1.05 TeV CERN is obliged to test the LHC on the fly. If they ramp up beam energies to 1.1 TeV without a problem, they should maintain that energy for a month to see how reliable the LHC is before they try collisions at 2.2 TeV. Even at a modest 2.2 TeV CERN probably will see unexpected particles as the Tevatron did at 2.1 or so. If there's another overconfident rush to higher energies and bigger collisions, the LHC could miss some spectacular results. In the worst case scenario CERN could destroy the LHC even at half power. And that's where Dr Heuer wants to start after the preliminaries, at 3.5 TeV. </div><br /><div>Good luck you guys!</div><br /><div>--Alan Gillis </div></div>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-67302598269815430252009-01-08T09:19:00.000-08:002009-01-08T11:33:07.015-08:00Someday This Crazy World Will Have To End<a href="http://www.peterdsmith.com/about/"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288975671225744354" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 204px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY3Wc0X--I/AAAAAAAAA9E/nBGQZNkAdTI/s320/doomsday-men-cover.jpg" border="0" />PD Smith </a>writes on science and literature as cultural history. His articles and reviews have appeared in the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>, the <em>Guardian Review</em>, the <em>Independent</em> and the essay below is from his recent column in <em><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/MondayMusings.html">3QuarksDaily</a></em>. His biography <em><a href="http://www.peterdsmith.com/einstein-life-times/">Einstein</a></em> was published in 2003. <em><a href="http://www.peterdsmith.com/doomsday-men-the-real-dr-strangelove-and-the-dream-of-the-superweapon/">Doomsday Men</a>: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon</em>, Penguin and St Martin's Press, is his new book on the dawn of the Atomic Age. For links, reprints and his latest blogging, see his website <em><a href="http://www.peterdsmith.com/">Kafka's mouse</a></em>.<br /><br />PD Smith's "Someday This Crazy World Will Have To End" touches the same nerve in CERN's LHC megaproject that promises a new nuclear physics and a new world. The same resistance to an open enquiry or discussion of the potential dangers and merits of the LHC that Dr Edward Teller hotly dismissed about the Bomb, surfaces in CERN's disregard of outside criticism as in my article <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/10/politics-and-science-at-lhc.html">"Politics And Science At The LHC"</a> and CERN's Dr Bob McElrath's hostile reply in his Comment on it. PD Smith also explores the relationship of Science to Science Fiction here and in <em>Doomsday Men</em>, as I have in my satiric essay, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-hand-of-dr-cern.html">"The Black Hand Of Dr CERN"</a>.<br /><br />The other day I had an email from an angry reader. He accused me of maligning the good name of scientists in my cultural history of superweapons. Scientists were not “doomsday men” and the phrase “an organization of dangerous lunatics” should not be applied to the secret laboratories where scientists developed superweapons. As someone who had worked in the nuclear industry, he wanted to make it plain to me that it was only thanks to such “lunatics” and their many scientific discoveries that I could enjoy a comfortable and healthy life, free from the fear of Nazism and Communism.<br /><br />I must admit I was slightly taken aback by the heartfelt anger of his email. It was clear there was not going to be a meeting of minds. But in the end we did have an amicable and interesting exchange of emails.<br /><br />I explained that the title of my book, Doomsday Men, was borrowed from JB Priestley’s 1938 novel of the same name, about how an atomic doomsday device is created at a secret laboratory in the Mojave Desert. My correspondent found the title provocative and even cheap. I hoped<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY3F7X06WI/AAAAAAAAA88/dNR4ViGoWd8/s1600-h/amazing-stories-jan-1935-cover-morey-for-nathanson-copy-2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288975387369728354" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 225px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY3F7X06WI/AAAAAAAAA88/dNR4ViGoWd8/s320/amazing-stories-jan-1935-cover-morey-for-nathanson-copy-2.jpg" border="0" /></a>other readers would see the irony, and, as my book is about how film and fiction prefigures our obsession with superweapons, insisted it was appropriate to use a title that wouldn’t have been out of place in the pulps.<br /><br />Indeed, the whole point of the book was not to blame scientists for weapons of mass destruction, but to show how humankind’s most terrible yet ingenious inventions were inspired by a desperate dream, one that was shared by a whole culture, including writers like Jack London and HG Wells, a dream of peace and scientific utopia. In a sense, we are all doomsday men. After all, it was Wells who coined the phrase “atomic bomb” before even World War I. And it was also Wells who in 1933 described scientists developing weapons of mass destruction in a secret laboratory as “an organization of dangerous lunatics”.<br /><br />The great scientific romancer HG Wells could hardly be described as hostile to science or scientists. It was his anger at the misuse of science to create weapons of mass destruction that led him to condemn such scientists. I share that anger and it prompted me to explore the cultural reasons why people from all walks of life came to think that superweapons were a solution to human problems.<br /><br />Readers of Wells’s fiction were familiar with mad scientists – Griffin or Moreau, for example – as well as those who hoped to improve the world, men like Holsten and Karenin in The World Set Free (1914). In the early years of the twentieth century, popular culture turned scientists into saviours who freed the world from war with awesome superweapons. But the experience of gas warfare, then biological weapons, and finally the atomic bomb gradually changed public perceptions. As fears grew about superweapons, their creators who had transformed the laws of nature into instruments of total destruction were increasingly depicted as mad scientists. Those who had been raised up to be gods, were later cast down as devils – or at least as acolytes of that master of megadeath, Dr Strangelove.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY25skuubI/AAAAAAAAA80/1hOaO7HDcFw/s1600-h/dr-cyclops-1940-copy.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288975177238886834" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 172px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY25skuubI/AAAAAAAAA80/1hOaO7HDcFw/s320/dr-cyclops-1940-copy.jpg" border="0" /></a> In the atomic age, as the public learned to live with first the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, and finally the world-destroying cobalt or C-bomb, scientists were stereotyped as mad, bad and dangerous (to borrow <a href="http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/book.html?id=144">Christopher Frayling</a>’s phrase). “What you are doing is mad, it is diabolic,” says the scientist’s assistant in Ernest B. Schoedsack’s movie Dr Cyclops (1940): “You are tampering with powers reserved to God.” In the classic science fiction film The Thing (1951), based on John W.<br />Campbell’s story about alien invasion, the sinister scientist Dr Carrington is prepared to sacrifice human lives in the cause of science: “Knowledge is more important than life... We’ve only one excuse for existing: to think, to find out, to learn…It doesn’t matter what happens to us.”<br /><br />Such scientists would be the end of us all, people feared. “What hope can there be for mankind…when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in the brilliant <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle_(novel)">Cat’s Cradle</a> (1963). As far as film and fiction were concerned, scientists were not just Strangelovian doomsday men. Their whole outlook on life was positively warped. “If the murders of twelve innocent people can help save one human life it will have been worth it”, reasons Doctor Necessiter in The Man With Two Brains (1983).<br /><br />But these are, of course, mere fictions. As physicist Sidney Perkowitz points out in his enjoyable survey of <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14280-9/hollywood-science">Hollywood Science</a> (2007), although they may on occasion appear somewhat arrogant, most scientists are not megalomaniacs: “few scientists have a burning desire to rule the world; typically, they don’t even enjoy managing people and research budgets”. He does, however, concede that one stereotype may have a basis in truth – the image of scientists as being sartorially challenged: “The rumpled look is a badge of authority; to scientists, the ‘suits’, formally dressed bureaucrats, are members of a despised race.” (I’m aware this may be a controversial view. In the interest of balance, I urge readers to also consult the excellent <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=402178&sectioncode=26">Geek Chic</a>, ed by Sherrie A. Inness, especially chapter 2, "Lab Coats and Lipstick", by L.<br />Jowett.)<br /><br />But Freeman Dyson suggests truth may be every bit as strange as fiction. The physicist, who worked on weapons projects as well as the Project Orion atomic spaceship in the 1950s, thinks there’s more than a grain of truth in the Strangelove stereotype. "The mad scientist is not just a figure of speech," says Dyson, "there really are such people, and they love to play around with crazy schemes. Some of them may even be dangerous, so one is not altogether wrong in being scared of such people."<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY2oTIK2RI/AAAAAAAAA8s/zhIGsNC28_E/s1600-h/firecracker-boys.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288974878350432530" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 207px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY2oTIK2RI/AAAAAAAAA8s/zhIGsNC28_E/s320/firecracker-boys.jpg" border="0" /></a>Recently, I was powerfully reminded of Dyson’s comment while reviewing the reissue of Dan O’Neill’s classic nuclear history <a href="http://www.firecrackerboys.com/">The Firecracker Boys</a> (1994). In 1958, physicist Edward Teller, the self-styled father of the H-bomb, turned up in Juneau, Alaska, and held an impromptu news conference. He was there to unveil Project Chariot, a plan to create a deep-water harbour at Cape Thompson in northwest Alaska using thermonuclear bombs. Seventy million cubic yards of earth would be shifted instantly using nuclear explosions equivalent to 2.4 million tons of TNT. That’s 40% of all the explosive energy expended in World War II. Some firecracker.<br /><br />Locals said they didn’t need a harbour. They also raised understandable concerns about radioactivity. After all, the year before, Nevil Shute had published On the Beach, one of the best-selling of all nuclear fictions (four million copies by 1980), in which the world dies a lingering death caused by fallout from a nuclear war fought with cobalt bombs. Teller was unfazed by the criticisms. That year he had defended atmospheric nuclear tests, claiming such fallout was no more dangerous than “being an ounce overweight”. He tried to reassure the Alaskans: “We have learned to use these powers with safety”. He even promised them a harbour in the shape of a polar bear.<br /><br />Teller and his fellow scientists at the Livermore Laboratory in California were on a mission to redeem the nuclear bomb. They wanted to overcome the public’s irrational “phobic” reactions to nuclear weapons. “Geographical engineering” was the answer, said Teller: “We will change the earth’s surface to suit us.” The Faustian hubris of the man appeared to know no bounds. Dubbed in the press “Mr H-Bomb”, Teller even admitted to a “temptation to shoot at the moon” with nukes. You need a new Suez Canal? Blast it out with my thermonuclear bombs. Or how about turning the Mediterranean into a freshwater lake to irrigate the Sahara? All you need to do<br />is to close the Straits of Gibraltar by detonating a few H-bombs (clean ones, of course, absolutely guaranteed). No problem. We can do it – trust me, I’m a physicist.<br /><br />Dan O’Neill interviewed Teller. Or at least he tried to. As soon as he started asking questions, Teller “cursed loudly and with great facility” and tore up the release form he had just signed to allow O’Neill to use the interview. Despite Teller’s hissy fit, O’Neill’s remarkable book shows how government agencies lied to local people, attempted to bribe scientists with promises of research funding, and manipulated the Alaskan media, which demonstrated “more sycophancy than scrutiny”. But a grass-roots movement of local Alaskans – Eskimo whale hunters, bush pilots, church ladies, and log-cabin conservationists – joined forces with a few principled scientists to successfully oppose America’s nuclear establishment, and in so doing sowed the seeds of modern environmentalism.<br /><br />Perhaps unsurprisingly, Teller devotes a mere page to this episode in his 2001 Memoirs. Les Viereck, a “soft-spoken and shy” biologist, whose research helped expose the real cost of Teller’s plans, lost his university position because of his opposition to Project Chariot. In a letter, he told his employer: “A scientist’s allegiance is first to truth and personal integrity and only secondarily to an organized group such as a university, a company, or a government.” Now there’s a scientist you could be proud of. HG Wells would have turned him into a heroic character, the kind of scientist who might really save the world.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY2WhlIfoI/AAAAAAAAA8k/s3E2_W-h9jo/s1600-h/amazing-stories-no-8-1947-copy.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5288974572992364162" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 230px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SWY2WhlIfoI/AAAAAAAAA8k/s3E2_W-h9jo/s320/amazing-stories-no-8-1947-copy.jpg" border="0" /></a>But perhaps that’s where the problem lies. As the Marquise von O tells the Russian Count at the end of Kleist’s great novella, “she would not have seen a devil in him then if she had not seen an angel in him at their first meeting”. We burden scientists with such impossibly high expectations: they’re going to discover a source of unlimited energy, invent a weapon that will make war impossible, and along the way find a cure for cancer. But when the philosopher’s stone turns into a Pandora’s box, we turn our saviours into Strangeloves. Despite their miraculous discoveries, scientists are only human. We shouldn’t forget that.<br /><br />O’Neill is rightly scathing about Teller’s role in Project Chariot: it seems Teller and his colleagues were more interested in improving the public image of nuclear weapons than in the lives of Alaskans. A Los Alamos colleague of Teller accused the brilliant scientist of becoming corrupted by his "obsession for power". According to Emilio Segrè, Teller was "dominated by irresistible passions" that threatened his "rational intellect". Another colleague said simply, "Teller has a messianic complex".<br /><br />Thankfully, for every Teller there is a Les Viereck. If you don’t believe me, then read <a href="http://www.eduardpunset.es/libros_detalle.php?idlibro=13">Mind, Life, and Universe</a> (2007), a wonderfully inspiring collection of interviews with scientists about their lives and work, edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset.<br /><br />But despite this, sometimes a dark suspicion creeps up on me, a nagging fear that somewhere out there a Dr Hoenikker is hard at work, intoxicated by his own genius and the desire for ultimate knowledge. Like Teller, this phantom Strangelove has forgotten Joseph Rotblat’s wise words: “a scientist is a human being first, and a scientist second”. All I can do at such moments is console myself by reciting the well-known Bokononist Calypso:<br /><br />“Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,<br />And our God will take things back that He to us did lend.<br />And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,<br />Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”<br /><br />--Copyright (c) 2008 PD Smith /All Rights ReservedAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-63197121635261549622008-10-01T06:22:00.000-07:002008-10-01T06:44:25.337-07:00Politics And Science At The LHC<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SON7ELWY2mI/AAAAAAAAAsU/Z-Q98s0q-gw/s1600-h/ginasiomentalcom016physicists2008.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252176902140516962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SON7ELWY2mI/AAAAAAAAAsU/Z-Q98s0q-gw/s400/ginasiomentalcom016physicists2008.jpg" border="0" /></a>In the days before Madison Avenue, public relations and spin doctors, Science was free to speak for itself. Like any other activity it was criticized and judged on its activites and results by media and the people. If the public had questions, the scientists answered them. Political games were for government and business. Now big science instituitions and labs with their own bewildering bureaucracies, have developed an interface to present an ideal world of science through their press offices and lobbyists. They sell science like GM sells cars. Somehow the media seems not to have noticed the difference, taking spin doctors' science press kits and sound bite analysis at face value.<br /><br />Camera shy bumbling scientists with thick accents who were honest about what they were doing, if you could follow the science and what they said, have now been pushed behind closed doors while the media gurus have taken over. At CERN they go a step further and stage media science events, like the big ballyhoo September 10th to show off the Large Hadron Collider during a preliminary start-up test. A modest start-up showcase for an extremely powerful atom-smasher that smashes nothing that day is played out as a big success and a victory for LHC safety. No more doomsday. Doomsayers all wrong, CERN always right. Then three big things go wrong which are skillfully downplayed. While the little ball of protons zips around, the CMS computer system is being hacked by the Greek Team and that for 2 days at the home of the World Wide Web? A 30 tonne surface transformer blows 36 hours later during a thunderstorm. Then a massive failure occurs in the cryogenic cooling system which cripples an eighth of the 17 mile collider ring. Very little information released, but a lot of reassurances on "teething troubles" at the giant baby collider.