Rare Earthquake Strikes Switzerland

SEISMIC HAZARDS
HEIGHTENED GLOBAL SEISMICITY
SCENARIOS 700, [500,] 08, 07, 02
.

M3.2 Quake Strikes Switzerland

Centered at 7.11°E, 47.19°N the quake struck about 120km NW of Meyrin (Canton of Geneva), the nearest Swiss town to the main site of the CERN particle physics laboratory.

EQ Details
Time: 2015-01-31 21:54:01.2 UTC
Magnitude: 3.2 ML
Epicenter: 7.11°E, 47.19°N
Depth: 3 km
Status: M – manually revised
SOURCE: GEOFON Extended Virtual Network (GEVN)

LHC IS FAULTY

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Construction Flawed: Director

Dr Steve Myers LHC cannot be operated at full  potential for [at least] two years.

In September 2008 after about 100 of the LHC’s super-cooled magnets heated up to more than 100°C, the system was shut down. It took 14 months to repair.

Soon the machine must close down again for about a year to make the tunnel safe for high energy proton collisions.

“It’s something that, with a lot more resources and with a lot more manpower and quality control, possibly could have been avoided but I have difficulty in thinking that this is something that was a design error.” Myers said, BBC reported.

“The standard phrase is that the LHC is its own prototype. We are pushing technologies towards their limits.” He added.

“You don’t hear about the thousands or hundreds of thousands of other areas that have gone incredibly well. [REALLY?]

“With a machine like the LHC, you only build one and you only build it once.”

The $10 to $14 billion “White Elephant” is buried up to 100m below the French-Swiss border region.

Must Read Background:

• NO Big Bang, not even a little one, for 6 months!
• LHC Champaign Science & Three-Legged Chickens!
• Large Hadron Collider Crashes
• LHC: What will it do after the bang?Thought for the Day: The LHC and Earth
• God Particle

NO Big Bang, not even a little one, for 6 months!

LHC Update:
Our good Professor Peter Higgs will have to find another way of communicating with the “Almighty!”

As the Moderators previously anticipated, there won’t be a big bang, not even a tiny one, for at least another 6 months at CERN’s “Champaign Science Center” the LHC.

It is highly probable that LHC may not be fully operational before 2010.

One of 1,746 helium-cooled superconducting magnets is lowered into the LHC tunnel via a specially constructed hatch in April 2007. The 17-meter long dipole magnet, one of 1,232 dipoles positioned around the LHC, is designed to produce a magnetic field that bends the particle beams around the circular path of the accelerator. [About 100 of these magnet overheated to more than 100ºC —possibly to several hundred degrees—frying the wiring, when liquid helium leaked out of the vacuum cooling system.] Photo by Maximilien Brice for CERN. Source: CNET

And who knows what surprises might be lurking around the LHC’s 27-km tunnel in 2009!

Related Links:

• LHC Champaign Science & Three-Legged Chickens!

• LHC shut down until early spring
• Large Hadron Collider Crashes
• LHC: What will it do after the bang?
• Thought for the Day: The LHC and Earth
• God Particle

LHC Champaign Science & Three-Legged Chickens!

Will they ever catch the ‘wretched’ smashed particles?

For anyone following the fate of LHC, here’s a quick update.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is shut down indefinitely for all intents and purposes. At least no particle smashing is likely to occur before the official inauguration on October 21, 2008.

In fact, the collider may not be fully operational before May 2009 due to huge power requirement.

The machine went out on September 19 with a [little] big bang when a “massive” magnet quench caused over 100 of its solenoid magnets to overheat from 1.9 Kelvin to at least 373K, or 100ºC (boiling point of water) and toasted the wiring. [Note: (K) = (°C) + 273.15]

And yes, the fire brigade were called to the rescue when the system vacuum failed and tons of liquid helium escaped into the 100-meter deep LHC tunnel.

[Note: The LHC tunnel has a 27-km circumference and is built underground at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 meters.]

