What's happened to the LHC?

I'm not sure if anyone else has been following the countdown to the activation of the LHC lately but I'm concerned that something may have gone wrong.

It was supposed to go online on the 7th of July, which is almost a week ago, and there has strangely been absolutely no news or media attention of this event at all.

Furthermore, all the LHC websites seem to have gone down at the moment. At first I thought this was just my browser acting up, but I've been trying persistently with no results. All of the following LHC links and homepages are either down or have no updates since it was supposed to go on:

www.lhcountdown.com

Maybe it did destroy the world and we are all in limbo right now?

Honestly, that would explain some of the insanity that has been happening lately. I have been wondering why we haven't heard any reports from them as well.

The_Modulus, a few of us lately have been wondering the same thing as you (after experiencing some really weird events).

A couple of threads with some recent information on the LHC (or comments on the lack thereof) are as follows:

The clock started ticking for LHC

Could the Hadron Collider interfere with our perception of reality?

You might find something of use there.




[edit on 14-7-2008 by Cadbury]

the lhc isn't due to be activated for another 24 days.

all those websites look fine to me. perhaps your internet had a problem temporarily or something.

Originally posted by justyc
the lhc isn't due to be activated for another 24 days.

What's the source for that? Was it on one of those LHC sites listed?

all those websites look fine to me. perhaps your internet had a problem temporarily or something.

Yeah, they're all still up here too.


(Greetings, fellow Wilsonian)

Originally posted by Cadbury

Originally posted by justyc
the lhc isn't due to be activated for another 24 days.

What's the source for that? Was it on one of those LHC sites listed?

my source is the big countdown clock on www.lhcountdown.com...

as far as i know, they are just running preliminary tests atm since the completion of the tunnel.

as an aside, today is the anniversary of one of their previous experiment tests.....

"On 14 July 1989, the first beam was injected into CERN’s new flagship particle accelerator, LEP, with first collisions coming one month later. Could history be about to repeat itself? As I write this, Sector 5-6 of the LHC has been cooled down, and the sectors between point 1 and point 7 are cooling. Up to now, two sectors have been cooled and warmed up again, but for all the others, the cool-down is definitive."

(quoted from the above mentioned site)

[edit on 14-7-2008 by justyc]

Originally posted by justyc
all those websites look fine to me. perhaps your internet had a problem temporarily or something.

Hmm, that is strange, so no-one else is having problems with these links? Even the countdown page? What does the countdown say?

This is strange that the only websites I can't access at the moment are related to the LHC

Thanks for those links Cadbury, some interesting ideas in those threads.

I've been doing a couple searches on BBC news and CNN to find some recent info, and this might just be my poor searching skills, but there's nothing! Anyone else finding peculiarly nothing on major news outlets?

the countdown clock is working it says right now:

24 days, 7 hours and 27 minutes

Originally posted by absente
the countdown clock is working it says right now:

24 days, 7 hours and 27 minutes

Please consider the possibility that the information is false.
It wouldn´t be hard to believe if they had made some major goof.

Originally posted by absente
the countdown clock is working it says right now:

24 days, 7 hours and 27 minutes

strange. isn't bulgaria (lovely country btw) gmt +1? wonder why your time is an hour out compared to what i see on the site, which says 8 hours?

Final tests at the end of July per this internal schedule:

indico.cern.ch...

And here are some videos of what the inside looks like, for those that are curious.

cern.ch...

cern.ch...

frazier.web.cern.ch...

(I recommend you download the files, then play them)

reply to post by Psychopump


of course I don't believe it, since this is not an official site (please correct me if I am wrong)

Domain Name: lhcountdown.com

Registrant Contact:
lhcountdown.com Private Registrant [email protected]
DreamHost Web Hosting
417 Associated Rd #324
Brea, CA 92821
US
+1.2139471032

even if it was official - it don't trust those experiments, but at least - some info is better than none

reply to post by justyc


no, Bulgaria is GMT +2

I'm feeling really jerked around by that website, because in February of this year they had a countdown of about 14 days, and naturally I was totally excited, waiting with baited breath, and then... and then they restarted the thing for the 7th of July!

Now they've restarted it again for another month!? Something strange is going on, because either they're purposely jerking us around, or they have a severe lack of planning ability, in which case it is highly worrying that the largest scientific endevour of all time is in these people's hands...

I don't know whether to be or

reply to post by The_Modulus


or more likely, real life isn't following their planned schedule and they are just making sure everything will run ok on the day. you would want them to be that thorough with checks and rechecks. they've also been ironing out a problem or two which has delayed the start.

If you look at the schedule I linked to, it shows some repairs and other things that are being done. Having been an engineer, I will quote one of the golden rules of such things:

The last 1% of the job takes 90% of the scheduled time.

While not literally true, that last 1% always takes a lot longer than 1% of the scheduled time.

reply to post by justyc


That is the most likely explanation. As Jadette sais, the final touches to most projects usually take a long time, because that's when all uncalculated factors have to be factored.

I still don't understand why they were naive enough to allow the countdown to be restarted 3 times!

Perhaps they want people to lose interest to divert attention when it finaly does go online.

It seems they are also getting rid of the physicisians, who are arguing against the project:

I have some real news for you guys. i stopped posting becuase I was afraid of getting fired. We'll i did get fired. I will explain later.

source

It's dated 6th of July - one week ago and no information about why he was fired.

His latest relevant blog entry is dated MAY 4th, where he states, that the "real" test will be held in August 2008:

Sunday, May 4, 2008
LHC cern update july and august
We were told yesterday that the beam schedule for the LHC collider at atlas facility will be in july 2008 with a cripple beam test of 1 TEV. this is 1 trillion electron volts. Do not expect anything to happen at these #ty energies. A so called full scale test will commence in august 2008 on a weekday. this is an energy of 14tev. I have heard rumors that the full energy capability of the LHC is 25TEV and that black holes will form at energies of 15 TEV and strangelets will oocur at energies of 20TEV. this is the reason why the probability of formation is so low becuase technically the particle accelerator will be run at subcritical velocities. Rumor has it also that the only people who will be around for the full scale test will be military of the 20 nations and a skeleton crew who will be jsut to operate the controls. It is also a rumor that fermilab has also decreased the barns of the focus magnets in the alice facility. This means that more ions will hit the each other. this is an experimental software update

source


I don't know if he is real, but he explains his work at least very professional.

edit: grammar
[edit on 14/7/08 by absente]

[edit on 14/7/08 by absente]

Originally posted by absente
It seems they are also getting rid of the physicians, who are arguing against the project:

i think you mean physicist. a physician is a medial practitioner

Originally posted by justycmy source is the big countdown clock on www.lhcountdown.com...

as far as i know, they are just running preliminary tests atm since the completion of the tunnel.

Understood, Sir. They've updated the countdown since the last time I saw that page. About a week or so ago it only had 3 days left on the clock.

(Cadbury account reinstated!)