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Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The world’s largest scientific experiment has been taken offline…by a weasel.

According to internal documents placed online, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva has suffered a power outage after the critter chewed on a 66 kilovolt electrical transformer. The unfortunate animal was fried and caused a CERN-wide power-cut.

“I can confirm that we had some issues overnight with electrical trouble,” says CERN spokesperson Arnaud Marsollier. “We suspect it might be due a small animal.”

It will likely take a few days to bring the collider back online, says Marsollier, but the equipment is fine and should be easily fixed.

The incident is reminiscence of a widely-reported story in 2009 that a similar power-cut at the LHC was caused by a bird dropping a piece of baguette on a substation, but Marsollier says that was a tall tale. “This was a story that was told, but we never knew exactly what happened,” he says, though as this latest incident demonstrates, it’s not impossible. “We’re in the countryside, you have wild animals.”

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...paign=hoot&cmpid=SOC|NSNS|2016-GLOBAL-twitter
 
Has the LHC discovered a new particle?
By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website
5 July 2016

After its much heralded re-start last year, has the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider, found a new particle?
You could be forgiven for thinking that things had gone a little quiet at Cern in Switzerland after the LHC was switched on to great fanfare in April 2015.

But physicists have been hard at work crunching data collected by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, which is now operating at unprecedented levels of energy and intensity.
Their efforts may not have been in vain, because there has been growing excitement in the hallways and offices at Cern in Geneva over a so-called "bump" in the data from the LHC's particle collisions.

The LHC smashes two beams of proton particles together about 100m beneath the French-Swiss border. Scientists then scour the debris of these smash-ups for hints of previously undiscovered particles.
Last year, out of trillions of such collisions, scientists detected more photon (light) particles being produced than expected - the aforementioned "bump". More precisely, they saw an excess of photon pairs with a combined mass of 750 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

This could be the tell-tale sign of a new, heavy particle that's about six times more massive than the famed Higgs boson - discovered at Cern in 2012.
The discovery of a new particle would be so exciting because the most widely accepted theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, can't explain everything we observe about the world around us.
It says nothing, for example, about dark matter - the mysterious stuff that makes up some 27% of the Universe. So scientists at Cern are searching for hints of new physical phenomena which could lead the way to a deeper understanding of the cosmos.

Signals have come and gone since the LHC first went online back in September 2008. Such statistical fluctuations are expected, and the bumps usually get ironed out with the addition of more data.
"More data is needed to be sure the signal doesn't go away - until then we have to be cautious," explained Prof Stefan Söldner-Rembold, head of particle physics at the University of Manchester.
"The big reason that people are excited about this bump is that both experiments (Atlas and CMS) saw a hint in roughly the same place. But even this is not completely unlikely."

The gold standard for claiming a discovery in particle physics is a statistical threshold known as five sigma. This corresponds to a chance of one in 3.5 million that the observed signal is a fluke, and roughly the same likelihood as tossing a coin and getting 21 or 22 heads in a row.

A slew of scientific papers seeking to explain the anomaly have been uploaded to the Arxiv pre-print server in recent months. However, in the last few weeks, rumours have begun to circle on blogs about the signal fading as the latest data from the LHC are analysed.
Later this summer, the LHC experiments will present their newest results at a conference in Chicago with significantly more data. Indeed, officials at Cern said the LHC has already accumulated more data in 2016 than it did last year.
So the coming weeks will be crucial for telling whether the 750 GeV signal is a simple mirage or something more.

But what we do know about the putative particle already restricts the possibilities.
If it's there, we know that it decays to two photons (light particles) and that, consequently, it must have a "spin" of either zero or two. In physics, spin is a quantum mechanical property of elementary particles which has several practical applications, such as in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
If the particle's spin is zero, like the Higgs boson, it could potentially be a heavier cousin of that particle discovered in 2012.

Another possibility, that the particle carries a spin of two, has led to the idea it could be a form of the graviton - a purely theoretical particle which imparts the fourth force, gravity. Gravity is one of the big puzzles in physics that remain unexplained by the Standard Model.
But some physicists are sceptical that a particle like the graviton answers the problem, and favour other explanations to the fourth force.

Many physicists working at the LHC have been looking hard for confirmation of a leading theory known as supersymmetry. The idea proposes the existence of hitherto unseen "partner" particles to those in the Standard Model. The Higgs' supersymmetric partner is dubbed the Higgsino, the gluon's is known as the gluino and so on.
But whatever the 750 GeV signal is, physicists are fairly sure it isn't the first supersymmetric particle.
"Something that you cannot incorporate in a known theory of physics can be very exciting because it means there's something fundamental that's not understood," Prof Söldner-Rembold explained.
And if a particle is confirmed, it shouldn't be alone.
"Ideally, if this is an indication of some new sector, then new particles should show up at similar scales or higher," he added.

