Unidentified Lying Object at the LHC.

originally posted by: bbracken677
a reply to: MacChiavell1

Just a clarification: dark matter, and dark energy are theoretical constructs that have not been observed in the wild.

The wild is very... wild:

"We tested every single scenario we could come up with and eliminated things very carefully," says Bulbul. "The upshot is we just don't know what this is. The most exciting explanation is the decay signature of sterile neutrinos."

Signs of sterile neutrinos have popped up and been knocked down before, so the researchers are being cautious.

"It's intriguing. There's a consistent picture for it being dark matter," says Kevork Abazajian at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in either study. "But I think confirming it would really require deeper observations of other things." His wish list includes checking if the signal shows up in other objects that should have lots of dark matter – such as dwarf galaxies – and finding out if the signal is stronger in the centres of clusters, where dark matter should clump more.

www.newscientist.com...

I would say you are both correct and wrong at the same time.

originally posted by: Glassbender777
ITs a bit stupid, to continue on an experiment with contaminants. Or am I being too cautious. lol geeez

Think so, I would suggest they prefer the pragmatic approach. Just remember this stunt:

During the training of the magnets for a beam energy of 6.5 TeV, a metal fragment became stuck in the connection, creating a short circuit to ground and preventing the diode from operating correctly. After having located the fault and carried out precise measurements, the accelerator teams decided to melt the metal fragment, in a similar way to blowing a fuse. Yesterday they injected a current of almost 400 amps into the diode circuit for just a few milliseconds, in order to make the fragment disintegrate. And it worked! Measurements made today showed that the short circuit had disappeared.

home.web.cern.ch...

Vaporized with 400 amps... that's pretty cool!

a reply to: PublicOpinion

Nope! I am correct until it is confirmed as being dark matter. That is how science works. Until then it is nothing more than conjecture. Does not even reach the level of hypothesis yet....

You know, I'm pretty sure that the Fermi fast breeder reactor outside of Detroit about forty years ago was done in by either a Coke can or a Doritos bag left in one of the cooling loops by a worker, lol. . .

a reply to: symphonyofblase
Well I suppose its not quite uncommon for some strange unknown thing to be lying or laying or just floating or whatever in something which took many years to build and close to 5 billion dollars in its construction, and its yearly cost to operate is about 1 billion. So ya! Either there are a lot of jokers over there, or this story is just made up...Or both those options are also quite viable in being true.

But yes searching for the God particle to me is a wee bit like that whole search for God thing people have been doing for centuries now, and are still doing, and may be doing for along time to come.

WHAT! how stupid can you get?
if you had a short in your computer
would you put 400Amps to Blow it out?

and how much does CERN cost?
we are so doomed! they are total idiots.
.............................. stupid.............

originally posted by: PublicOpinion

originally posted by: Glassbender777
ITs a bit stupid, to continue on an experiment with contaminants. Or am I being too cautious. lol geeez

Think so, I would suggest they prefer the pragmatic approach. Just remember this stunt:

During the training of the magnets for a beam energy of 6.5 TeV, a metal fragment became stuck in the connection, creating a short circuit to ground and preventing the diode from operating correctly. After having located the fault and carried out precise measurements, the accelerator teams decided to melt the metal fragment, in a similar way to blowing a fuse. Yesterday they injected a current of almost 400 amps into the diode circuit for just a few milliseconds, in order to make the fragment disintegrate. And it worked! Measurements made today showed that the short circuit had disappeared.

home.web.cern.ch...

Vaporized with 400 amps... that's pretty cool!

Hmm! so now they have small partials of metal in the tube?
so when the magnetic beam picks this up
and speeds it to 95% of the speed of light.
then it hits! my god they are in for a big Bang!
its not the same as the atom size they use.
its BIG!

This existential angst was triggered by the prospect of protons colliding at extremely high energies. Einstein's general theory of relativity suggests that concentrating this kind of energy in a volume smaller than an atom might distort space and time enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe. This "mini black hole" could rapidly expand ...

New scientist

originally posted by: buddha
WHAT! how stupid can you get?
if you had a short in your computer
would you put 400Amps to Blow it out?

It's not exactly a CPU in this case. Yes, sometimes you do this sort of thing with high power equipment.

a reply to: jaffo

You know, I'm pretty sure that the Fermi fast breeder reactor outside of Detroit about forty years ago was done in by either a Coke can or a Doritos bag left in one of the cooling loops by a worker, lol. .

Well said. That leaking fragger must have been a Boritos bag in his younger years, a can would actually hold more (waste)water.

"About 1% of the fuel was damaged," he said. "Everything was contained."

news.blogs.cnn.com...

Sure, nothing to see...

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: buddha
WHAT! how stupid can you get?
if you had a short in your computer
would you put 400Amps to Blow it out?