<br /><br />It can get worse. The latest surprise from CERN is a new paper published which finally comes to grips with part of the problem with the helium used in their massive near absolute zero cooling system. The CERN paper dismisses every safety concern with helium without considering all of them in "There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system", September 23, 2008, by Malcolm Fairbairn and Bob McElrath of the CERN theory group.<br /><br />Its focus is helium-4 bosenovas at the LHC and cold fusion during these events.<br /><br />The short answer is, "We conclude that that there is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo any kind of unforseen catastrophic explosion."<br /><br />Sounds like these guys were in a hurry, but right behind the Eight Ball. "that that" is fast fast, potential there for a new type of doublespeak. Of course there was an explosive release of one to two tonnes of superfluid helium last time, but that was different. Not a real explosion, more like your radiator exploding, not your gas tank. But the paranormal mindbender winner is, as KFC at the physics arXiv blog said of CERN's conclusions, "That's comforting and impressive. Ruling out forseen catastrophies is certainly useful but the ability to rule out unforeseen ones is truly amazing."<br /><br />It's a welcome response from CERN even if it is only partial. I first raised the issue myself in <em>ScienticBlogging</em>, July 2nd, 2008, in "Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment" reprinted here on <em>The Science of Conundrums</em>. When CERN didn't bother answering, I contacted their LSAG people via email twice, August 25th and 29th, but included other helium risks like the production of helium-3 via LHC energies ionizing helium-4, where helium-3 bosenovas obviously should also be considered. I received no reply and CERN's paper doesn't address helium-3 bosenovas either. I also wrote about nuclear events in helium, certainly a potential danger in helium-3 and even possible plasma and fusion reactions of helium-3 at the LHC. Again no answer from CERN. Only this sweeping rebuttal: "There is no physics whatsoever which suggests that Helium could undergo any kind of unforseen catastrophic explosion" Is this science or speculation and politics? Don't worry from CERN, but this time not from the CERN PR department, but their CERN theory group.<br /><br />If this sounds a spectacular failure in addressing safety issues honestly, well what other explanation is there? All they had to say was Helium-4 Bosenovas are Bunk, and Cold Fusion of Helium-4 Stinks. Of course we hope other physicists will examine CERN's 6 page paper and let everyone know if CERN's arguments are sound. Even if they are on Helium-4, one mosquito does not a summer make. Though there have been plenty of light speed protons in another CERN public relations context, masquerading as mosquitos.<br /><br />If the politics of safety can override safety concerns, like chicks sprawled on red sports cars, are there other similar sales jobs on safety approximating the scientific? Where is the CERN Model hiding out? Look no further than the pharmacuetical industry. When people die, safe products are recalled. Tons of safety reports and tankers on a magazine sunset, and then a giant oil tanker spills and kills birds and animals and fish by the thousands. With 6 months of downtime at the LHC thanks to accidents can happen, they've got plenty of time for gearing up for a new sales campaign, CERN TV commmercials. We're still waiting breathlessly for "Spin the Collider and Win" or "My Best Friend is a Collider / When he gets warm I get hot / Gimme gimme gimme more / My collider / Bang, bang, bang / Big Bang. Be there! Beat Doomsday! Make it happen. Geneva is to die for. Hunker in our bunker or dance the night away. Win a trip for two at participating Dunkin Donuts, your Collider Central. Free Collider Keychain in every limited time only Giant Collider Donut. Careful when you munch. Be safe, dunk first."<br /><br />Nowadays politics is part of big science. Recently a Climate scientist at MIT, Richard S Lindzen wrote a paper, "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" Although the author states that the focus of his paper is on climate science, "some of the problems pertain to science more generally."<br /><br />Lindzen notes "the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs." The LHC Machine is certainly part of this change from earlier Einsteinian physics to let's see what happens when we simulate the Big Bang.<br /><br />". . . an emphasis on large programs that never end." Fifty years of CERN and now on a budget of $1 billion a year with a $10 billion broken collider that might never work right.<br /><br />". . . the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the distribution of 'carrots and sticks' where by reputations are made and broken." CERN in a nutshell.<br /><br />". . . the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research." New Physics sought.<br /><br />". . . scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of." Safety or the appearance of safety? Critics are doomsayers who just don't understand.<br /><br />Well this still works for CERN because it is an enormous organization that has a small powerful directorate and a Director General with Presidential Powers, 'carrots and sticks'. So big and influential in physics that those within and those outside are wary of demurring on anything. Even 20 EU governments that support CERN financially applaud rather than criticize, but then they're not scientists, or cost accountants, and just as misinformed as anyone else. If there are any diplomatic groans, it's probably because the big collider party this October 21st has been called off. In the interests of vitual safety, no doubt here a Virual Inauguration would be safer for Heads of State. Cheaper too, a few souvinir hardhats FedEx'd. <em>Click for Bollinger and caviar now.</em><br /><br />No doubt CERN will spring for the real thing. These guys pay their bills. It's prestige that still counts. With participation in other nuclear labs in Europe and friendly relations with many others worldwide, CERN amounts to something like the Church of the Middle Ages. Not based in Geneva for nothing. In 1955 the Swiss Government gave CERN carte blanche to operate in Switzerland as part of the deal to locate its operations in Switzerland. The list of concessions and priviledges CERN enjoys gives it the power of a city state (currently 2,600 staff, plus some 7,931 scientists and engineers, in Wikipedia) or in modern terms, that accorded to a foreign government's embassy and its diplomats. When CERN expanded into France in 1973, the French government was more circumspect but awarded CERN similar if more limited powers. Neither country though has jurisdiction over CERN, its property, its personnel or its activities. Though the French have reserved some rights including the right to intervene if there is a threat to France. If CERN blows up Geneva, Switzerland will have to sue Fermilab. An obvious mistake to put an organization above the law, like we didn't know the gun was loaded. Anyone in Switzerland or CERN care to bet that the obvious mistakes are the most statistically significant?<br /><br />Surely if there were doubts within CERN as to problems or even the advisability of the Large Hadron Collider in the first place, we would hear about it? Not much has slipped through the cracks in the CERN PR department except their tactics. One source is CERN archives. Some CERN people have found themselves embassassed in hindsight when their candid comments were recorded in CERN videos, transcripts and documents.<br /><br />One insider has recently commented, not realizing there was some unwritten code of silence. A CERN physicist, Tommaso Dorigo who works at the LHC CMS experiment, wrote in his blog, <em>A Quantum Diaries Survivor</em>, "In fact CERN appears a bit up-tight about the latest events in sector 34 of the LHC tunnel. He goes on to say ". . . since my blog is targeted as a possible source of leaks. . . And if I play fair, maybe I am allowed to survive here, and maybe one day I will stop being threatened every other day, in the name of protecting internal information of the experiments I am a part of."<br /><br />Dorigo concludes, "Of course, I still assert my complete disagreement at a way to conduct scientific experiments paid with your tax money which resembles the management of the Pentagon rather than an agorà of education, research and scientific communication."<br /><br />--Alan Gillis<br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Fairbairn, Malcolm and McElrath, Bob. "There is no explosion risk associated with superfluid Helium in the LHC cooling system", September 23, 2008, arxiv,<br /><a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.4004v1.pdf">http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.4004v1.pdf</a><br /><br />KFC. "Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a "Bose supernova"?, September 29, 2008, the physics arxiv blog, <a href="http://arxivblog.com/?p=645">http://arxivblog.com/?p=645</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment At The LHC", July 12, 2008, The Science of Conundrums, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/07/superfluids-becs-and-bosenovas-ultimate.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/07/superfluids-becs-and-bosenovas-ultimate.html</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "The Almost Thermonuclear LHC", March 17, 2008, The Science of Conundrums, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html</a><br /><br />Lindzen, Richard S. "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?", September 27, 2008, arxiv, <a href="http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf">http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.3762.pdf</a><br /><br />Dorigo, Tommaso. "An agorà of education and scientific communication", September 23, 2008, A Quantum Diaries Survivor, <a href="http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/an-agora-of-education-and-scientific-communication/">http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/an-agora-of-education-and-scientific-communication/</a><br /><br />CERN / Switzerland. "Agreement between the Swiss Federal Council and the European Organization for Nuclear Research . . .", June 11, 1955, CERN Legal Services, <a href="http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000012.pdf">http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000012.pdf</a><br /><br />CERN / France. "Agreement between the Government of the French Republic and the European Organization for Nuclear Research . . .", August 30, 1973, CERN Legal Services, <a href="http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000010.pdf">http://documents.cern.ch/archive/electronic/other/legal/articles/LSL00000010.pdf</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-56127684640713586102008-09-25T19:38:00.000-07:002008-09-25T22:00:42.135-07:00LHC Quench Stops CERN: Re-start Delayed Again<a href="http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/lhcenormousm.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/lhcenormousm.jpg" border="0" /></a>After last Friday's massive quench at the LHC, CERN has announced that re-starting the collider will have to wait even beyond 2 months for repairs and downtime. With a planned winter shutdown in late November, even if the collider were ready, there would not be enough time to continue tests. Re-start of the LHC should be in April 2009.<br /><br />Day 7 into the major accident damaging part of the LHC helium cooling and superconducting magnet systems, indicates little progress as yet. Scientists at CERN are still investigating the failure in Sector 3-4, an eighth of the 17 mile ring of magnets that are normally cooled to near absolute zero temperature. The extent of the damage is greater than was reported by CERN initially. Dismissive at first of the collider's "teething problems", CERN suggested that the LHC could be operational soon. A sketchy press release was followed by another sketchy press release.<br /><br />Oddly after the BBC discovered the massive quench of about 100 magnets in a log entry on a CERN website, "the entry has since been removed" according to TimesOnline the day after.<br /><br />It was also TimesOnline that said on September 21st that a connection between 2 giant magnets melted, with a release of one tonne of helium, adding the heat also melted 2 giant magnets, causing an explosive release of liquid helium which blasted helium gas through the ring tunnel. No one was hurt as no personnel were in the collider ring said CERN, normally only off limits when proton beams are operating. CERN said that at the time of the accident last Friday morning, there were no beams and only admitted to "a large helium leak" and "a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted".<br /><br />The only piece of real news by CERN's chief spokesman, Dr James Gillies, who does the standard tour of the major media outlets to reassure journalists, outside of his department's press releases, was about the damaged magnets in question that he identified as giant quadrupoles, in the Telegram UK, September 20th. Later the probably melted connection turned out to be a busbar, a type of reinforced splice of magnet ribbon cable, one of many such connections between magnets.<br /><br />It wasn't exactly a routine failure. Commissioning was still going on in Point 4 and on either side into the later damaged zone of Sector 3-4. and in 4-5. The high energy test was of the RF system for anticipated higher loads when it would be used to power up beams to 5 TeV, that were scheduled for later this year.<br /><br />As of today only specialized safety teams and technicians have been allowed in to check for hazards and equipment damage. Following the accident Sector 3-4 showed some continuing warming of magnets and helium, some of the warmest then cooling, but now the Sector has been partially re-cooled. Most magnets are at 30 K, with no further helium leaks reported.<br /><br />Eventually the damaged Sector 3-4 will be warmed to room temperature for repairs to be effected, but that would mean that remaining helium would have to be drained from the system first, and that hasn't started yet. Since temperatures have been brought down, it seems that the strategy is to cool the helium enough so that it can be safely drained as a liquid and stored as it's very expensive to replace. At least two damaged quadruoles will have to be cut out as they are welded together and then new ones welded in, a difficult and expensive proposition.<br /><br />Coming on the heels of two other major failures, the hacking of part of the CMS computer system, during the big September 10th media launch, and the destruction of a 30 tonne surface transformer during a thunderstorm shortly afterwards, powering 2 sectors of the LHC cooling system, the need for a more careful re-launch of the collider is apparent to CERN, hence the further delay to spring.<br /><br />CERN publicly has put on a brave if vague face, with its first very short press release of the 20th September, "Incident in LHC sector 3-4", though it was abundantly clear the day of the accident September 19th that it was more than an incident, as reported by the BBC that day. Even on the day of the accident, according to Scientific American, "CERN said on Friday that "The LHC is on course for [its] first collisions in a matter of weeks", just a day later it announced the minimum two-month repair job." Lately Dr Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN referred to the accident as "undoubtedly a psychological blow."<br /><br />But there are other factors leading up to the accident that haven't been addressed. Certainly timing the First Beam to suit a media bash opening, when the CMS was being hacked, and still going ahead with it, suggests the need to perform for the media above ordinary safety considerations. Several other factors also indicate a rush to perform for the media and a huge worldwide audience.<br /><br />Reuters reported September 10th, that there were "Small electrical issues before CERN machine start-up". "Project leader Lyn Evans gave no details . . ."<br /><br />Operating the collider during a thunderstorm is certainly a known risk at the Tevatron, and 36 hours after the September 10th opening, a 30 tonne surface transformer that powers part of the helium cooling system failed during a lightening strike. Cause of failure still not confirmed by CERN.<br /><br />According to the LHC Commissioning with Beam page, "The winter shut-down will then be used to commissioning and train the magnets up to full current, such that the 2009 run will start at the full 14 TeV design energy." Lyn Evans reiterated the same point in a talk on "The LHC Machine" at a CERN colloquium, Strings 2008, August 18th. Some installed magnets from another supplier had to be retrained. Earlier this year there were plans to jump to 7 TeV. Then 5 TeV was announced as rather a surprise, the new goal per beam. Where the damaged magnets from this lot of not fully trained magnets?<br /><br />What if CERN has run out of luck? They have been lucky, not running beams they say during the transformer failure and the huge magnet quench, but what if they had been running beams? Beams could have been lost causing more damage. They ran beams during the hacking of CMS, but luckily there were no collisions.<br /><br />There's a long road ahead. As Fermilab/SLAC's sponsored magazine, Symmetry wrapped up the transformer accident at the LHC, "These kinds of hiccoughs in starting up a large collider are not surprising as the LHC has millions of critical components."<br /><br />What? Only millions?<br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "Accident Cripples LHC", The Science of Conundrums", September 19, 2008, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/accident-cripples-lhc.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/accident-cripples-lhc.html</a><br /><br />Higgins, Alexander G. "Small accidents mean big trouble for supercollider", AP/PhysOrg, September 22, 2008, <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news141278719.html">http://www.physorg.com/news141278719.html</a><br /><br />CERN. "Incident in sector 3-4", Press Release, September 20th, 2008, <a href="http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR09.08E.html">http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR09.08E.html</a><br /><br />CERN. "LHC re-start scheduled for 2009", Press Release, September 23, 2009, <a href="http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR10.08E.html">http://press.