The LHC: what went wrong - October 16, 2008
CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, has released its report on what went wrong on 19 September, just as the Large Hadron Collider was firing up. Blame a bad electrical connection that led to the vacuum enclosure rupturing. The full report is a rather grim litany of engineering gone awry: "soot-like dust", it turns out, contaminated the beam pipes "over some distance".
The LHC (Nature special here) won't start working now until spring 2009 -- not a happy delay for the particle physicists who have waited for it for years.
Comments
This may also be a good time for most researchers here to take time off, remove their blinkers, and check out what else have happened around them in the field.
Clearly, the LHC was conceived with the goal of answering some vexing fundamental questions. However, the most important conceptual breakthrough - of the breathing atom - emerged (without grants!) only subsequently. This has required a review of the entire field of our so-called modern quantum theory.
Let's here quickly consider a typical item pertaining to the LHC: the 'God' particle, or Higgs boson, that is expected to debut here. This is now seen as a fundamental nonentity. But, hark, there is indeed a particle that truly deserves that nomenclature: the hitherto unrecognized per-cycle quantum of the photon. For this final perspective on the nature of things, do spare a few more minutes of your time to peruse its one-page summary, on www.sittampalam.net/Summary.pdf.
Thank you.
Posted by: Eugene Sittampalam | October 22, 2008 07:05 PM