It's not exactly a CPU in this case. Yes, sometimes you do this sort of thing with high power equipment.

It seemed to be the most effective way to get rid of the problem. Otherwise there would have been lots of screwdriving involved, for weeks. Maybe even months.

originally posted by: buddha
WHAT! how stupid can you get?
if you had a short in your computer
would you put 400Amps to Blow it out?

and how much does CERN cost?
we are so doomed! they are total idiots.
.............................. stupid.............

Well... ya. But now consider the costs for bank-bailouts - too big to fail anyone? Or just try to imagine the annual military-budgets, not to mention DARPAs black projects.

And now we are talking about peanuts at CERN.

I would prefer the scientific approach to criticise this project:

Einstein's general theory of relativity suggests that concentrating this kind of energy in a volume smaller than an atom might distort space and time enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe. This "mini black hole" could rapidly expand ...

Nobody at CERN would say this could never happen. They usually just try to marginalise this point as another grey theory.

a reply to: Joneselius

Occam's Razor: clearly, a demon was pulled into our dimension and panicked, almost making it out on time before the portal closed back up.

/sigh...Why can't it be something awesome (yet terrifying) like that?

a reply to: bbracken677

Id like to ripose that gravity, relativity and magnetism are theoretical concepts too, verbal descriptions of observations of phenomena. Likewise, we have an OBSERVED phenomena whereby we have far too little matter visible in the universe to account for universal structure. Infact only about 25% of the observeable (due to planck time limitation) universe is visible. The rest is something more exotic...whether this is in form of WIMPs or SIMPs or something else is still very much, as you would say, pure theory (not to speak of the even larger portion being something different, but equally exotic).

It is not up to debate whether there is something exotic, rather what those exotic things are. The recent new microwave maps of the universe already have proven that in fact because we have these exotic materiae, galaxies and therefore starsystems and ergo life was able to form, by adding their mass to proto-galaxies, allowing them to create sufficient gravity in "places" for visible matter to clump together. Im over-simplifying this process a lot, and apologise for that plus typos (im writing this from my mobile)

What the original article said was
"This time everyone is wary of the "Unidentified Lying Object" problem, called such because if there is even the tiniest debris - a nitrogen particle - the beam could be disrupted. Such an object would be unidentified because the beam pipe is a sealed vacuum."
It was presented as a theory about something that hypothetically could happen and as such is something to watch out for.
www.science20.com...

In later articles this has been expanded on and angled so that it really does look like this has happened.
I don't know what to make of this. Is it just a hypothetical "what if" or has it really occurred?

a reply to: TheCloakedHedgehog

In later articles this has been expanded on and angled so that it really does look like this has happened.
I don't know what to make of this. Is it just a hypothetical "what if" or has it really occurred?

It really did occur, if you consider CERN press releases to be a credible source.

An unexpected obstacle is sitting at the bottom of the beam 2 beam-pipe in a dipole in sector 8-1. Although it is not causing too many problems for the moment, regular scans are being performed to make sure that the situation remains stable and that it doesn’t result in a more serious aperture restriction.

In recent days operations have been dogged by a series of technical problems ranging from cooling problems to a router issue. Despite the rocky machine availability, about half of the planned beam commissioning has been completed and the LHC remains on track for its first high-energy collisions in a few weeks from now.

cds.cern.ch...

But who knows what really happened, we will have to wait until somebody gets to this dipole. Also, it could have been a nice PR-gag if one is up to overemphasize the way this Cern Bulletin reads.

'Just look how rocky our machine availability gets - moar monetas por favor!'

Well I can say is I'm sorry.

I've e-mailed the scientist over 5 times and he utterly refused to respond. I have no idea now what happened or is happening there but it's still running fine as far as I know.

He does say it's not a problem yet. I'm sorry people. I tried to get the answer I truly did, but there's absolute radio silence.

a reply to: TheCloakedHedgehog

I was starting to think that but even a CERN press release carried the article.

No one 'in the know' will respond to my e-mails either, which just makes it more annoying for me.

a reply to: dogstar23

It could still be terrifying. What if this thing gets sucked along at God knows what speed and smashed into something? What if it causes severe damage to the machine and compromises the safety of the people working there?

Thing is. No one's responding to me, and the silence is deafening. I'm hoping it means that it's nothing and it's no big deal....

originally posted by: Joneselius
a reply to: dogstar23

It could still be terrifying. What if this thing gets sucked along at God knows what speed and smashed into something? What if it causes severe damage to the machine and compromises the safety of the people working there?

Thing is. No one's responding to me, and the silence is deafening. I'm hoping it means that it's nothing and it's no big deal....

As long as it's not in the beam path and not outgassing significantly, it's not an issue. It would be more of an issue to open the system. There's nothing to "suck it along".