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR10.08E.html</a><br /><br />Reuters. "Hadron Collider halted for months", Reuters News Video, September 21, 2008, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=91036">http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=91036</a><br /><br />Chalmers, Matthew and Henderson, Mark. "CERN delays atom-smashing over magnet fault", TimesOnline, September 20, 2008, <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4789673.ece">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4789673.ece</a><br /><br />Leake, Jonathan. "Oh blast, that's the wrong kind of big bang", TimesOnline, September 21, 2008, <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4794825.ece">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4794825.ece</a><br /><br />Highfield, Roger. "Large Hadron Collider to be turned off for two months following damage", Telegraph UK, September 20, 2008, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/20/scilhc120.xml">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/20/scilhc120.xml</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "LHC Not So Safe". The Science of Conundrums, September 12, 2008, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-not-so-safe.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-not-so-safe.html</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "LHC Fails Thunderstorm Test", The Science of Conundrums, September 17, 2008, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-fails-thunderstorm-test.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-fails-thunderstorm-test.html</a><br /><br />Lite, Jordan. "Hobbled LHC shuttered for repairs; 'No big deal say scientists'", SciAm, September 22, 2008, <a href="http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=hobbled-lhc-shuttered-for-repairs-n-2008-09-22">http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=hobbled-lhc-shuttered-for-repairs-n-2008-09-22</a><br /><br />Reuters. "Small electrical issues before CERN machine start-up", Reuters News, September 10, 2008, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLA57119">http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLA57119</a><br /><br />CERN. "LHC Commissioning with Beam", LHC Commissioning, page still current, <a href="http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/">http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "LHC Start-up To Shutdown 2008", The Science of Conundrums, August 22, 2008, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/08/lhc-start-up-to-shut-down-2008.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/08/lhc-start-up-to-shut-down-2008.html</a><br /><br />CERN. "LHC: countdown to beam begins", CERN Courier, August 18, 2008, <a href="http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/35431">http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/35431</a><br /><br />Harris, David. "LHC glitch means two month delay" symmetrybreaking, September 20, 2008, <a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/09/20/lhc-glitch-means-two-month-delay/">http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/09/20/lhc-glitch-means-two-month-delay/</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-66172745749008896522008-09-19T21:43:00.001-07:002008-09-19T22:03:25.215-07:00Accident Cripples LHC<a href="http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/ne/p/2008/0812_Large_Hadron_Collider_Gallery/tunnelpath_550x541.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/ne/p/2008/0812_Large_Hadron_Collider_Gallery/tunnelpath_550x541.jpg" border="0" /></a>No collisions, no beams either next week at the LHC. The BBC reports an alarming quench of about 100 superconducting magnets today, that heated up as much as 100 C. A tonne of liquid helium spilled into the tunnel and the CERN fire brigade went in. Cause of the quenching has not been announced, nor have any injuries been reported. Liquid helium leaks vaporize back to a gas almost instantly and would freeze or choke personnel present.<br /><br />Ordinarily magnet quenches occur when proton beams are lost or scatter into magnets, causing helium coolant and magnets to heat and lose their superconductivity and their power to keep proton beams within the collider. CERN doesn't say whether beams were running today during the accident. They would have been at their lowest power 0.45 TeV per beam, though beams 11 times more powerful at 5 TeV were scheduled before October 12th. Vacuum conditions were also lost said the BBC, which suggests beam damage, though CERN hasn't commented.<br /><br />This is on top of another major failure to the helium cooling system. Last Friday the 12th's thunderstorm burned out a giant 30 tonne 12 Million Volt Amperes surface transformer that powers some of the helium cryogenics system. Although CERN admitted the problem yesterday, without mentioning the thunderstorm, and said the transformer was replaced last weekend, there was no explanation for the long delay in informing the public. The failure of the transformer caused an initial warming in the helium coolant in 2 of the colliders 8 sectors, some as late as September 17th at near 7 K<br /><br />Whether an ongoing transformer problem contributed to quenching has not been announced. The TimesOnline initial report on damage said, "One of the beams had been captured by Friday, but work was then interrupted by the loss of electrical transformers that power the cryogenic cooling system . . ." A beam apparently running during the thunderstorm, and more than one transformer lost. CERNS's lastest progress report yesterday was sketchy.<br /><br />The damaged Sector3-4, an eighth of the 17 mile collider has still not been stabilized since this morning's accident. About half of it or a mile length was well above normal 1.9 K design temperature, about a quarter of the sector and its magnets this afternoon at 15:46 PM were about 82 K to 110 K. Currently all magnets have warmed. The warmest show a slight recovery from 110 K down to 99 K. and Sector 3-4 is still in crisis as of the 20th September 0:418 AM, with no accurate readout for about half the magnets, and the rest showing more warming, with a few outside the spike zone climbing abruptly in temperature since this afternoon.<br /><br />Given the gravity of the accident, repairs would take a week or longer.<br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />BBC. "Hadron Collider forced to halt", Sept 19, 2008, BBC News, <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7626256.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7626256.stm</a><br /><br />CERN. "LHC progress report, week 1", Sept 18, 2008, LHC First Beam, <a href="http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/News/lhc_080918.html">http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/News/lhc_080918.html</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "LHC Fails Thunderstorm Test", Sept 17,2008, The Science of Conundrums, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-fails-thunderstorm-test.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/09/lhc-fails-thunderstorm-test.html</a><br /><br />Henderson, Mark. "'Big Bang Machine' back on collision course after its glitches are fixed", Sept 18, 2008, TimesOnline, <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4774817.ece">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4774817.ece</a><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247960475084784450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SNSAP0i4A0I/AAAAAAAAAsM/5AA_4xDKgnI/s400/CERN_LHC_Sector3-4_Sector4-5Cooldown_status_edit1_1546Sept19-2008.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247960057551839362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SNR_3hHQ4II/AAAAAAAAAsE/RdZHEYL0EcY/s400/CERN_LHC_Sector3-4_Sector4-5Cooldown_status_edit1_0558Sept20-2008.jpg" border="0" />Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-61001078945009649762008-09-17T16:52:00.001-07:002008-09-17T20:34:58.631-07:00LHC Fails Thunderstorm Test<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SNGetlDWqMI/AAAAAAAAAr8/gzRHvoUF6xQ/s1600-h/577874339_0d814b6ce1_b_Geneva_villoks_2007.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5247149546740820162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SNGetlDWqMI/AAAAAAAAAr8/gzRHvoUF6xQ/s400/577874339_0d814b6ce1_b_Geneva_villoks_2007.jpg" border="0" /></a> Nature had her own ideas about testing LHC safety. A thunderstorm last Friday knocked out some transformers at the LHC near Geneva that are part of the helium cooling system, that cools the magnets that keep the proton beams travelling (near light speed) on a circular path through the collider. Technicians have been scrambling to fix the problems, but not before some magnets warmed well above standard operating temperatures, some reaching almost 7K from the usual ultra cold 1.9K .<br /><br />Electromagnets at the LHC need to be this cold to be superconducting, or at peak efficiency, in order to deliver extremely high magnetic fields in the 27 km ring of 1200 giant magnets and thousands of smaller ones, at 8.33 Teslas or about 200,000 times the earth's magnetic field strength.<br /><br />Everything about this atom smasher is boggling, including the numbers, like its cost at about $10 billion and CERN's yearly operating budget of $1 billion, with over 2500 physicists working on site.<br /><br />Reports from CERN today state that repairs were successful and the collider will be poised for proton collisions next week at a base energy of 0.90 Trillion Electron Volts. CERN is aiming for much higher energies never before attempted, 5 TeV per beam before October 12th.<br /><br />CERN didn't say whether the collider was operating with beams or not during the emergency. If it had beams shooting through the ring, protons could have scattered, further warming and quenching some warm magnets, that might have exploded if the automatic heaters had also been affected by the power failures. Several sectors did warm partially at the LHC. If they all had, in the worst case scenario, beams might have unravelled and crashed down the LHC, causing a catastrophic failure. With the warming of magnets and helium coolant, up to 40 refrigeration plants above and below ground could have failed, usually with a loss of helium. In December 2003, the Tevatron had a catastrophic beam loss and a major quench, not related to thunderstorms.<br /><br />Some hassles during storms have hampered operations at Fermilab's Tevatron, currently the most powerful collider until the LHC goes full blast. Even though both colliders are largely underground, lightning travels well though moist earth or wet clay, and part of the LHC in the vicinity of the second largest experiment, the CMS, has been excavated from clay, so unstable that it had to be artificially frozen during excavation of the giant CMS cavern. Hence its nickname at CERN, s<em>ee-a-mess</em>.<br /><br />Like any machine the LHC is vulnerable to its environment and its own weaknesses, not forgetting the colossal energies and particle collisions it will produce.<br /><br /><br />News Stories On LHC Thunderstorm<br /><br />Henderson, Mark. "'Big Bang Machine' is back on collision course after its glitches are fixed", Sept 18, 2008, TimesOnline,<br /><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4774817.ece">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4774817.ece</a><br />Brouet, Anne-Marie. "Panne de faisceau dans le LHC", Sept 17, 2008, Tribune de Genève, <a href="http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu/2008/09/16/systeme-froid-gele-faisceau-lhc">http://www.tdg.ch/geneve/actu/2008/09/16/systeme-froid-gele-faisceau-lhc</a><br />Highfield, Roger. "The Large Hadron Collider: First subatomic particle collision to happen next week", Sept 16, 2008, Telegraph UK, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/16/scilhc116.xml">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/16/scilhc116.xml</a><br /><br />LHC Costs And Benefits<br /><br />O'Neill, Martin. "Politics of proton smashing", Sept 17, 2008, New Statesman,<br /><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2008/09/physics-lhc-cern-scientific">http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2008/09/physics-lhc-cern-scientific</a><br /><br />Tevatron Thunderstorms at 100,000 electron volts<br /><br />Mosher, Dave. "Lightening strikes, Tevatron blinks", Oct/Nov 2006, Symmetry Magazine,<br /><a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000391">http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000391</a><br /><br />Tevatron Quenches and Failures<br /><br />Gillis, Alan. "Major Failures At The Tevatron", Apr 18, 2008, The Science of Conundrums,<br /><a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-83546739102446609082008-09-12T15:54:00.001-07:002008-09-12T16:44:44.022-07:00LHC Not So Safe<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SMrznUh8SmI/AAAAAAAAArk/ryNjFRTEkoI/s1600-h/scicern212_big_GreekSecurityTeamHacksCMS_LHC_TelegraphUK2008.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5245272572877884002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SMrznUh8SmI/AAAAAAAAArk/ryNjFRTEkoI/s400/scicern212_big_GreekSecurityTeamHacksCMS_LHC_TelegraphUK2008.gif" border="0" /></a> The Greek Security Team, computer hackers who know Greek at least, left this souvenir behind on the CMS experiment's computer system. The attacks went on for two days, September 9 and 10, part way into First Beam commissioning. "We are 2600 --dont mess with us" was their sign-off.<br /><br />One of the CMS team fighting off the hackers said it was a "scary experience". Dr James Gillies, chief spokesperson for CERN said "It was quickly detected." A half dozen files were uploaded by the hackers. One CMS computer file was damaged. It could have been worse. An CERN insider commented that if the attackers had penetrated into a second computer system, some of the CMS could have been turned off, adding, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it." The CMS is a gigantic solenoid magnet that could slow down traffic in Paris, though here it will be used to detect muons with its millions of pixels and sensors, or whatever else registers during proton beam collisions of extraordinary power.<br /><br />CERN of late is under siege as the LHC moves closer to full 5 TeV beams before October 21st. Emails and telephone calls are flooding in from panicked people fearing the worst, from black holes to tsunamis caused by collider operations. If tsunamis are typical of the irrational sort of fears, CERN has admitted micro black holes are a possibility, but won't be dangerous.<br /><br />The current blitz against CERN is mostly by professional spammers. Yesterday CERN got 1.4 million emails, about 98% spam. <br /><br />As usual CERN is not worried. "There seems to be no harm done." said Gillies.<br /><br />News source: The Telegraph, UK, "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/09/12/scicern212.xml">Hackers attack Large Hadron Collider</a>" by Roger Highfield, September 12, 2008.<br /><br />--Alan GillisAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-125315122682598202008-09-07T21:59:00.000-07:002008-09-07T22:49:54.689-07:00The Black Hand Of Dr Cern<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SMSyOVoSroI/AAAAAAAAAq4/d2Mz6s0aiOM/s1600-h/FN0344H_CockcroftWalton_Fermilab2008.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5243511825560153730" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SMSyOVoSroI/AAAAAAAAAq4/d2Mz6s0aiOM/s400/FN0344H_CockcroftWalton_Fermilab2008.jpg" border="0" /></a>Not a 50's B movie, but the latest Press Release from the biggest black hole on the planet, sucking up an astronomical $10 billion and ready for more, (gulp) dollars. What an appetite! Even now it's going after spare change. $10 million a month from the U.S. alone. When will it end? Is any sofa safe from the Black Hand of Dr Cern?<br /><br />Of course it says it doesn't want your money. This monster Collider has some self-respect. It sends out Press Releases, like this one, all nice and cosy from September 5th, "CERN reinterates safety on eve of first beam" like on a snowy winter's eve with a baby first beam, <a href="http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR07.08E.html">http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR07.08E.html</a><br /><br />"A report published today . . ." it says " . . . provides comprehensive evidence that safety fears about the Large Hadron Collider are unfounded."<br /><br />Comprehensive, no. Stuff not considered, lots.<br />Evidence, no. Theories, yes.<br />And which report?<br /><br />Well the one the news stories based on this Press Release are trumpeting as though this was a new safety study just released. An assumption made by journalists too busy to read the CERN Press Release under a microscope. Here is what they mistakenly wrote about shortly after seeing the new CERN Press Release:<br /><br />"A new report . . ." <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080904220342.htm">http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080904220342.htm</a><br /><br />"A new report . . ." <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/2008/09/05/new-report-lhc-switch-on-fears-are-completely-unfounded/">http://www.universetoday.com/2008/09/05/new-report-lhc-switch-on-fears-are-completely-unfounded/</a><br /><br />"A new report . . ." <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/iop-lsf090408.php">http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/iop-lsf090408.php</a><br /><br />"A new report . . ." <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news139810863.html">http://www.physorg.com/news139810863.html</a><br /><br />"A new report . . ." <a href="http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/544021/?sc=rssn">http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/544021/?sc=rssn</a><br /><br />"A new report . . ." <a href="http://www.newkerala.com/fs/b/ai-1621.htm">http://www.newkerala.com/fs/b/ai-1621.htm</a><br /><br />"a new report . . ." <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml</a><br /><br />Burried at the bottom is the old LHC Safety Assesment Group (LSAG) report from June, though still not identified as the subject of this Press Release. CERN's PR Machine is so good it could publish the Geneva phonebook as a safety report and it would still make headlines, <em>No One Dead Yet, Claims CERN in a New Geneva Safety Report. </em><br /><br />One safety study flows into another without being named and instead of four CERN physicists and one Russian who wrote the June LSAG report, it's "The report (still un-named) was prepared by a group of scientists at CERN, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences." There is no one from the University of California, Santa Barbara that contributed, no groups except the CERN group and one Russian. Yes there is a scientist from UCSB, but he contributed to a different paper, "Astronomical Implications of Hypothetical Stable TeV-Scale Black Holes" and that report was done by a group of two, the UCSB guy and a CERN scientist.