Hadron Collider hit by power cut

news.bbc.co.uk...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is recovering from a general power cut which affected the machine's systems.

Cern, the organisation operating the LHC, said it had taken until Monday morning for the machine to recover.

Power was cut to the entire accelerator complex at Cern, including the LHC, according to a spokesperson.

Ok... now to be honest i know very little about the complexities of the Hadron Collider... Nor was i ever very good a physics... so please don’t laugh at my next comments

If there is a power cut... does that not mean that the magnetic field, that is supposed to contain all these particles, mini black holes and what not's, is down?

If that is so... what happens to them? Do they cease to exist the moment the power is cut? or do they continue to exist uncontained and therefore interact with the particles around them?

Like i say... i am not too clever on this subject so please forgive me if I’m talking rubbish (too many Sci-Fi movies)

ye, it would mean that i think, but the mini black holes (if they happen) woudl only last a fraction of a nano second before disapearing anyways ... and if the power cut then the beams would also stop going round...

i think lol.

How many outages is that now? 4,5 or 6? what a joke surely the billions that were spent on it could have gone to better use other than to create so called black holes? or could there be another reason they built it? who knows?

it could be just like that one crazed scientist said... or at least I think he was a scientist, he could of just been some dude. In our search for the god particle we failed to realize that it is an impossibility to find for the particle itself travels back in time and the universe corrects itself to avoid a paradox, hence someone finds bread in the collider or the power gets cut or a bird #s in it. Its always something :p

[edit on 2-6-2010 by Vicious Jones]

isit just me or does this thing just break constantly. has it even worked yet?

Originally posted by danielhanson420
isit just me or does this thing just break constantly. has it even worked yet?

abcnews.go.com...

Physicists at the CERN research center said on Wednesday they had created 10 million mini-Big Bangs in the first week of mega-power operations of their marathon probe into the secrets of the cosmos.

Is that good enough for you?

reply to post by InvisibleObserver


i stand corrected . i should of checked my self before comming out with stupid comments. thank you for clearing that up.

Originally posted by InvisibleObserver

Originally posted by danielhanson420
isit just me or does this thing just break constantly. has it even worked yet?

abcnews.go.com...

Physicists at the CERN research center said on Wednesday they had created 10 million mini-Big Bangs in the first week of mega-power operations of their marathon probe into the secrets of the cosmos.

Is that good enough for you?

Does that mean that they have just destroyed 10 million new universes? So I would assume that must be the case.

Now tell us what you have found CERN! Oh yeah that ain't the way it works.

Originally posted by Muckster
If there is a power cut... does that not mean that the magnetic field, that is supposed to contain all these particles, mini black holes and what not's, is down?

The magnetic field exists in many elements of the LHC complex and serves different functions. The many powerful magnets in the accelerator ring are superconducting and will remain current as long as there is liquid helium to keep the cold (and there is a reserve). There are magnets in the detectors themselves (of which CMS and ATLAS are major), and some of these will be affected by the power failure.

In either case, there is no evidence of black holes even being produced at this point, and if you imagine there was a containment chamber which is now accidentally open, you just have vivid imagination

Power cuts are relatively common in this area.

reply to post by buddhasystem


OK... i think i understood most of that

Thanks for explaining... and your right, i do have a vivid imagination

Like i said before... to much Sci-Fi... not enough education... thanks again

reply to post by danielhanson420


You have to remember, this is a one in a kind, one build only, no prototypes or prior testing type machine ... not only that its the biggest, and most probably the most complex machine ever built ... and concidering it went from design to build with no prototype or prior experience in building LHC , to being a fully build machine id say their doing pretty good at the moment!

and yes, it has worked, they have had it at 1/2 power already.

Someone forgot to hook up the UPS.

Originally posted by Muckster


If there is a power cut... does that not mean that the magnetic field, that is supposed to contain all these particles, mini black holes and what not's, is down?

If that is so... what happens to them? Do they cease to exist the moment the power is cut? or do they continue to exist uncontained and therefore interact with the particles around them?

Like i say... i am not too clever on this subject so please forgive me if I’m talking rubbish (too many Sci-Fi movies)

Think of the sub-atomic stuff created in the collider as boiling water. Boiling water is just liquid water with energy added to it. If you stop adding energy eventually it cools down and stops boiling.

This is the same concept as the LHC. Except they are adding energy to protons and other sub-atomic particles to get them to "boil" to a higher state where they break into more basic particles. (Fission might have been a better example to illustrate here)

It sounds rather scary when you start talking about mini-blackholes, but it doesn't take much energy to "boil" a proton, about as much as it takes to move a mosquito a small distance. But that's only because a proton is so small.

It takes fractions of fractions of seconds for the protons to stop "boiling". In fact they don't survive long even if the machine is on since they start to decay as soon as they are created in the proton collision.

I think you have to get your head around the fact that, yes, the LHC is a huge machine that uses tons of electricity and cost billions of dollars. But all it does is accelerate a few thousand protons at a time, a fraction of a fraction of a gram, and collide them. It does work at a high energy but at a scale so ridiculously small that it costs as much to observe it as it does to do it.

Originally posted by thedarklingthrush
Think of the sub-atomic stuff created in the collider as boiling water. Boiling water is just liquid water with energy added to it. If you stop adding energy eventually it cools down and stops boiling.

This is the same concept as the LHC. Except they are adding energy to protons and other sub-atomic particles to get them to "boil" to a higher state where they break into more basic particles. (Fission might have been a better example to illustrate here)

This is a highly misleading and pointless comparison. Circulating beams at high energy has nothing in common with your tea pot. Simply nothing.

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by thedarklingthrush
Think of the sub-atomic stuff created in the collider as boiling water. Boiling water is just liquid water with energy added to it. If you stop adding energy eventually it cools down and stops boiling.

This is the same concept as the LHC. Except they are adding energy to protons and other sub-atomic particles to get them to "boil" to a higher state where they break into more basic particles. (Fission might have been a better example to illustrate here)

This is a highly misleading and pointless comparison. Circulating beams at high energy has nothing in common with your tea pot. Simply nothing.

Umm so adding energy to break molecular bonds isn't a good metaphor for adding energy to break atomic and sub-atomic bonds. I think that it is.

You gradually add energy to the proton via a magnetic field until they're going almost the speed of light around the LHC. Then you collide them and for split second they "boil" in a mini-big bang that creates who knows what.

[edit on 4-6-2010 by thedarklingthrush]