The absence of any evidence for supersymmetry at the LHC so far has led to some simple versions of the theory being excluded, while others are being put under pressure. But adherents of the idea say there is still a vast amount of open territory still to be explored at the LHC.
"Supersymmetry isn't something people just made up. It addresses certain problems in the Standard Model which remain unsolved," said Prof Söldner-Rembold, adding that we shouldn't give up on the idea yet.
And whether the 750 GeV "bump" turns out to be something real, or not, the Manchester University particle physicist stresses that the LHC is a long-term endeavour with decades still to run.

Despite the relative swiftness with which the LHC discovered the Higgs boson, this was never going to lead to a bonanza of discoveries every year. Perhaps we should get used to the idea that the Universe isn't going to give up its secrets so easily.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36703721

Much more stuff on page.
 
Even by the Express' standards this takes the biscuit. Next they'll be telling us an old fashioned Police Box was seen inside the collider :)
Did Large Hadron Collider create TIME TRAVEL? 'Machine shut down after plane vanishes'
THE Large Hadron Collider "created a 'time warp' that sent a passenger jet thousands of miles off course" in the blink of an eye and caused a massive power black out, it has shockingly been claimed.
By JON AUSTIN
PUBLISHED: 13:44, Wed, Aug 3, 2016 | UPDATED: 14:21, Wed, Aug 3, 2016
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Conspiracy theorists have sensationally claimed the LCH caused time travel.
The huge scientific experiment, which is used to collide particles to discover more about how the universe formed, opened a time portal meaning an Iberworld Airbus A330-300 ended up landing 5,500 miles from where it was supposed to, conspiracy theorists say.

Built among miles of tunnels under the Swiss-French border, the complex machine is run by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Claims are now ride CERN scientists shut down the LHC during an experiment immediately after the incident with the plane.

An article on website Freedom Fighter Times said: "The power released from the LHC was so strong that it sent a time warp across the planet.

"What really happened can best be explained as a massive power outage all across South America."

The report said CERN scientists began a series of experiments during which they discovered their testing was "distorting our Earth’s magnetic field and had 'shot off' a 'time wave' towards the core of the planet”.



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LARGE HADRON: The LCH is the biggest scientific experiment on Earth.
Tracking showed the wave veered exactly towards the ‘Sun Gate’ high in the Bolivian Andes mountains, the report said.

The report added the “initial ‘time wave’ spawned by the LHC” erupted from the ‘Sun Gate’ and headed out towards the space above South America.

The wave then “glanced into the path of an Iberworld Airbus A330-300 flown by Air Comet which was ready to begin its descent into Santa Cruz, Bolivia, but then found itself ‘instantly and mysteriously’ over the skies of Santa Cruz, in Tenerife, Spain, over 5,500 miles away”.

All 170 passengers and the crew of flight A7-301 were safe, and after 17 hours on the ground in Spain the departed back to Bolivia.

The bizarre plane incident is said to have happened on November 1 2009.



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COMPLEX: Cables powering the huge collider.
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A day later CERN lost power at the LHC and announced some days later in a statement a bird had dropped a piece of baguette onto the machinery, causing the shut down.

The report added: "After this mysterious event CERN scientists shut down the LHC blaming their failed experiment on a bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery.

"After which their Director for Research and Scientific Computing, Sergio Bertolucci, warned that the titanic LHC machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or 'unknown unknowns' such as an 'extra dimension'".

The report, and other similar ones went onto claim, even after the LHC was shut down, “dimensional distortions” created in South America by the “time wave” continued and caused the Gateway of the Sun monolith to send out what Russian scientists likened to a "digital communication”.

This was said to have been blasted towards thousands of Pyramids and other ancient sites in Brazil and the Andes Region, leading to a massive power outage plunging “tens-of-millions of people into darkness".



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JONAUSTIN

Former Whitby Town councillor Simon Parkes claimed he stopped LCH scientists allowing Satan through
So is any of this true?

Well it is true that CERN had been testing the LHC on November 1, after it was out of action for more than a year, following a previous power failure.

It is also true CERN had to postpone the test runs of the LHC on November 2, 2009, after the bird dropped bread into an external electricity supply cutting power to the machine, as announced in a press release some days later.

There are also reports online that flight A7-301 ended up at Santa Cruz, in Tenerife, instead of the same in Bolivia, with 170 passengers on board, with no explanation initially given.



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However, there was no suggestion in these reports of any time anomalies.

In fact the flight was said to be five hours into the journey over the Atlantic, when pilots were denied access to Brazilian airspace, and had to return, taking a further six hours to reach the diverted airport.

It is also true that on November 11, 2009, a power cut affected millions of people in Brazil for two hours, and in Paraguay for 20 minutes.

But the cause of this was given as a huge hydroelectric dam suddenly malfunctioning.