<br /><br />The other safety reports are not exactly numerous, only one other LSAG report from 2003, CERN's first on the subject, based on the earlier RHIC safety report for a small low power U.S. collider in reply to Dr Walter Wagner's concern that micro black holes might be produced at the Relatavistic Heavy Ion Collider in Long Island, the 2003 LSAG report now the basis of the June 2008 update, the last update, the presumed subject of the CERN Press Release.<br /><br />A few words later, "The papers comprising the report . . ." What report? What papers? Why not list all these papers and reports and provide hot links? Isn't this relevant in a Press Release? Or is CERN planning to send journalists <em>Ask CERN</em> Virtual Crystal Balls?<br /><br />The only 2008 safety report was a single 15 page document undated, with one addendum of 11 pages, the total LSAG report. There was another much thicker report by two scientists on mBH, one from CERN, that was used to buttress the mBH section of the 2008 LSAG report. Those are all the papers, all the reports on safety this year from CERN. No doubt the whole kit and caboodle was presented to the CERN Scientific Policy Committee (SPC) of 20 unnamed scientists who CERN says are independent of CERN. If they pay for parking that settles it. Five out of 20 studied in depth "the 2008 report" meaning what report exactly? OK, say it was all they had, "and endorsed the authors' approach of basing their arguments on irrefutable observational evidence . . ." in the 2 documents submitted, the LSAG 2008 report, 15 plus 11 pages, and the GM Black Holes 2008 paper of 97 pages, finally clear from a read of the 5 page "SPC Report On LSAG Documents".<br /><br />All this Press Release blather about 2 documents, previously published in June, previously reviewed in an undated SPC Report, the arcane subject of an September Press Release.<br /><br />Go back a bit to the 5 page SPC Report. If the Press Release is a labyrinth, who claims the straight and narrow "irrefutable observational evidence"? What "irrefutable observational evidence to conclude that new particles produced at the LHC will pose no danger." These new particles have never been observed by CERN or anyone else. There is no evidence, only theories. But the SPC Report makes it clear that they weren't observing "new particles", but <em>"irrefutable observational data on cosmic rays and on astronomical bodies".</em> For journalists who aren't physicists what are they supposed to think? Don't worry about "new particles", we have observational evidence? We have observed these "new particles"? We saw them yesterday?<br /><br />"The full SPC unanamously agreed with their findings." But why didn't the other 15 of the full SPC 20 study "in detail" the so-called report? Are they that busy, that the safety of CERN itself and their people and Geneva, isn't worth the full particpation of even one CERN hosted committee? But they all unanimously agreed with the select five and each other, perhaps on the very fate of the planet. 20 men decide for us all. The Black Hand Of Dr Cern won't let go of this Collider. <em>It's mine mine mine!</em> hisses Dr Cern, but we never see his face, only the blasted black hand groping for change.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#009900;">On To September 10th And The Other LHC Machine: The CERN PR Department</span><br /><br /></span>The First Beam injection is an important test of LHC engineering. A single low power proton beam is going to circulate through the main 17 mile ring. It's not dangerous like some critics in the media are suggesting, with over-the-top headlines, The BBC calling it "Big Bang Day" for their live radio coverage on BBC FOUR.<br /><br />Ordinarily CERN would be cringing at misinformed media hype. But it also plays 2 ways. A successful first test cancels fears that the collider is dangerous. Reacting to the media hype some other media outlets are making fun of the dangers, especially in Europe, a nice PR bonus for the machine.<br /><br />CERN is turning this easy September 10th test into a bigtop LHC media circus, the perfectly safe collider. Hundreds of journalists will be on site for the thrilling 1/15 of normal operating energies single beam, 1/30 of eventual combined energies. The big CERN Dome will be the real hot spot, with all the collider action in up and down and side to side near-collisions of piled high plates from the giant free all day all you can eat buffet, if CERN doesn't forget to call the caterer. Warning, journalists are a grumpy hungry lot. Don't tell them to eat at the cafeteria. They could destroy it! If all goes well at the buffet, a bonanza of headlines the next day, <em>Surprise, It's Not the End of the World</em>. Not even close. Take your cue from Fermilab's own same day LHC Pajama Party, <a href="http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/64412.html?wlc=1220824563">http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/64412.html?wlc=1220824563</a><br /><br />CERN's direct competion is Fermilab's Tevatron collider, steady since the start of Run II at 0.90 TeV per beam or half the LHC First Beam attempt at 0.45 TeV. Still those small numbers are in Trillion electron Volts, enough to burn down the CERN Dome, easy, its only low-tech wood, but it is the media center for the day, so watch where you point that thing.<br /><br />Still in the hunt for the Higgs, the Tevatron's in a last ditch attempt to beat the LHC. Due to run through to 2010 before being scrapped thanks to a recent financial bailout, $5 million from an anonymous donor and more cash this year from the U.S. Government's deep pockets or at least some loose change behind cushions in Washington, the venerable Tevatron has an extra year or two of life.<br /><br />Way back when CERN's LEP collider was looking for the Higgs in its last days of 1999-2000, before 40,000 tonnes of it was hoisted away to make way for the LHC, CERN optimized and then pushed the LEP beyond its design energies. <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=higgs-wont-fly">http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=higgs-wont-fly</a><br /><br />There was even a call to wait on demolition and press ahead with the LEP due to some tantalizing last minute results. They weren't heeded and for 8 years CERN has been in a vacuum doing no physics since then. Physicists at CERN have been understandably restless for years and now more so with the Tevatron still blazing. Another (unexpected) 'doubly strange' particle discovered a few days ago with energies higher this year and data optimized to the max, <a href="http://www.physorg.com/news139673506.html">http://www.physorg.com/news139673506.html</a><br /><br />Taking its cue from the old LEP do-or-die experiment, current Tevatron energy is 0.98022 TeV per beam, <a href="http://www-bd.fnal.gov/notifyservlet/www?project=outside">http://www-bd.fnal.gov/notifyservlet/www?project=outside</a> the Higgs maybe a few more GeV down the road. Let's hope the old collider can take it. <a href="http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=fermilab-says-hey-wait-were-in-the-2008-08-08">http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=fermilab-says-hey-wait-were-in-the-2008-08-08</a><br /><br />With the Higgs in Fermilab's pocket, the LHC, ostensibly built to find the mother of all particles, might be a $10 billion irony, just another lonely financial black hole. CERN would definitely disagree. I'll make it easy for them here, since they don't bother responding to my blog articles or to my letters to the LSAG about potential hazards not analyzed by LSAG reports, like bosenova implosion/explosion from quantum state helium-4, or helium-3 produced by LHC ionization of helium-4, first proposed by me in a <em>ScientificBlogging</em> article, <a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment">http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment</a><br />and now a part of the European Court of Human Rights suit on LHC safety; or thermonuclear fusion of this helium-3 also first proposed by me in <em>The Science of Conundrums</em>, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html</a><br /><br />CERN absolutely disagrees with everybody out there who hasn't got a CERN badge. Of course critical internal CERN Intranet emails are taken seriously before they are bounced into the not fully tested LHC thousand tonne beam dumps, where they've been known to smoke some graphite into methane, but don't tell anyone. It's top secret!<br /><br />CERN has said there is other new physics out there as do collider happy physicists everywhere, maybe extra String theory dimensions and then oops micro black holes that oops might merge into a bigger mBH that might start accreting mass at 17,000 tonnes a year that might radiate some nuclear energy that might destroy Switzerland and might go on destroying the planet until it is destroyed, or so says a physicist, Dr Rainer Plaga, <a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf">http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf</a> whom CERN has dismissed with an admirably quick but short 2 page argument printed on 4 pages, <a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.4087v1.pdf">http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.4087v1.pdf</a> Plaga's paper on metastable quantum black holes is only theoretical, but can we relax when CERN's counter-arguments, all its safety studies are also all based on theories?<br /><br />In the final analysis, the only practical analysis, CERN's implied LHC safety rests on one point rattling around somewhere behind their theories: So far no major threats have been found in the operation of tiny colliders using low energies.<br /><br />For now it's theories versus theories, smoke and mirrors, from both sides of the question: Is The LHC Safe? Later this October with a big do-or-die totally unnecessary quantum jump in energy to the first LHC 5 TeV beam, way way more powerful than any collider's on the planet, that might all change.<br /><br />Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of CERN says: "In any case, they will only send the hadrons in one direction this week. The collisions start in October. Until then, at least, we're not all doomed." Or last chance to visit Geneva or buy a Rolex. Quote from <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-large-hadron-collider-end-of-the-world-or-gods-own-particle-921540.html">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-large-hadron-collider-end-of-the-world-or-gods-own-particle-921540.html</a><br /><br />No, not the end September 10th, of the end of the world debate, maybe equipment failure, collider damage or something more surprising. Like basic nuclear physics they don't know about or maybe dismissed at the water cooler because everyone had another meeting on parking lot passes, the next big ski-weekend or New Dimensions in String Theory. (For the demonstration, please bring your own string and sharp scissors are recommended.)<br /><br />If the LHC survives, then the first 10 TeV proton collisions later this year will be something to watch on the BBC's New and Improved Big Bang Day broadcast. Add a Rock Concert from the CERN Dome, for backgound music and intercutting into the boring bits. Hey Dr Brian Cox, Rock your Collider!<br /><br />Let's have this one live on TV worldwide, or maybe Google Earth can get their just launched satellite cameras callibrated in time. About 500 miles up, Google Eye should be safe. Hope the DVD Live At The Collider makes it outta there. Might be <em>the</em> collector's item.<br /><br /><br />For News on the current LHC prep steps leading up to September 10th, <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4692222.ece">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4692222.ece</a><br /><br />The Media Circus Program September 10th,<br /><a href="http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/practical.html#techinfo">http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/practical.html#techinfo</a><br /><br />Fear And Loathing At The LHC,<br /><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/05/scilhc105.xml</a><br /><br />In Desperation CERN physicists are taking comedy improv classes at CERN. (see above link) Listen in on NPR's "Can Physicists Be Funny?"<br /><a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94357426&ft=1&f=1007">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94357426&ft=1&f=1007</a><br /><br />Dr Brian Cox, your host on BBC FOUR Radio's Big Bang Day September 10th 08:30BST, time travels from the LHC, we knew it all along, back to the days of D:ream,<br /><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-sex-and-drugs-and-particle-physics-as-dream-star-recreates-the-big-bang-917196.html">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-sex-and-drugs-and-particle-physics-as-dream-star-recreates-the-big-bang-917196.html</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-16720260076674973102008-09-01T14:18:00.000-07:002008-09-01T16:10:52.869-07:00Stop CERN Euro Court Action Slips And Slides Forward<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SLxcxvkiobI/AAAAAAAAAqw/xXaaZyQSm-0/s1600-h/0,1020,1218764,00_LHC_CERN_2008.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5241166076005491122" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SLxcxvkiobI/AAAAAAAAAqw/xXaaZyQSm-0/s400/0,1020,1218764,00_LHC_CERN_2008.jpg" border="0" /></a> <em>LHC Kritiks</em> in Switzerland, Germany and Austria survived the first ruling on their case by the European Court for Human Rights, August 29th. So did CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will go ahead while the court action continues. A stunningly quick decision by the ECHR only 3 days after the complaint was filed against CERN and its 20 member countries from the EC, denies any Interim Measures that would have forced CERN to suspend operations of the LHC.<br /><br />Soon to be the world's most powerful atom smasher and the biggest and most costly science experiment ever, the $10 billion LHC straddles the borders of Switzerland and France, near Geneva. CERN the giant European nuclear physics lab has completed the 17 mile underground construction of the ring accelerator and is now in the first stages of start-up. It's goal is to unlock the secrets of the early Universe, through unparalled high energy collisions of hadrons, protons at first and then heavy lead ions. Critics believe that the LHC could pose enormous dangers to the planet.<br /><br />Markus Goritschnig, a spokesman for LHC Kritiks said, "This quick decision of the court to dismiss the claim for Interim Measures is not a negative sign as such. The Court is studying the whole appeal in detail now. Only the claim for Interim Measures was rejected, not the appeal itself." The Court gave no reasons for dismissing the preliminary injuction to stop LHC operations.<br /><br />"The case before the European Court of Human Rights," said Dr James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, commenting on the Court case in the <em>Telegraph</em>, "contains the same arguments that we have seen before and we have answered these in extensive safety reports."<br /><br />Bosenovas haven't been addressed by CERN. All 12 points in the LHC Kritiks arguments are being considered by the ECHR, including Bosenovas. A new risk of a Bosenova produced during collider operations that might destroy the LHC, was first raised in the on-line science magazine ScientificBlogging in an article July 2nd, by Alan Gillis. Other well-known safety hazards have been studied in the latest CERN LHC Safety Assessment Group report, theoretical objects and dangers that might be produced at the LHC, like micro black holes destroying the planet. MBH is the main focus in the Court suit. CERN concludes there is no risk.<br /><br />LHC Kritiks strongly disagree on the level of risk and CERN's claim that they have addressed it. "In the complaint", said Markus Goritschnig, "we took all the safety arguments into consideration that were given by CERN in their standard reactions to the global risk. They will have to produce a better LSAG report."<br /><br />One of CERN's chief critics on mBH is the eminent scientist, Dr Otto E Rössler. He has been linked to the Court challenge, though he is not directly behind it. There are three principal signatories to the suit, one each from Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In the suit Dr. Rössler's theories on mBH figure prominently. In answer to Dr James Gillies, he told me that CERN still has not disproved his general relativistic theory on mBH or proved that neutron stars are immune to mBH because mBH don't exist. Dr Rössler said these, the most dense stars, are not attacked by mBH because they are protected by their own superfluidity, so mBH pass through them as there is no friction. MBH can exist in space, he insists. CERN has no proof one way or the other. Dr Rössler said, "This unproven argument does not impart any security onto earth as CERN alleges."<br /><br />Dr Rössler added that there is further confirmation of his theory that mBH do not evaporate, contrary to what Professor Stephen Hawking states, through his Hawking radiation theory. "I just learned about an earlier proof of non-evaporation given by Vladimir Belinski, Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette, France, in Physics Letters A. (Vol 209, p 13)<br /><br />The authors of the Euro suit have included a new study on the mBH question, not considered in the LSAG report as both are recent documents. The paper by Dr Rainer Plaga, a German physicist, that supports Dr Rössler on possible mBH production and dangers, uses quantum physics arguments as CERN does. Markus Goritschnig thinks that Dr Plaga's work is a compelling contribution to the argument for dangerous mBH. "Plaga says the first consequence of producing black holes in lower dimensions would be a disastrous explosion. Then the semi-stable black hole would intensively radiate, consuming 17,000T of material each year. It would be unremovable, undestroyable, and surely endanger the planet as a whole."<br /><br />Dr Rössler is due to meet with the Swiss President, Pascal Couchepin, this fall on LHC safety issues. According to a spokeswoman for the ECHR, "The proceedings before the Strasbourg Court are expected to take several years."