LHC (Large Hen Carrier) crashes, crate magnets break up, chickens escape into vacuum (near the city of Glasgow, Scotland). Photo: MEN. Image may be subject to copyright.

CERN’s director of communications, James Gillies, wants the public to look at the latest spate of failures philosophically: It’s taken us 20 years to build the machine, and we were behind the 2006 completion date by errr… 2 years. Would a few more months or another year, even two, change the “big picture?” He asks.

[No worries, Mr Gillies, so long as you can tell us in this lifetime what the smashed particles looked like. Oh, and go easy on the bubbly stuff!]

To repair the machine, they’ll have to warm it up very slowly to the ambient temperature. After fixing, it has to be slowly cooled down again to its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (about -271ºC).

A litany of “difficulties” and “serious difficulties” delayed both the construction of the tunnel and the collider machine. Like the three-legged chickens, the wretched smashed particles are proving too difficult to catch!

The Three-Legged Chickens!

On the lighter side of things, it’s been said that an Australian scientist held the patent to the three-legged chicken. The idea for genetically modified monster chickens came to her because everyone in her family (she, her spouse and son) liked to eat fried chicken legs. A curious scientist visiting the ranch downunder where the tripodal creatures lived wanted to know what they tasted like. The inventor replied: “I wish we knew. The wretched things run so fast we haven’t been able to catch one yet!”

Police officer orders the escaped chicken to freeze!  Photo: Center Press Agency. Image may be subject to copyright.

Related Links:

• NO Big Bang, not even a little one, for 6 months!
• Large Hadron Collider Crashes
• LHC: What will it do after the bang?
• Thought for the Day: The LHC and Earth
• God Particle

-.-

Large Hadron Collider Crashes

LHC Crashes, Fire Engines Called

Engineers hoping to smash particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were forced to stop work, after about 100 of the LHC’s super-cooled magnets heated up to more than 100°C.

The failure, called a quench, in this case a “massive” quench, occurred  in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, at a point between Alice and CMS detectors, at about 09:30UTC/GMT on September 19, 2008.

The CMS “superconducting” magnet is meant to create a powerful magnetic field [when it works!] Source: CMS magnet, CERN. Image may be subject to copyright.

Tons of liquid helium leaked into the Collider’s 27-km tutunnel at Cern, near Geneva, Switzerland. Some 20 years after the construction began, and about $10 billion later, this was the second reported incident since last week which stopped work on the giant white elephant.

Photo of the Alice Detector in early 2008. Source: Alice website. Imaga may be subject to copyright.

The quench occurred when liquid helium leaked out of the LHC’s cooling system which keeps the super-cooled magnets at 1.9ºK above absolute zero ( 0ºK is -273.15ºC). LHC engineers also reported a loss of vacuum condition in the cooling system.

A faulty transformer delayed work at LHC throughout last week, and was replaced only a day before the quench occurred.

Will Be Back in November, Possibly December!

CERN spokesperson,  James Gillies said the repairs would be expensive.

“A full investigation is still under way but the most likely cause seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two of the magnets which probably melted, leading to a mechanical failure.

“We’re investigating and we can’t really say more than that now.

“But we do know that we will have to warm the machine up, make the repair, cool it down, and that’s what brings you to two months of downtime for the LHC.”

Related Links:

• LHC: What will it do after the bang?
• Thought for the Day: The LHC and Earth
• God Particle

[Note: No photos of the fire engines called to LHC were available at the time of publishing!]

FEWW

LHC: What will it do after the bang?

Astronomical Cost of LHC Reminds You of ISS

When the Scientists take the taxpayers to the cleaners

LHC has so far cost an estimated $10billion to build, while its annual operating cost remains a “secret.” FEWW Moderators believe the philosophy, direction and reasons for creating this white [super] elephant are entirely misplaced.

