CERN's black hole cannon not working right for a other 2 years

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If you knew what "nonplussed" actually meant, you'd be aware that it implied a state where I was bewildered and didn't know what to say.

Since you are responding to what I did find to say, this just emphasises your linguistic incompetence.

In Texas, an occasional raindrop can be described as a flood. Texans don't know any better.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Odd, since the atmospheric circulation goes the other way. And Florida's swamps stink badly enough that it is difficult to imagine that it's citizens can smell anything else - the olfactory sensors do saturate, and Florida's ambiance is notoriously overwhelming.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You serve it up on a regular basis.

Not unexpectedly, the customers aren't buying any.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

LOL, the LHC 'failed to stop "working right"'. The saboteurs must feel devastated.

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If you could understand what was written, you would have understood the the problem wasn't understanding the problems that infants present to their parents (which you may well understand) but the problems that come up when engineers run into when commissioning a new and complicated piece of equipment, which you clearly don't.

I've had to learn about unfants' problem vicariously from friends and relatives - I've got eight nieces and nephews, and four grand-nieces and -nephews, so I've heard quite a lot about the subject.

Americans do spell generalisation with a "z" but outside America the spelling with an "s" is an accepted variation.

It's working fine - at 3.5 TeV - at the moment. The operators plan to let it run at that level for a while before starting to crank it up to the design level of 7 TeV. There's nothing wrong with working at 3.5 TeV. At least 49 of the super-conductiong magnets are going to have to be "retrained" so that they will remain super-conducting when generating the magnetic fields appropriate to 7 TeV - they were got there once (ar manufacture), but apparently the wiring has forgotten its "training" and will have to worked up to its design levels again. this is going to take a while. and the operators want to get some physics out of what they have got before making the next step.

It's a big and complicated system which is now doing almost everything that it was designed to do, and in that sense it is "working right". It hasn't yet got to the design target of 7 TeV, but the route is clear, and the operators have a perfect right to decide how fast they will move along it.

It's your argument that is specious, based as it is on your own restricted experience with rather less complicated and demanding projects.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

that Fermilab already has.

Tell that to the residents of Corpus Christi ;-(

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

that Fermilab already has.

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Experiments that produce the expected are less useful than ones that don't. One that works as expected only shows that you were right. One that doesn't shows both that your calculation was wrong and the right answer.

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Another example of inadequate linguistic comprehension ...

Even someone as stupid as you ought to realise that we are talking about problems of getting large and complicated projects up and running, and my lack of hands-on expereience with children is irrelevant, while your lack of experience with large and complicated projects does help to explain the nonsense that you post.

True, but precisely analogous to your boasting about your physical fecundity, where your intellectual sterility was the subject of the discussion.

ned,

It was designed to work at 7 TeV and will presumably get there in the end. The magnet that quenched last year - and did all the damage - apparently quenched at a lower field than would be required for 7 TeV operation, which was unexpected.

It is an unexpected problem. Big and complicated projects usually manage to produce a few of them - my younger brother once said that his policy was to anticipate all the problem he could think of so that when the problems that he didn't expect showed up he'd have time to solve them. It worked on the London Bridge Station rebuilding job in London in the early 1970's, and it has cvertainly worked for me since then.

It's not broken, it is still being worked up.

It isn't. What you and Jan Panteltje are pushing is negative spin - trying to pretend a big and complicated project can hit its design objectives as soon as the power is turned on. This is the kind of unrealistic rubbish that politicians do like to push to try make a political point, but you two seem to be sincerely stupid.

The "sea trials" aren't finished yet, and won't be finished until all the offending magnets are retrained.

Super-conducting magents that unexpectedly quench below the currents that they were trained to carry are the kind of unexpected event that requires some re-routing. One hopes that the machine doesn't have other unexpected features - it can be a painful way of discovering new physics.

I had noticed. You are the one that is advancing the specious claim that its teething troubles represent some kind of evidence of incompetence, slandering a bunch of engineers and physicists whose competence you can only envy.

One can only wonder why? Perhaps you were part of the "pork" in the Texan super-conducting collider project, and formed part of the evidence that prompted your congress to pull the plug on that particular project, which would explain why you want to write off the CERN project as a failure, rather than seeing it as the success that a more competent US competitor might have achieved.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The magnets are designed to take quenches without damage. Last year's event was caused by a failing connection between two magnets.

As anyone here will know, trying to brutally interrupt the current in an inductor will make sparks. There is a lot of stored energy in a magnet. About 7 MJ at the nominal current of 11.8 kA. That's as much as three sticks of dynamite, if I may believe Wikipedia!

Over the past year, much effort has been put into verifying these connections and adding & improving diagnostic equipment to keep an eye on them. The resistance of the interconnections must be kept below 0.6 nOhms at a temperature of 1.9 K!

For those who are curious about the technical details of the machine, you may try to have a look at the design report at:

The magnets are described in chapter 7.

It'll get to 7 TeV, eventually, no doubt. That is not to say there won't be a few more hurdles along the way.

Jeroen Belleman

that Fermilab already has.

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that Fermilab already has.

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