<br /><br />(This article was originally published in the Alan Gillis Column, ScientificBlogging, <a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/stop_cern_euro_court_action_slips_and_slides_forward">http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/stop_cern_euro_court_action_slips_and_slides_forward</a>)<br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Chown, Markus. New Scientist, "Trouble on the horizon for evaporating black holes", Feb 10, 1996, <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14920163.000-trouble-on-the-horizon-for-evaporating-black-holes.html">http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14920163.000-trouble-on-the-horizon-for-evaporating-black-holes.html</a><br /><br />Dambeck, Holger. SpiegalOnline, "Gericht weist Eilantrag gegen Superbeschleuniger ab", August 29, 2008, <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,575275,00.html">http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,575275,00.html</a><br /><br />Ellis, Jonathan et al. CERN LSAG, "Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions", Undated (from 2008), <a href="http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf">http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf</a><br /><br />Ellis, Jonathan et al. CERN LSAG, "Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions Addendum on strangelets", June 20, 2008, <a href="http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf">http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report_add.pdf</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan. ScientificBlogging, "Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment", July 2, 2008, <a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment">http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment</a><br /><br />Gray, Richard. Telegraph, "Legal bid to stop CERN atom smasher from 'destroying the world'", Aug 31, 2008 <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2650665/Legal-bid-to-stop-CERN-atom-smasher-from-destroying-the-world.html">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2650665/Legal-bid-to-stop-CERN-atom-smasher-from-destroying-the-world.html</a><br /><br />LHC Kritik, ECHR Court Documents, <a href="http://lhc-concern.info/">http://lhc-concern.info/</a><br /><br />Plaga, Rainer. ArXiv, "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders", preprint submitted to Elsevier, Aug 10, 2008, <a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf">http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0808/0808.1415v1.pdf</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-54353343379227354482008-08-27T18:46:00.000-07:002008-08-28T13:14:31.783-07:00Suit Alleges CERN In Violation Of Human Rights<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SLYFcky-BOI/AAAAAAAAAqo/k6vh9bWv8sQ/s1600-h/391143453_4f340fb105EuroCourtHumanRightsNicomars82CC2007.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5239381204964082914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SLYFcky-BOI/AAAAAAAAAqo/k6vh9bWv8sQ/s400/391143453_4f340fb105EuroCourtHumanRightsNicomars82CC2007.jpg" border="0" /></a>Yesterday, a group of LHC critics filed a suit against CERN in the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg . The authors of the suit are physicists, professors and students largely from Germany and Austria, who feel that the operation of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, poses grave risks for the safety and well-being of the 27 member states of the European Union and their citizens. The Rule of Law, the suit states, is also threatened. The legal arguments that define the legitimacy of the suit appear clear-cut, and have been crafted in German by a well known Professor of International Law, Adrian Hollaender.<br /><br />The arguments for several major risks that might develop into wholesale disasters are based on papers from various physicists and a risk assessment analyst, whose conclusions will be examined by the court as well as counter-arguments by CERN. It's a question of theories versus theories. The outcome is anyone's guess, but a cogent risk analysis could be the deciding factor. The suit highlights the possible production of Micro Black Holes, which could be a pollution hazard or combine and destroy the LHC. In the worst case, mBH could start consuming the planet, producing dangerous radiation.<br /><br />MBH are admitted as theoretically possible by CERN. Indeed CERN anticipated large scale production of mBH, but lately has refuted the possibility and denied that they could be produced at the LHC, unless there were extra dimensions as postulated in String Theory. In that case CERN says mBH would be harmless, evaporating quickly due to a theoretical Hawking radiation, though this radiation has not been detected from black holes in space. <br /><br />Bosenovas are a new risk theory in the suit, besides the better known Strangelets and Lowered Vacuum State theories. Unlike the others there is some experimental evidence for a Bosenova, but this phenomenon of implosion/explosion has only been produced in small groups of atoms of Rubidium-85 in an ultracold state, a Bose-Einstein Condensate.<br /><br />What might occur at the LHC, is a new type of Bosenova from what amounts to a BEC used there as a coolant, an ultracold Superfluid Helium II, of about 60 metric tonnes in the LHC ring, and a further 60 tonnes of somewhat warmer Superfluid Helium I in refrigeration plants on the surface connected to the subterranean main ring. Whether possible or not is unknown, no experiments having been done by CERN to rule out the possibility, nor any theoretical model studies. The Bosenova risk was first raised in an article by Alan Gillis in the on-line science magazine, ScientificBlogging, July 2, 2008, "<a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment">Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment"</a>.<br /><br />The first full proton beam injection into the LHC is due September 10th. As further studies and experiments required to assess risks are a long way off, and even a decision on risks as presented by the plaintiffs could take the European Court some time to evaluate, the authors of the suit are asking the court for a speedy granting of Interim Measures. The LHC should be shut-down pending the Court's ruling. The argument that the LHC be limited to no more than 2 TeV energy overall, similar to Fermilab's Tevatron collider design energies, they exclude from the Court's consideration.<br /><br />A similar suit is before the US court in Hawaii, launched by Dr Walter Wagner and Dr Luis Sancho, against CERN and Fermilab, court in session September 2nd.Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-54565657291598434442008-08-22T17:45:00.000-07:002008-08-26T16:09:52.707-07:00LHC Start-up To Shut-down 2008<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SK9fZci9N8I/AAAAAAAAAqg/0m4YFmlgst4/s1600-h/firstBeam_ip3_LHC_proton_bunch_point_3CERN2008.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5237509782419355586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SK9fZci9N8I/AAAAAAAAAqg/0m4YFmlgst4/s400/firstBeam_ip3_LHC_proton_bunch_point_3CERN2008.jpg" border="0" /></a>After the Olympics, the next big thing is the international Large Hadron Collider. There's a lot of excitement at CERN. The first injections, and without a hitch, of low energy protons shot through an eighth of the 27 km LHC ring. Back to back for this weekend they're doing it again at 0.45 TeV with the anticlockwise beam. It's an important preliminary test, kicking the protons from the pre-accelerator loops, into the unknown. At this point CERN is confident there is nothing to worry about. The energy is only half of the currently most powerful collider, Fermilab's Tevatron, in Batavia, Ill. So, CERN's probably right, this time. Higher energies will be the real test.<br /><br />Now for the news, major media aren't covering, from the current <em>Strings 2008</em>, a CERN conference, and not only on String theory. It's another window on CERN that is fascinating.<br /><br />Even at 1% of design energies, as Lyn Evans, Project Director, said August 18th in his talk, on LHC Machine Status, we'll be in new territory. He also confirmed that the first beam right around the main ring is still set for September 10th, as announced last week.<br /><br />There's one problem Evans said quickly, a turbine needs replacing in Sector 6-7, but it won't delay operations. Once another test is done for the other beam later in September, CERN plans to go ahead with 5 TeV runs before the standard winter shutdown. A Russian scientist, Alexander Vodopyanov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna), said recently in <em>RIA Novosti World</em>, that he's heard that the LHC will be inaugurated October 21st, which supposes that the collider, will by that time have had one test run at least. Though beam collisions at 10 TeV, probably will start later. CERN is in a hurry though, having cancelled earlier plans for a gradual ramping up of beam energies. Going from a known quantity, suddenly into the unknown is a risk, and totally unnecessary. The big rush is due to three years of delays, construction and equipment problems.<br /><br />Seems they would even have skipped 5 TeV and gone straight to 7 TeV beams this fall, as Evans said the collider wasn't ready for the design energies, as some magnets had been lying around for two years, and were found to require retraining for higher energies, though they were previously trained, this batch from some other supplier. Those will be retrained during the winter shutdown, so they can all go skiing. Mount Blanc is only a proton away. That's not official though. Ski report widgets and desktop ski weather icons and live webcam links to the best ski resorts are all over CERN desktops and laptops. Ski weekend emails fly like alarm routines.<br /><br />Magnets have to sit up, bark and rollover, as they say at Fermilab. Twelve hundred 15 meter ones at about a million dollars a pop, thousands of smaller ones. But Evans added they were proceeding with care, with some magnets not fully trained, not pushing them beyond 5 TeV, as there are always some protons lost from the beams, and that can cause magnet quenches. As we know from the Tevatron, quenches can crash down the entire collider. Sometimes beams are lost, potentially a dangerous situation.<br /><br />So September 10th, 21 days to go, is not the BBC's "Big Bang Day", as they're calling it, on their live Radio Four broadcast, starting at 0:8:30 BST. No need to panic yet. Try again later this October. For all you fans of micro black holes, you'll have to wait for them too. CERN's not convinced they'll show up during proton collisions. If they do, Dr O. Buchmüller, speaking on The Search for New Physics at the LHC, said at <em>Strings 2008</em>, after the Evans presentation, that if they show up they would be within SUSY parameters, and their signature would be clearly obvious. Keep your fingers crossed so they aren't too obvious.<br /><br />Make a date to watch the September 10th LHC Sparks and Quarks, starting 0:8:30 BST, firing of the First Beam an hour later, like on BBC Radio Four, either on Eurovision, if you have a feed or can buy an Internet pass for this one. Or if you're broke after blowing $10 billion on the LHC, watch it for free on CERN's tiny TV Live Webcast, better in Flash if you have internet lite, but a fast machine.<br /><br />The just-ended <em>Strings 2008</em>, the best in arcane viewing, even if you're a physics fanatic, was a live webcast on the same CERN url daily this week. Earlier talks from <em>Strings 2008</em>, you might have missed, including the must see Evans and Buchmüller talks, should be available as videos a few days late on this same CERN url, see below.<br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />CERN Strings 2008, conference program, <a href="http://ph-dep-th.web.cern.ch/ph-dep-th/content2/workshops/strings2008/?site=content/talks.html">http://ph-dep-th.web.cern.ch/ph-dep-th/content2/workshops/strings2008/?site=content/talks.html</a><br /><br />CERN Webcasts, live or pre-recorded video, for Strings 2008, First Beam September 10th, or other CERN events, <a href="http://webcast.cern.ch/">http://webcast.cern.ch/</a><br /><br />CERN First Beam, news on LHC start-up, countdown to September 10th, <a href="http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html">http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html</a><br /><br />CERN Press Release, CERN announces start-up date for LHC, August 7, 2008, <a href="http://info.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR06.08E.html">http://info.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR06.08E.html</a><br /><br />RIA Novosti World, "Large Hadron Collider to be launched October 21 -- Russian Scientist", August 5, 2008, <a href="http://en.rian.ru/world/20080805/115771418.html">http://en.rian.ru/world/20080805/115771418.html</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan, The Science of Conundrums, "Daily Battles At The Tevatron", <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/daily-battles-at-tevatron.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/daily-battles-at-tevatron.html</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan, The Science of Conundrums, "Major Failures At The Tevatron", <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/major-failures-at-tevatron.html</a><br /><br />Gillis, Alan, The Science of Conundrums, "It's All About Energy At The LHC", <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/its-all-about-energy-at-lhc.html">http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/04/its-all-about-energy-at-lhc.html</a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">From First Test To First Beam To First Collisions</span><br /><br />CERN's image (above) of last weekend's first proton bunch injection, raises some questions for those who aren't particle physicists. If you read the CERN descriptions of the particle beam and bunches of protons, they look nothing like this.<br /><br />Ordinarily at design energies, CERN states there will be 3,000 bunches of protons in the beam, and numbering overall anywhere from 100 billion to the trillions of protons, depending on how much luminosity the physicists at the LHC would like for each experiment. The pictured bunch according to SciAM is 5 million protons, a far smaller number than would be usual, which would be at least 100 million protons per bunch. And CERN always describes their beams as less than the thickness of a human hair, and each bunch about 5 cm long. What we're seeing with this first bunch is a hot ball of protons, with a big halo and tail, at about 7.5 mm on the Y-axis, and with the halo included, about 11 mm overall, more like the width of your baby finger.<br /><br />There's nothing wrong here, as this is typically what you get from the low energy 0.45 TeV SPS pre-accelerator that feeds the LHC. Further focusing of the beam will occur later, to produce needle-like bunches, through collimators throughout the main ring. But the halo is worth looking at. It's well understood this is mostly an electron cloud, generated through interactions of these accelerated protons and extremely high magnetic fields from the superconducting di-pole magnets.<br /><br />But in the LHC the initial halos, that are cleansed later and focused, show some foreign matter in the beam cryostats which is burning, and this in the best vacuum that CERN can produce for the beam lines, a greater vacuum than is found on the Moon.<br /><br />Recently, Katherine McAlpine, a science writer working for CERN, put it this way. ". . . with that first beam, they're going to be getting so much more data coming out from those protons running into things that are in the beam pipe than they're getting from cosmic rays coming in from outer space right now that the detector people will have a lot more information to work with calibrating."<br /><br />Of late she's become well known as AlpineKat through her rap video, "Large Hadron Rap", with CERN back-up.<br /><br />Besides some collider debris, electron cloud production at the Proton Synchrotron and the Super Proton Synchrotron has been an unresolved problem, especially the proton scattering which comes with an unfocused beam. Other pre-accelerators have the same problem.<br /><br />Looking back to what Lyn Evans said at <em>Strings 2008</em>, there's an interesting effect that might be seen on September 10th, during the First Beam right around the collider ring.<br /><br />As some magnets are not properly trained, they won't be ideal superconductors like the other magnets, that will be at 8.33 Teslas. Their magnetic fields will be somewhat weaker and so the First Beam of protons will pass through various field strengths around the collider. This also affects the Superfluid Heliums that circulate through the magnets and cool them and the cryostats. As Superfluid Helium is considered to be a Bose-Einstein Condensate, it has been demonstrated in another BEC that an abrupt change in magnetic fields starts the Bosenova implosion/explosion.<br /><br />No CERN experimental studies or theoretical analysis has ever been produced on this safety issue by CERN. The recent LSAG safety report by CERN ignores this possible risk that might destroy the collider.<br /><br />There should be some news this weekend on another test. The counter-rotating beam, like last weekend's test will be injected this weekend, probably with similar success. The next thing to watch is the September 10th First Beam, where there is more risk of failures in engineering and equipment. Look for a follow-up article here on what CERN might discover, when it's too late.<br /><br />Katherine McAlpine also said, in line with earlier reports from CERN, " . . . on September 10th they're really only going to have one beam going around, so they're not going to have collisions until they project about two months later after startup."<br /><br />So around November 10th for the first particle collisions at 10 TeV.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">CERN Confirms Big Bash</span><br /><br />If there's no big crash, CERN says the Collider Inauguration will be October 21st, as Vodopyanov said. 10 TeV Collisions are scheduled before winter shutdown, CERN says again, confirming what McAlpine said. And I was right about the second kicker magnet test. No problems. There was a bit more action from one of the smaller forward detectors, the VELO, part of the giant LHCb detector. The protons knocked through part of the VELO array, and CERN captured the first particle tracks in a series of images, showing at least that this bit works. A relief, these card modules are supercomplex. See the preliminary data and beam schedule on this <a href="http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/News/FinalLHCsyncTest.html">CERN summary page</a>.