On a planet whose ability to support life is eroding daily, caused by the human onslaught on her ecosystems, and where the probability of finding any named living individual being still alive in a few years time is truly minuscule, the $10billion could have been better invested to:

• Conduct research into low-energy technology in air quality improvement, water purification, food production, clean energy, health and hygiene, learning and education, sustainable living … and communication sectors.
• Create working blueprints for low-energy, low-impact intelligent communities, providing about 1,500,000 people with a realistic chance of crossing the precarious “life bridge” into a possible future.

Bang for the Buck [readers will excuse the unintended pun]

The LHC project is inappropriate, ill-timed, unnecessary and hideously expensive!

Never mind the Big Bang simulation. The LHC’s poorly conceived philosophy would provide the tiniest, one-time, damp squib for your buck. The minuscule return on the enormous investment, the amount of [useful] science received for the cost of building and operating the project, makes LHC stand out like a giant white European elephant on the France’s border with Switzerland. The scientific payoff of LHC will not come even close to that of its orbiting uncle, the multi-billion dollar public-financed space science project black hole, aka the International Space Station (ISS).

And what exactly has NASA got to show for the ISS since 1998 when its on-orbit assembly began?
To be precise, NOT much!

Related Links:

• NO Big Bang, not even a little one, for 6 months!
• LHC Champaign Science & Three-Legged Chickens!
• Large Hadron Collider Crashes

• Thought for the Day: The LHC and Earth
• God Particle
• 286W

• Frustrated NASA chief vents about agency’s fate
• Shoot Down the ISS

A simulated event at the CMS particle detector of the LHC, CERN, Switzerland. The simulation depicts the decay of a Higgs particle following a collision of two protons.

LHC
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. More …

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. More …

God Particle

Updates:

• CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang [September 8, 2008]
  
• The Large Hadron Collider will start operating on September 10, 2008 [August 7, 2008]

Physicist says “God particle” will be found soon

Peter Higgs, a British physicist, believes scientists can soon prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible, a theory he first published 40 years ago.

Higgs, 78, believes a particle called the “Higgs boson” [nicknamed the “God particle” much to his chagrin as he is an atheist] will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research center in Switzerland kicks into full gear early 2009.

“The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly … I’m more than 90 percent certain that it will,” Higgs told reporters.

In the 1960s, the scientists at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) had dismissed Higgs’s theory, which explained why the force, named the Higgs field, must exist.

Today, the scientists widely accept the existence of the invisible field, which they believe came into being several milliseconds after the Big Bang created the universe about 13.73 billion years ago [the age of universe has an uncertainty of about 120 million years.]

Ordinary matter in our universe is made up of atoms. Each atom includes a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons, surrounded by a cloud of electrons. Protons and neutrons are in turn made of quarks, which are bound together by other particles called gluons. The bounds are so strong they have prevented quarks from existing on their own since just after big bang.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will simulate conditions at the time of big bang. Particles colliding at near light speed will generate temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the sun, which would melt protons and neutrons, breaking the quark-gluon bonds and creating a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma. The project collaborators hope that by studying the quark-gluon plasma, as it expands and cools, they can uncover the mysteries of universe.

Higgs, who taught at Scotland’s Edinburgh University, postulated that matter was weightless at the exact moment of the Big Bang, but most of it quickly gained mass because of the presence of a field that combined with the particles as they passed through it.

LHC Particle Collider at CERN. Image may be copyrighted. See FEWW Fair Use Notice.
CERN is currently building the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. This massive collider is being installed in a tunnel 27 km in circumference. CERN claims by studying collisions at very high energies its physicists could make progress in understanding the mysteries of how universe was born.

It is not known how long it might take to analyze the big bang simulation data, despite using bleeding edge supercomputers, before any evidence of the god particle could be found.

“I may have to keep the champagne on ice for a while yet.” Said Higgs.

“It all happens so fast that the appearance of the boson may be hidden in the data collected, and it could take a long time for the analysis to find it,” said Higgs. “If it doesn’t,” he said, “I shall be very, very puzzled.” Report

Cost of LHC Project: About $10 billion.

Related Links:

• LHC: What will it do after the bang?
• Thought for the Day: The LHC and Earth