<br /><br />(This article originally appeared in the Alan Gillis Column, Big Science Gambles, ScientificBlogging, in two parts, August 19 and 22, 2008, Big Bash update August 26, 2008, <a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/lhc_start_up">http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/lhc_start_up</a>)<br /><br /><br />References<br /><br />Gillis, Alan. ScientificBlogging, "Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment", July 2, 2008, <a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment">http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/superfluids_becs_and_bosenovas_the_ultimate_experiment</a><br /><br />McAlpine, Katherine (AlpineKat). Youtube, "Large Hadron Rap", July 28, 2008, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM</a><br /><br />Turner, James. O'Reilly News, "Rapping the Higgs Boson: Katherine McAlpine . . .", August 19, 2008, <a href="http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/rapping-the-higgs-boson-kather.html">http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/rapping-the-higgs-boson-kather.html</a>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-6450392982883402622008-08-06T08:38:00.000-07:002008-08-07T18:06:07.656-07:00LHC News Update<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SJnF74BDYjI/AAAAAAAAApg/k2xDGlaICkg/s1600-h/r2529041419PhoenixLanderMarsWeatherEdit1NASA2008.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5231430074607297074" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SJnF74BDYjI/AAAAAAAAApg/k2xDGlaICkg/s400/r2529041419PhoenixLanderMarsWeatherEdit1NASA2008.jpg" border="0" /></a> Well Fuk, over to you.<br /><br />Right Brian. Over on Earth, 'Red Button Day' is fast approaching. That's when they push the big red button at the Large Hadron Collider.<br /><br />It's finally a go, right Fuk?<br /><br />We make it a preliminary feed. We're getting some Russian satellite interference. We're filtering now. Gillies at CERN is on top of it.<br /><br />Wasn't he on top of it for June? Fuk?<br /><br />That was full cooldown, Brian.<br /><br />So we got full cooldown, Fuk?<br /><br />No Fuking way. They're almost there.<br /><br />Fuking glitch factory, Fuk? Weren't they gonna hit that Fuking button 3 years ago?<br /><br />That's affirmative, Brian. But when they do, they're gonna hit a Fuking Home Run.<br /><br />Hope you're right, Fuk.<br /><br /><br />The real down to earth story is the Russians have scooped CERN on start-up of the LHC. <a href="http://en.rian.ru/world/20080805/115771418.html">RIA Novosti World</a> says the collider "will be officially unveiled October 21". The source is a Russian scientist, Alexander Vodopyanov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna). CERN has been awash with start-up rumors lately, including one in The New York Times, and hasn't commented.<br /><br />James Gillies, CERN's PR Director, reported in <a href="http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/08/04/1246154.aspx">CosmicLog MSNBC</a>, did announce that the timing of the first beam injection will be sometime during the first 2 weeks of September. "The machine is basically cold now." See for yourself. Click on <em>LHC Cooldown Status Live</em>, on this page, from a column of <em>KEY CERN SITES</em> on your right, only 5 of 8 sectors are cold enough, at 1.9 K . But this first injection is for only one beam into one sector of 8, basically a test of one of the Injection Kicker magnets that kicks a proton beam into the main ring from the PS and SPS pre-accelerators. This will be the clockwise beam, the counterclockwise beam test should be a month later. The beam energy isn't specified, but it will probably be 0.45 TeV, which is what the pre-accelerators deliver to the main 17 mile ring, where beams will be further accelerated to 5 TeV, maybe in October as Vodopyanov says, just before the official inaugeration.<br /><br />CosmicLog also has some useful updates on a rival Fermilab search for the Higgs Boson, some ZZs turning up, <em>yawn</em>. And the Wagner/Sancho suit, to be heard in court on September 2nd. It could be dismissed then or an injunction could be granted to delay LHC start-up. Or proceedings could drag on. Probably the Hawaiian Court will say they don't have jurisdiction.<br /><br />And all the fuss on the latest LHC Rap Video, not enough juice to power a hearing aid, at 0.0000000000003 GeV. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/cernettes">The Cernettes Channel on Youtube</a> can't be beat.<br /><br />Lately too, you might want to see a dazzling gallery of 28 hi-res images of the LHC by CERN photographers on The Boston Globe on-line edition's <a href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html">Big Picture</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">STOP PRESS August 7, 2008</span><br /><span style="color:#33cc00;"></span><br />It's official. <a href="http://info.web.cern.ch/Press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR06.08E.html">CERN announced</a> the first attempt to <em>circulate</em> a beam of protons through the LHC ring will be September 10, 2008. The beam energy is what the pre-accelerators can deliver, that is 0.45 TeV. The target is still 5 TeV per beam later this year, with collisions possible before the planned Winter shutdown.<br /><br />The big event will be on <a href="http://www.eurovision.net/">Eurovision</a>, but elsewhere you'll need a paid on-line account with them. There's a big media circus being carefully planned for hundreds of journalists descending from the skies or driving in. The good news is the rest of us will be able to watch it <em>live</em> on up to 4 <a href="http://webcast.cern.ch/">CERN Webcast Channels </a>for free. Thanks to all at CERN. Don't forget to stock up on your Collider Donuts and don't miss this. If you're worried, it's still too early to be really worried, only a low energy single beam run. Still the LHC has never been tested like this. Expect some sparks and quarks.<br /><br />The initial test of an Injection Kicker magnet into one sector is way ahead of schedule, <em>set for this weekend</em>. This must be an LHC first. Ahead of schedules and rumors? Amazing!<br /><br />Make a date to watch the Collider Show here, Wednesday September 10, 2008. It's five hours later in France if you're in New York. There's a <em>CERN LHC LIVE WEBCAMS</em> spot on your right. Click on <em>CERN Live Webcasts</em>. Next one is August 18, 08:00 or 3 AM in NY, lectures on String theory, "Strings 2008".Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-33746839877396626032008-07-19T09:12:00.000-07:002008-07-19T20:22:26.598-07:00LHC Sci-Fi And Critics Buried In The Blogosphere<a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SIIZUSECi4I/AAAAAAAAAno/b0We8XBoHXQ/s1600-h/Set5_279_BritishPhysicistsATLAS_edit2_STFC2006.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5224766353940056962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SIIZUSECi4I/AAAAAAAAAno/b0We8XBoHXQ/s400/Set5_279_BritishPhysicistsATLAS_edit2_STFC2006.jpg" border="0" /></a>The British ATLAS Team inspecting their Stargate Portal, the higher-dimensional ‘shipping container’ ready for activation, beating the American LOST Team by 2.2 years. The Russians were the first to crack the top secret potential of the <a href="http://www.geekologie.com/2008/02/uh_oh_russians_have_either_bui.php">LHC Time Machine</a>, but forgot to commercialize it.<br /><br /><div>Now the American <a href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4260687.html?series=6">LOST</a> Team has the Hollywood edge, with millions watching every week, and an Internet frenzy that eclipses anything on real science. Fifty million hits on one LOST fan site alone. The LHC Money Train smokes, while mighty NASA bites the Martian dust.<br /><br />It gets goofier with the new Dan Brown movie, Angels and Demons, and Tom Hanks, scheduled for launch May 15, 2009. <a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000572">Stealing antimatter from CERN</a> to make a bomb to blow up the Vatican. CERN did produce antiprotons with the old LEP and even a tiny bit of antihydrogen, enough to blow up a jumbo cup of movie popcorn, though they’re not planning to produce any with the LHC, unless by accident, in which case it might blow up and uh-oh fuse some helium.<br /><br />So the interest in the LHC is big, sideways. Considering its real world unknown potential to blow itself up with a super bosenova, and maybe Geneva, or produce a runaway black hole that might devour the planet, or strangelets, or magnetic monopoles or wormholes, there’s, oddly, little enough real interest outside the physics community.<br /><br />The problem is, that apart from a few critics with scientific credentials who have gone public, those with some international clout, either support the LHC, like Stephen Hawking, or are working directly or are collaborating with CERN, about 8,000 or half of all particle physicists. The others are teaching or working at other labs. Some have their doubts about the wisdom of going ahead with the LHC, but they’re either obliged to keep them private to protect their jobs and reputations, or they voice their concerns during coffee breaks at committee meetings. For those physicists outside the CERN loop, CERN invites them to contact <a href="http://mlm.web.cern.ch/mlm/">Michelangelo Mangano</a>, a CERN physicist and quantum spin doctor, who handles serious objections at the LHC. He must be good. Complaints go in and like in a black hole, they never come out again.<br /><br />With the mainstream media unwilling to investigate possible dangers at the LHC, that leaves the field open for anonymous and amateur scientists to criticize the LHC, about a dozen major websites and blogs geared to monitor the LHC, and comments posted on hundreds of news sites that run articles on the LHC, even on social bookmarking sites and anonymous blogs and blogs within blogs. Comments run from the abysmally dumb, to panic-stricken, to rumor-mongering, to honest complaining or just having fun with doomsday, though there is some erudite analysis, tantalizing but not easily verifiable. Here are a few worth reading.<br /><br />From <a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/34711">Physicsworld</a>: vbarashkov June 24, 2008 2:58 PM<br />I doubt that is how a black hole can be formed, considering that as we know so far it takes an entire star to form one. Not only that, but for a black hole to form exactly how much must the two atoms be compressed. Certainly a lot more than they can be in a head on collision even at near twice the speed of light. If I had 20 ton iron sphere, and I compressed it to fit on a tip of a needle, the only thing it would do is explode with enough energy to destroy the entire planet. . .<br /><br /><em>Anyone seen a black 20 ton iron sphere? It was here a second ago? Never mind, Val found the vodka.</em><br /><br />From <a href="http://www.geekologie.com/2008/02/uh_oh_russians_have_either_bui.php">Geekology</a>: VtFarmboy - February 12, 2008 11:22 AM<br />I think Mr. Scott needs to get back to the enterprise. He's needed the Klingons are attacking and the warp drive dilithum crystals are decaying.<br /><br /><em>And Spock. Is that new compression algorithm ready? We need to beam up the LHC before it blows up. Professor Rössler wants it on the Moon right now.</em><br /><br />From <a href="http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/03/more_physics_nonsense_the_lhc.html">The Great Beyond</a>, BlogsNature: Walt 06-18-08 01:00 AM<br />. . .The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states quote: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions..." This stunning admission is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing.' you could not be more wrong. The second part of the quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle experimentalist physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. . .<br /><br /><em>Walt has it right. Here is the actual embarrassing CERN webpage, </em><a href="http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html"><em>Our understanding of the Universe is about to change...</em></a><em><br /><br /></em>From<em> </em><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080502/full/news.2008.797.html"><em>NatureNews</em></a><em>:</em> David Wenbert 06 May 2008<em><br /></em>. . . 4. Perhaps the unqualified legacy of monumental failure and waste exhibited by the high energy and plasma physics community is instructive here. After more than 50 years of building ever larger and more powerful colliders and plasma reactors, at a cost of untold Billions of dollars, NO useful scientific breakthroughs have ever been recorded from either such device, and both a Fundamental Understanding of Matter, and Controlled Fusion Energy remain totally elusive. The abject failure of particle physicists to have achieved their objectives (i.e. discovering the Higgs Boson) with prior collider experiments - although widely predicted to have done so - indicates the low reliability of their certainty in the outcome of these experiments. Consistently wrong, over decades, in their assertions that 'the last big machine' would illuminate the structure of matter - or ignite a controlled breakeven reaction, for that matter - leaves us with no alternative but to conclude that the same physicists may be no more accurate in predicting the behavior of 'the next big machine. The math doesnt fix this, since each such project had 'good math' to contend it would meet its scientific objectives, and yet, repeatedly, failure ensued. The rich, deep, and unbroken record of failure in these "Big Physics" projects is a Red Flag that the warnings from the fringe on potential distasters should be heeded. The physicists who propound the reliability of their assumptions have yet to be proven right once, whereas, the alarmists only need to be right 'once'. The Precautiionary Principle would seem wisely applied in these collider debates.<em><br /><br />Read the thread and Wenbert’s full comment, in response to a previous comment by Richard Dawson who wrote to CERN and got some answers he quotes from the CERN letter.<br /><br /></em>One important point on micro black holes, received no comments, but is worth another look. The unnamed CERN source wrote, “But since, in case they (mBH) really exist, there will be millions produced, this means that indeed a few of them would be stopped within earth and start accretion. This however does not mean that they will crush the earth.” This is the point most commentators have been worried about. The odd thing is that at first CERN ignored the possibility of black hole formation, then embraced it publically as the LHC Black Hole Factory, while in their latest safety report, the LSAG is busy swatting mBH as though they were CERN’s famous TeV mosquitoes. That embarrassing Safety at the LHC webpage has been deleted, replaced with<em> </em><a href="http://public.web.cern.ch/PUBLIC/en/LHC/Safety-en.html">a summary of the new LSAG report</a> where Einstein has been resurrected, and therefore “. . . it is impossible for microscopic black holes to be produced at the LHC.” Mosquitoes however, linger on <a href="http://public-old.web.cern.ch/public-old/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/CERNFuture/LHCSafe/LHCSafe-en.html">Are LHC Collisions Safe?</a><br /><br />The best analysis ever was made inadvertently, by The New York Times, when they called the LHC, <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/31/large-hardon-collide.html">The Large Hardon Collider</a>, which fits in well with Big Bang Theory, on everybody’s mind since the hit TV show.</div><div></div><em><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/A1L2xODZSI4&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/A1L2xODZSI4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="405" height="344"></embed></object>Seriously, there is one dissenting group of physicists at CERN, forced to do retro cabaret or else get lepton, none other than those sexy control room bottoms from the biggest collider ever, Les Horribles Cernettes. </em>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-79202462513655914402008-07-12T11:37:00.000-07:002008-07-12T13:51:02.647-07:00Superfluids, BECs And Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment At The LHC<a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SHj7Vhx4PCI/AAAAAAAAAng/6wGSpPvafFc/s1600-h/BoseEinsteinCondensateEdit1NIST2003.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5222200115199491106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SHj7Vhx4PCI/AAAAAAAAAng/6wGSpPvafFc/s400/BoseEinsteinCondensateEdit1NIST2003.jpg" border="0" /></a><em>The first BEC, a rubidium-87, at 3 temperatures, 400nK, 200nK and 50nK, each pile of atoms 1 mm wide, activity greater nearer absolute zero, NIST 1995</em><br /><blockquote></blockquote>In a familiar world of solids, liquids and gases, we find the fourth state of matter, the plasmas of lightning to the aurora borealis and fluorescent tubes at the office. Further out, minor phenomena becomes the big event in space, our shining stars are plasma being fused producing light. Not until 1924 was a fifth state of matter considered possible. Intrigued by quantum statistics, invented by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose from observations of light, Einstein applied Bose’s work to matter. The Bose-Einstein Condensate(BEC) was born. Was there any truth to the theory, Einstein himself wondered, that matter that could condense at ultracold temperatures into something new?<br /><br />Einstein’s theory was left hanging, as a mathematical artifact, until 1938. Fritz London, a German theoretical chemist and physicist, working on helium at the same time as the Russian Pyotr Kapitsa who discovered its superfluid state at just under 2.2 K, found it behaved like Einstein’s theoretical BEC. Subsequent research confirmed London’s insight. Both stable isotopes, ordinary helium-4, and the rare helium-3 at much lower temperatures, are quantum superfluids, behaving like matter-waves or superatoms, undifferentiated matter with vastly different properties from their gas state or their ordinary bottled fluid state. Now scientists had a way of studying laboratory tabletop quantum physics. These, the only two superfluids known with zero viscosity, have sparked intense interest, helium-4 a bosonic superfluid and helium-3, a fermionic superfluid. Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch. A gateway opened which eventually led to the laboratory production of other BECs when finally ultracold states could be induced, starting in 1995.<br /><br />Viewing superfluid helium in action, demonstrates the baffling counter-intuitive nature of quantum fluids and other BECs. Some of the stunning properties of superfluid helium were observed if not understood back in 1908 when the Dutch physicist, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, cooled helium-4 to -269 Celsius. Not only was there no resistance to flow, the superfluid could climb the walls of the vessel, like a film, always 30 nanometers thick, defying gravity, or pour through the smallest hole or fissure, or leak through some apparently non-porous matter.<br /><br />Further studies showed that this superfluid, now called Helium II, behaved as a two-fluid model, partly in a low energy ground state, and partly in an excited state. With a little added heat and manipulation of the superfluid, an interaction of the two states was enhanced, producing a fountain effect, as though 2 fluids existed.<br /><br />In our own Sun and countless other stars, hydrogen fusion produces helium, the second most abundant element, and is in turn eventually fused by steps into carbon-12. On Earth there isn’t much, a trace atmospheric gas but found in quantity up to 7 percent in some natural gas. It’s produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.<br /><br />Given an electric charge, helium can fluoresce like neon. Even rarer molecules of helium-3 have been produced in helium-4 during ionization. Superfluid helium is also a superconductor, 30 times more efficient than copper as well as a thermal conductor 300 times that of copper. And both helium-3 and helium-4 have been cooled to near absolute zero, helium-4 retaining its superfluidity, helium-3 crystallizing, yet still capable of movement like other BECs. Adding enormous pressure of 25 atmospheres and more, forces even helium-4 to act like other BEC ‘solids’.<br /><br />If superfluid helium can tell us a lot about other ultracold BECs now being studied and produced by over 200 research teams worldwide, then BECs that also appear to be superfluids and have two coexisting states like the two fluid state of superfluids, could show us how superfluids behave. It’s more than satisfying the curiosity of pure research. BECs have been turned into atom lasers and BECs have produced bosenovas, an inexplicable phenomenon where BECs explode, releasing more than the energy present in the system and where about half of the BEC sample literally vanishes without a trace. Fascinating and worrisome in any lab working with small amounts of BECs, but superfluid Helium II BEC is being used in great quantities as a coolant in certain nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.<br /><br />The possibilities of a giant BEC bosenova produced in superfluid Helium II haven’t been investigated. The matter is urgent as 120 T of superfluid Helium II are being used at the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, whose energies far surpass any other collider’s, not only beam energies, but RF applied, extreme Tesla Fields by superconducting magnets, and electrical energies equivalent to the consumption of Geneva, powering the 27 km ring system. Startup of the LHC at 5 TeV per proton beam has been delayed to this September but for other technical reasons.<br /><br />The problem too, is that BECs are new and strange. It wasn’t until 1995 that an ultracold BEC was produced by new methods of supercooling, in this case applied to a gas of Rubidium-87 to bring it near absolute zero. For physics it was a sudden explosion in the quantum world. A new field of study, Condensed Matter Physics, a new state of matter positively confirmed, but far from understood. Matter acting as one giant atom with the properties of a superfluid. Shared Nobel Prizes awarded in 2001went to the team leaders at JILA, the joint NIST project with CU-Boulder, Carl E. Weiman and Eric A. Cornell. A third share in the Nobel for a sodium-25 BEC developed independently went to Wolfgang Ketterle now at MIT. Research at MIT is on a massive scale with several big BEC labs, working in part on BEC atom lasers. Don’t worry, Ketterle has said, atom lasers only work in a vacuum and would only travel a meter without one. Nevertheless matter-wave lasers are bound to be improved. There’s always military interest and funding.<br /><br /><p><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5222199727961544546" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SHj6-_NKF2I/AAAAAAAAAnY/B4dQvX-GvxQ/s400/BosenovaBurstmovieEdit1NIST2008.gif" border="0" /> <em>A bosenova explosion of rubidium-85, from a new burstmovie by NIST, 2008</em></p><em><p></em></p>What astonished some physicists was another BEC event in 2001, well beyond anything anticipated. The BEC discovery team at JILA produced a new rubidium-85 BEC. While an electromagnetic field was applied to cause a stronger attraction among the BEC atoms, the BEC started to shrink and then exploded like a supernova. The result was a release of particles in various streams, leaving behind a much smaller BEC remnant. The thermal energy released was greater than the energy in the BEC and about half of all the thousands of atoms of the rubidium-85 disappeared. The effect was at first nicknamed the bosenova, and still a total puzzle to this day. After 7 years of study, the latest research on whatever goes on in a bosenova, now referred to as a BEC loss, needs a “new microscopic BEC physics” to explain it, says N.R. Claussen et al of a joint BEC team at the U of Colorado at Boulder, in a paper published in February this year. A second team at UC-Boulder led by Elizabeth A. Donley published the following month, also could not account for the bosenova phenomenon nor the apparent loss of atoms.<br /><br />Though the bosenova effect is staggering in its repercussions for the Standard Model, none of the more than 200 teams experimenting with BECs appear interested. The only study groups working seriously on bosenovas are those at JILA. Other research teams are looking for new BECs and a few are looking for applications of BECs to create things like better atomic clocks, interferometers or even studying light by teasing BECs with lasers to slow light down or stop it! In the future, quantum computing might use BECs and lasers. BECs could be big business.<br /><br />What happens next at the LHC will be the next big experiment in a superfluid Helium II BEC. It’s not part of the design parameters, as physicists assume that the helium will be stable based on its use in the much smaller, much less powerful, up to 250 GeV per beam, RHIC collider in Long Island, NY. CERN’s interests lie in producing the Higgs boson at the LHC, perhaps micro black holes and quark-gluon plasma. Even in the much awaited CERN safety study released last month, there’s absolutely nothing on a possible bosenova implosion/explosion. Of course to test the safety of the enormous LHC to handle foreseen and unforeseen events you’d need another disposable one. But at least it is possible to subject Helium II to some of these high energies and hadron beams as a test. Not at the low energies of the RHIC, but at Fermilab’s Tevatron, currently the most energetic collider with 0.9 TeV per beam, though still far short of the power of the monster LHC at ordinary operating conditions of 7 TeV and ultimately 1,150 TeV collisions of lead ions at nearly twice light speed. Helium II could simply be used as a target by Tevatron beams to see what would happen, besides being exposed to high and fluctuating Tesla fields, ionized by electrical currents, subjected to some of the extreme conditions anticipated at the LHC.<br /><br />The LSAG safety review at CERN, even their new report, is still a 4/5 majority internal assessment, and with an independent SPC Report/review of that review that’s still a CERN committee of 5 physicists, though the mainstream media is content with the CERN press releases, ‘No Danger That The LHC Will Destroy The Earth’, about everywhere. Though now black holes are now unlikely, but previously predicted to occur rapidly by CERN in the ‘LHC black hole factory’, but initially ignored, until a physicist wrote about the possibility in a letter to Scientific American that sparked the initial 2003 CERN safety assessment. There’s hard science and there’s French farce. Which one are we getting? Pushing the LHC big button as a test is a risky way to go. CERN has always insisted that small amounts of hadrons can’t do very much, but there’s an enormous amount of energy in the LHC and 120 T of BEC superfluid. There’s still a suit in the Hawaii courts to delay LHC startup because of safety concerns like black hole and strangelet production. Lately and since I first considered the possible dangers of superfluid helium in my article of March 7, 2008, ‘The Almost Thermonuclear LHC’, the plaintiffs, Dr Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho have announced they will seek an addendum to their suit to include bosenova risks at the LHC.<br /><br />Seven years after the rubidium-85 BEC produced the first bosenova, we still don’t know what happened to half of the Rubidium-85 atoms that disappeared.<br /><br /><em>(This article originally appeared in the Alan Gillis Column, Big Science Gambles, published in <a href="http://www.scientificblogging.com/Alan_Gillis">ScientificBlogging</a>.)</em><br /><br /><br />Baum, Michael. <a href="http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/tn6240.htm">From Supernova to Smoke Ring: Recent Experiments Underscore Weirdness of the Bose-Einstein Condensate</a>, NIST 2001<br />Boyle, Alan. <a href="http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/16/1146317.aspx">Doomsday Under Debate</a>, Cosmic Log, MSNBC 2008<br />Braun-Munzinger, Peter, et al. <a href="http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=20&resId=0&materialId=0&confId=35065">SPC Report On LSAG Documents</a>, CERN SPC 2008<br />Claussen, N.R. et al. <a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0201/0201400v3.pdf">Microscopic Dynamics in a Strongly Interacting Bose-Einstein Condensate</a>, JILA 2008<br />Donley, Elizabeth A. et al. <a href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0105/0105019v3.pdf">Dynamics of collapsing and exploding Bose-Einstein condensates</a>, JILA 2008<br />Ellis, John, et al. <a href="http://lsag.web.cern.ch/lsag/LSAG-Report.pdf">Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions</a>, CERN LSAG 2008<br />Gillis, Alan. <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html">The Almost Thermonuclear LHC</a>, The Science of Conundrums, 2008<br />Ketterle, Wolfgang. <a href="http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/Projects_2006/Pubs_06/kett06_BEC-Identity%20Crisis%20for%20Indestinguishable%20Particles.pdf">Ch 9, Bose-Einstein Condensation: Identity Crisis for Indistinguishable Particles</a>, in “Quantum Mechanics at the Crossroads”, Springer Berlin, 2006<br />Schewe, Phil et al. <a href="http://www.aip.org/pnu/2004/split/669-1.html">Supersolid, Quantum Crystal, A Bose-Einstein Condensate in Solid</a>, Physics News Update, The AIP Bulletin of Physics News, 2004<br /><br /><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3qvqg_superfluid_tech">Superfluid</a>Uploaded by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/reelgood0008">reelgood0008</a> BBC VideoAlan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-64616556482284352432008-05-29T10:40:00.000-07:002008-05-29T13:37:03.292-07:00Science, Prophecy And Art At The LHC<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SD7q1zLmEHI/AAAAAAAAAnI/jl36Yp2UmCU/s1600-h/866396441_9ad367aa33_o_floor_art_SergeMoro_VisitorCenterCERN_edit1_Arenamontanus2007.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5205856429279678578" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SD7q1zLmEHI/AAAAAAAAAnI/jl36Yp2UmCU/s400/866396441_9ad367aa33_o_floor_art_SergeMoro_VisitorCenterCERN_edit1_Arenamontanus2007.jpg" border="0" /></a> The Mayan influence on the floor of the CERN Visitor Center, artist Serge Moro. A friend ribbed me about the previous post on Nostradamus And The LHC, you can read anything you want into those quatrains. It's Art, I should have said, that's what Art does. There are over 10,000 dissertations on Hamlet alone, and more than a 100,000 published articles. You should throw in the Mayans too while you're at it, he went on. The famous Mayan Calendar, the long count, that expires or starts over in 2012, some taking that as the end of the world. See if you can tie that in with CERN! As you can see, CERN did it themselves, unconsciously or consciously, doesn't matter which. Both are equally valid motions, conjuring up some tie with the past and the future or building on the past or stealing some glory, like the Roman Capital in Washington, DC or Fermilab's Stonehenge Computer Center in my earlier post 'The Tevatron Connection' of April 2008.<br /><br />Human experience is broad and varied. Looking at the big picture has made for great civilizations. Today's narrow focus into specialities has isolated many of our most able and brilliant people into pigeon holes. Other pigeons might communicate with them, but we don't and they don't bother. So we drift into a future nobody particularly cares for.<br /><br />I'd remind scientists that before modern science there was science fiction, that gave science a tremendous push, starting say with the Victorians like HG Wells and Jules Verne. In 1895 Wells wrote in 'The Time Machine', "There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it." He added, "Scientific people . . . know very well that Time is only a kind of Space." An impressive insight coming well before Einstein's Spacetime.<br /><br />If societies took Art as seriously as Science we could avoid some trouble brewing in science, the other aspect of sci-fi. These visionary works should caution us as well as inspire, like those of Jules Verne. Besides his scientific adventures and futuristic novels, he wrote one bleak and realistic novel approximating our own time. His publisher discouraged him, saying it would damage his reputation and disappoint his public. <a href="http://jv.gilead.org.il/evans/thenewjv.html">'Paris in the 20th Century'</a> was forgotten, only to resurface in 1994. Written with a uncanny prophetic power in 1863, it characterizes not only a technologically modern Paris of today with glass skyscrapers and cars, worldwide communications and even a geometric centerpiece at the Louvre, the IM Pei pyramid, it reflects the modern state of big business and science as the only virtues, even the women emancipated into the workforce and necessarily masculinized. Look on the right, this odyssey might not last.<br /><br />So before some physicists laugh at CERN, <em>Nostradamus, les Maya et quoi encore?</em> The big picture of the big collider sleeping underground could just wake up like the proverbial fire-breathing dragon.Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-54117004960648792472008-05-12T09:30:00.000-07:002008-05-25T13:16:33.255-07:00Nostradamus And The LHC<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SChxYcGBELI/AAAAAAAAAnA/Jr1887GTT04/s1600-h/Lost_Book_Of_Nostradamus_1_FULL_detail_BNCR_Rome2006.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5199530434471465138" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SChxYcGBELI/AAAAAAAAAnA/Jr1887GTT04/s400/Lost_Book_Of_Nostradamus_1_FULL_detail_BNCR_Rome2006.jpg" border="0" /></a> A detail from a watercolor in the Vaticinia Nostradami codex, 1629 AD, at the Central National Library, Rome. The current buzz on the internet is a prophecy by Nostradamus that seems to indicate a colossal disaster for Geneva caused by the LHC. It's so striking, I thought it worth a closer look. While searching for the original French quatrain, number 44 in Century 9, I came across this image from what's being called 'The Lost Book of Nostradamus' from the recent book with this title by Ottavio Cesare Ramotti.<br /><br />An archer shoots two fish in opposite directions across a gap, within a section of pipe. If you're imagining the LHC proton beams shooting through a detector through a beryllium pipe, and you're from the Renaissance, knowning nothing of physics and little of machinery, how better to illustrate this event? Fish too, in opposite streams, quite remarkable when you recall the quatrain and the 'Raypoz'.<br /><br />It's not certain that Nostradamus wrote and illustrated this codex of 80 watercolors, something like William Blake's much later books of illuminations. It was attributed to Nostradamus by the title added in about 1689, while Nostradamus lived from 1503-1566. It's possible the codex was produced by Nostradamus' son César, who is known to have been a painter of miniatures and was preparing a booklet as a gift for King Louis XIII of France.<br /><br />The current codex was presented by a Brother Beroaldus to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII who was in office from 1623-1644. The mystery deepens as the codex some how found its way into the Central National Library in Rome, only to be rediscovered by Italian journalists in 1982. After some study, parts of it were found to be derived from an earlier work, the 'Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus' from the 13-14th century. The 'Marston MS 225' at Yale, is also similar, probably from Bavaria or Bohemia. These earlier works were considered books of prophecies, though whose is in doubt.<br /><br />If not quite evidence to confirm the Nostradamus LHC prophecy, it set me off on another search through the other 700 or so quatrains where I found another striking one, from Century 4, number 67. Before we look at this one, here is the one that has internet buzzing.<br /><br /><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Raypoz will exterminate all who oppose him,(?)</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Before the coming the sky will show signs.</span></strong></div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="left"><span style="color:#000000;"></span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"></div><div align="left"></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="left"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"><strong>Migrés, migrés de Geneue trestous,</strong></span></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Saturne d'or en fer se changera,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Le contre Raypoz exteriminera tous,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Auvant l'aruent le ciel signes fera.</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="left"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span></strong></div><div align="left"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;"></span></div><div align="left"></div><div align="left">You've got to be careful with translations from Old French. The popular English version is not totally correct. Spellings vary in old texts, words change meanings and some become obscure.</div>The third line in question is one of a mistake in syntax. The translator was guessing here at the meaning. 'Le contre' clearly means 'the opposite'. 'Raypoz' is not a term used anywhere else in French and has no definite meaning. <strong><span style="color:#009900;">The opposite Raypos will exteriminate all,</span></strong> is the actual statement. 'Ray' is not French, though evidently it's Nostradamus' abbreviation of 'rayon', meaning 'ray.' 'Poz' is curiously written with a Z, a rare letter like in English, which indicates at least the pronunciation. 'Pos' for 'positive' is current in English as an abbreviation, and 'positif' is 'positive', though neither pos or poz would have been used in the Renaisance. Though the Z makes it clear that it isn't the French 'pos' which if so spelt would be pronounced like 'poe'. So 'poz' definately suggests 'positif'. Note that Nostradamus is consistent, using abbreviations to make up Raypos, as we do today. To call Raypoz the PositiveRay is a sound derivation, though it wouldn't have been understood back then, with the only rays being 'rayons de soleil' or sun rays, sunlight.<br /><br />What is the Opposite of Raypos? A negative ray. In the case of the LHC, since they're using proton rays, the exact counterpart is antiproton rays, antimatter. So a matter/antimatter explosion destroying Geneva? All of us Trekkies know that. CERN experiments have confirmed it. And the Geneva Airport is a stone's throw away from the giant Atlas Experiment.<br /><br />Two disturbing bits of information, the detail from the watercolor and the quatrain above. Have a look at number 3, the C4Q67:<br /><br /><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">The year that Saturn and Mars are equal fiery,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">The air is very dry, a long meteor.(?)</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">From hidden fires a great place burns with heat,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Little rain, a hot wind, wars and raids.</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="left"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">L'an que Saturne & Mars esgaux combuste,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">L'air fort sieché longe trajection.</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Par feux secrets, d'ardeur grand lieu adust,</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;">Peu pluie, vent chault, guerres, incursions.</span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong> </div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="center"><strong><span style="font-size:130%;color:#009900;"></span></strong></div><div align="left">You have to think like an astrologer here to make sense of the time clues he left in his works and consider his experience of the world. Nostradamus was himself a famous astrologer, well known for his almanac and the patronage he received at the court of Henry II of France and his Queen Catherine di Medici. But far from being in what we might consider a dubious profession, he was well respected and honest. Having studied with Rabelais at the same school, he was a Doctor of Medicine, perhaps the first of his day to insist on hygiene. Known also as a Mathematician, he was involved in public works projects, like the irrigation of the vast Paine de la Crau, which he also partly financed, near his home at Salon-de-Provence.</div><br />Both quatrains have astrological time clues. But Saturn wasn't discovered until after Galileo and the telescope. Well, like the modern method for inferring the presence of a celestial object by its apparent effect on other objects, modern astronomers have made similar guesses. With Nostradamus it was the careful study of Astrology that made Saturn real for him.<br /><br />In the first quatrain, 'Saturn converted from gold to iron' is a metaphor for a conjuction where Saturn is unfavored, possibly eclipsed. In the other quatrain, 'The year that Saturn and Mars are equally fiery' could mean both are exhaulted. An astrologrer today might be able to put a date on this disaster at the LHC.<br /><br />'The air is very dry, a long meteor.' is a suspect translation. The literal French is <span style="color:#000000;">'The</span> air very dried long distance.' The air is dried by something and there is no meteor. The 'longe trajection' could be 'a long distance' and the drying is clear in the next line, not 'from' but 'by secret (not hidden) fires'. So we have poetically: <strong><span style="color:#009900;">The air dried for a long way / By secret fires of ardent power, a great place burns.</span></strong><br /><strong><span style="color:#009900;"></span></strong><br /><span style="color:#000000;">As a real warning of the burning of the LHC and Geneva, I think that it should be considered seriously. Reconsidering 120 tonnes of helium under 15-20 atmospheres pressure, much of it in an odd superfluid state at critically low 1.9 K temperature, and exposed in the ring to an 8.2 Tesla magnetic field, and the 'Raypoz' and its opposite, what might happen if not a plasma fire, some altered state of helium combusts due to the enormous TeV energies, 5 per beam and a collision force of 10 TeV scheduled this summer. Even worse, some nuclear event, as in an earlier post, <a href="http://bigsciencenews.blogspot.com/2008/03/almost-thermonuclear-lhc.html">The Almost Thermonuclear LHC</a>. If I were in Geneva, I'd pack my bags.</span><br /><span style="color:#000000;"></span><br />For the Hollywood History Channel version of <a href="http://www.history.com/media.do?action=clip&id=nostradamus_ep1_end_of_world">Nostradamus: The Lost Book</a>, the 5 minute video is the best look at the original watercolors.<br /><br />For a brief <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus_Vaticinia">Wikepedia</a> history of the Lost Book and some images.<br /><br />For <a href="http://www.mendhak.com/40-the-lost-book-of-nostradamus.aspx">more images</a> from the Lost Book.<br /><br />For an <a href="http://www.godswatcher.com/dictionary.htm">Old French dictionary</a>, geared for Nostradamus.<br /><br />Finally a <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/empire/nostradamus/index.html">big Nostradamus site</a>, with the Centuries in French and English, searchable.Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-14234629910345011412008-04-26T08:30:00.000-07:002008-04-26T14:24:55.133-07:00Near An Inevitable LHC Disaster<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SBNMIWpMhxI/AAAAAAAAAlk/YuMM52C24Uo/s1600-h/Set4_001_VeloModule_OneOf42_LHCb_edit1_STFC2006.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5193578501689345810" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SBNMIWpMhxI/AAAAAAAAAlk/YuMM52C24Uo/s400/Set4_001_VeloModule_OneOf42_LHCb_edit1_STFC2006.jpg" border="0" /></a>On the left, a U of Liverpool contribution to the Velo Detector for the LHCb experiment. The sophistication of so many components, most of them custom designed and built for the LHC, means their reliability is unknown. In fact, well before startup, the main control room, the CCC, is flooded with <a href="http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/33359">180,000 alarm events per day</a>.<br /><br />There are more than 120,000 computer definitions of what constitutes an alarm, over 120,000 things that could go wrong. Of course a lot of the alarm events are false readings or are from faulty sensors. EMS problems can add noise and alter readings. Operator error is another factor. Commonly, computer software and hardware have their own glitches as we all know now. And here at the LHC, everybody is flying blind. You have to have faith in your instruments, because you can't eyeball what's going on. If you noticed a real world fault, it would be an explosion on a security cam down in the ring tunnel.<br /><br />How do control room operators react? In a typical emergency there is no time to react. Events go forward with nanosecond delays. An idiot light goes on and it's already too late. So emergency systems are automated for the most part. The software decides what to do. Fine if the sensor data can be trusted and the computer program recognizes the emergency and knows what to do in the space of milliseconds. If not, the operators have to think fast and hit the right buttons.<br /><br />Reminds me of the partial melt-down at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in the 1970's. Some main switches for various emergency functions were identical. Which one do you hit if you have to read a tiny label under each one? An investigation showed that some operators glued beer bottle caps on the switch buttons to make their functions clear, like Coors and Bud. If you think that was then and this is now, OK, but virtual switches on a computer screen might be hard to find and click or require some fancy keystrokes, that only so and so is authorized to make, but he's off in the washroom. Lately AEC inspections of a nuclear plant in the U.S. found operators napping, actually asleep on the job. Must be all those late nights with Coors and Bud.<br /><br />Fortunately CERN's got some experience with control room emergencies from the days of the LEP. The computer systems were painstakingly designed, taking some 300 person years, and have been in use while the older pre-accelerators and systems were operating, like the LEIR, the SPS, the CNGS, and during the current LHC hardware commissioning. Here again, you can't be too careful. CERN has no experience at the TeV level of operations. To start beam commissioning at 5 TeV to save time, because of a backlog of problems that delayed the LHC startup for 3 years, certainly is asking for trouble. The former LEP was producing electron and positron beams of nearly massless particles at only 0.200 TeV. Now it's hadrons, protons and later very heavy lead ions. 5 TeV is only the start. 7 TeV next year and 1,150 TeV for lead ions , the year after.<br /><br />But from a design and engineering point of view you don't even need these particle beams, to have a major accident. By mid-June this year the entire LHC cryogenic ring is to be cooled down to 1.9 K, near absolute zero. To do just this, you'd be hard pressed to follow a simple description of it's multi-stage complexity, in <a href="http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29074">CERN's giant fridge</a>. 20 fridges actually, 8 plus 8 in the tunnels, but 4 giant main multi-stage refrigeration plants, a thousand inlets and outlets per plant, above ground, using liquid nitrogen for pre-cooling to cool the 120 t of helium, 60 t in the plants and another 60 t in the ring, at 20 atmospheres pressure is a lot of helium (the world production for a year) and a lot of pressure. Simple over pressurising can blow valves or pipe or any fault at design pressure can produce an explosion. Ever blown up a bicycle tire at the gas station? Sure, there are LHC pressure relief valves, but recall the failure-prone Kautzky valves at the Tevatron, operating at a warmer 4.5 K? Above 5 K the superconducting magnets quench, which is one reason why in view of the Tevatron's troubles with recurring quenches, colder helium provides more of a theoretical safety margin. It also turns into a superfluid which has so little viscosity it can leak out through the smallest fracture or pinprick in the cryogenic system. If you thought you had troubles with a leaky bathroom tap, try a leaky cryogenic valve blasting you frozen in a millisecond. Ouch.<br /><br />To make sure the superconducting magnets don't warm, the helium is pumped through them, so avoiding any hot spots developing which could cause a quench. Elaborate cryogenic Meyer distribution systems are in place within the tunnels themselves, custom built for the purpose. But a fault anywhere down the line at design pressure could explode, even before a relief valve is engaged, calibrated for above normal pressures. But it's all tested, sector by sector. Sure, but tests are short term stresses on equipment, not about failures developing over time. When the whole system is pressurized for the first time, it will be a real test of the cryogenic system, with all the equipment running simultaneously. And don't forget the superconducting magnets will be powered too. That's when engineers cross their fingers.<br /><br />Over pressurising, in a worst case scenario, means equipment failure, then a pipe or valve failure, an explosion and helium release. Then the superconducting magnets quench, possibly exploding or magnet energy not safely discharged, and refrigeration plants crash.<br /><br />Under pressurizing could be due to a helium leak, a power failure, or equipment malfunction, then the superconducting magnets quench, with the same dangerous cascade of events.<br /><br />Normal operating pressure could still be too much for any of thousands of welds and pipe connections, and any valve or line with a hair fracture or defect. Possible leak or explosion and helium release. Then the superconducting magnets quench, and the same dangerous cascade of events ensues.<br /><br />The best case scenario? The cryogenics and magnets work perfectly. But will they every day, 24 hours a day, until winter shutdown?<br /><br />I'd say there's a 50-50 chance of a major accident even before complete cool down. The danger is to technicians and engineers who will be down in the tunnels when it happens. A deadly explosion and helium gas asphyxiation, a catastrophic failure at the LHC. No matter how knowledgeable and professional people are, people still make mistakes. It might shock some people into their senses and stop the LHC.Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2736188646958105958.post-47996588066355504802008-04-25T11:22:00.000-07:002008-04-26T08:17:30.350-07:00It's All About Energy At The LHC<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SBIl-2pMhvI/AAAAAAAAAlY/c77-mTG80-A/s1600-h/Set1_081_WeighingTheHiggs_CMSphysics_teamRAL_LowRes_STFC2006.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5193255082062022386" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iUP5mII57Lo/SBIl-2pMhvI/AAAAAAAAAlY/c77-mTG80-A/s400/Set1_081_WeighingTheHiggs_CMSphysics_teamRAL_LowRes_STFC2006.jpg" border="0" /></a>British CMS Team weighing the Higgs. Even one particle of dust could skew the results. That's why there are about 150 million sensors in the main experiments, 60 million tracker and pixel channels in the CMS alone, to nail the Higgs boson. And one large grocer's weigh scale just in case it's rather heavy.<br /><br />And there are a lot more sensors and equipment to operate the LHC machine. Thousands of miles of electrical cable and fiber optics feeding four auxiliary control rooms for the experiments and one 5 million Euro main control room or CERN Control Centre (CCC), the Central Computer Room, plus the Tier Zero and Tier One Computer Grid based at CERN. Once operating, the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-collider13apr13,1,1524950,print.story">annual LHC electric bill is estimated at $30 million</a>, the power consumption about equivalent to the Canton of Geneva.<br /><br />Rudiger Schmidt at CERN: "<a href="http://lhc-data-exchange.web.cern.ch/lhc-data-exchange/schmidt.ppt#453,1,">The LHC is a frightening complex accelerator</a>--both from the hardware point of view and from operation."<br /><br />Frightening and it hasn't been turned on yet. We have an idea of what to expect from the earlier posts on Fermilab's Tevatron. Electrical problems and faults for one, a tedious reality that has surfaced during LHC commissioning, besides some odd surprises. They have to be eliminated. At the LHC scale, even small faults can have potentially disastrous consequences.<br /><br />One thing to remember is the 27 km LHC pipe when cooled to 1.9 K, near absolute zero, actually shrinks by about 10 meters. Odd problems and failures can crop up. When there's a quench, superconducting magnets affected need to be heated to discharge their energy or they will self-destruct. Last August when Sector 7-8 out of 8 did not expand properly during a warming test, there was a <a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/31434">major failure in the beam lines</a>. Some PIM's or plug in modules, like sliding copper fingers, buckled into beam lines, obstructing them in the pipe. Proton beams have yet to be injected, so there was no scare, and the problem was fixed in an ingenious way, some high tech with a lot of low tech. "Ping pong balls" with radio transmitters were blown through the system to locate the 6 defective PIMs.<br /><br />With the LHC so big, there are other problems peculiar to it. You might laugh, but the <a href="http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1092437/files/CERN-Brochure-2008-001-Eng.pdf">Moon influences the size of the ring</a> during tides, producing a variation of a millimeter, raising the Earth's crust 25 cm in the Geneva area. That causes a change in the beam energy of up to two tenths of a thousandth. Adjustments even at this tiny scale have to be made by physicists. N. Mokhov of Fermilab, now working on the LHC machine protection system, says, "The parameters of the LHC beam are so high that <a href="http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000570">microscopic effects can be very destructive</a> to the machine and to the detectors." Not to mention that unstudied anecdotal effect of Full Moons burning out electrical equipment and flooding hospital emergency rooms with accident victims. Can we get <em>Mythbusters</em> in on this one?<br /><br />The nagging electrical problem affecting the entire LHC, is EMC or Electromagnetic Compatibility. Equipment, sensors, communications and computers, like nice cosy shielded conditions with proper and invariable power supplies, with no interference from high powered up to 8.2 Tesla magnets or odd electron cloud formations in the pre-accelerators or other nastier radiation. The LHC has been an EMC swamp, causing all sorts of equipment failures, noise and false readings that might be genuine that set alarms off all over the place. Even the electric passenger train system above ground emitted stray DC currents influencing the accelerators. That was fixed after a long investigation. Here's a bit more from <a href="http://ab-div-po.web.cern.ch/ab-div-po/Infos/Conferences/EMC%20Workshop/Fritz%20EMC_LHC_workshop_041122.pdf">http://ab-div-po.web.cern.ch/ab-div-po/Infos/Conferences/EMC%20Workshop/Fritz%20EMC_LHC_workshop_041122.pdf</a>:<br /><br /><ul><li>Alarm systems - NDE's, false alarms, alarm avalanches, wrong alarms</li><li>Multiple grounding and shielding of equipment</li><li>Entire physics project failures, eg Microvertex detector cancelled</li><li>Large computing effort to remove signal noise in postprocessing</li><li>Fragile designs asking for "quiet environments"</li><li>Teams accusing each other of making "noise"</li><li>Destruction of 600 kW cryogenic compressor</li><li>Beam loss and consequent magnet destruction in TT40</li><li>Fire in experiment NA48 </li><li>Fire in BA3 because fire alarm showed a fire elsewhere</li></ul>Alan Gillishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00891733244573571562noreply@blogger.com0