The Itaipu dam, across the two borders stopped producing 17,000 megawatts of power.

The cause was not determined at the time, but was thought to be strong storms uprooting trees near the dam.



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One wild theory is the LCH could pull an asteroid towards Earth, something CERN denies.
The power released from the LHC was so strong that it sent a time warp across the planet. What really happened can best be explained as a massive power outage all across South America.

Freedom Fighter Times

Sceptics say conspiracy theorists are very good at filling in blanks and joining dots.

They also monitor news sites, so when events like these occur around the same time, they piece them together to create a new theory.

This, coupled with a distrust of most official explanations for unexpected events, means there is only going to be one outcome and a theory is born which then travels like wildfire over various websites, debunkers claim.

According to the neutral howitworks.com website it is easy for the theories to begin and travel.

A report on the website said: "For a conspiracy theory to get started, there has to be something that a conspiracy theorist can use, something that doesn't make sense. In some conspiracy theories, it's something very small.

"A conspiracy theorist might notice dozens of other anomalies.



Inside the Large Hadron Collider
Tue, October 20, 2015
Pictures of The Large Hadron Collider which is the worlds most powerful particle accelerator held in Geneva, Switzerland.
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The Large Hadron Collider CMS detecter held in Geneva, Switzerland
Full story here http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird...TRAVEL-Machine-shut-down-after-plane-vanishes
 
Express is like "Before It's News" on paper.
 
Has the LHC discovered a new particle?
By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website
5 July 2016

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36703721
Short answer - No!
Blip flop as tantalising bump in Large Hadron Collider data disappears
Hopes for a new particle are dashed, as new data shows no trace of the anomaly, suggesting that its appearance was a statistical fluke
Nicola Davis
Friday 5 August 2016 16.48 BST

It was a result that seemed to herald the discovery of a brand new sub-atomic particle and a clutch of Nobel prizes.
Some suggested that a tantalising bump in data collected by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern could be a cousin to the much feted Higgs Boson. Others pondered the possibility that it was a graviton - a particle thought to be involved in the force of gravity. Everyone, it seemed, was intrigued.

While other blips in data had previously had been seen, and dismissed, this one was different: it had been spotted by two teams working on different experiments on the particle smashing ring - Atlas and CMS.

But, eight months later, such hopes have now been dashed. With the collection of much more data, the signal has vanished, and with it both the puzzle and promise of the particle.
In a press conference held at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago, researchers revealed the results from an analysis of new data, collected since the LHC was switched back on in May.

“What we saw in the 2015 data was a bump which was not hugely statistically significant, but nonetheless there was a bump, a clustering of events at a mass of about 750 GeV,” said David Charlton, professor of particle physics, University of Birmingham and spokesperson for the Atlas Collaboration at Cern. But when the team analysed new data he says, “We see nothing, actually, in the region suggested by last year’s data. We see many events but we see no bump.”

The team working on the CMS experiment, he adds, have also seen no trace of the bump in their new data, suggesting that it was just a statistical fluke.
“If it had been real of course it would have been one of the big projects for this year - to study its properties to try and understand what it is,” said Charlton. “We are not greatly surprised it has gone away, it is just a pity because of course it would have been a fantastic discovery.”

But with the LHC running well and swaths of new data being collected, the teams don’t have too much time to feel downcast.
“We are looking for things like possible explanations for dark matter in the universe, we are looking for possible supersymmetric particles, maybe extra dimensions of space and time,” said Charlton.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...bump-in-large-hadron-collider-data-disappears
 
The very presence of a statue to Shiva - the Hindi deity known as "The Destroyer" at LHC is more disturbing than a bunch of interns having a laugh.
This refers to the enormous power of the atom. It's a quote from Robert Oppenheimer : American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project to build an atom bomb.


    • We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer
 
I've asked Escet about it, he's still in close touch with the place!

Edit - he says it's DEAD funny but he doesn't know who did it.
Or maybe he's not telling me!
 
They are building a second particle accelerator in my area, perhaps a sacrifice to the norse gods will be needed to make it run better.

For CERN's investigation into this, I feel they should ask for help from a Harvard symbologist. He could be assisted by a beautiful but brilliant female scientist.
 
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They are building a second particle accelerator in my area, perhaps a sacrifice to the norse gods will be needed to make it run better.

For CERN's investigation into this, I feel they should ask for help from a Harvard symbologist. He could be assisted by a beautiful but brilliant female scientist.
There might also be some involvement with the Vatican and a missing container of antimatter.
 
This refers to the enormous power of the atom. It's a quote from Robert Oppenheimer : American physicist and the scientific director of the Manhattan Project to build an atom bomb.


    • We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

The statue was a gift from the Indian government, it seems. I'd thought of the Oppenheimer quote too but apparently it's unrelated in this instance.

The "human sacrifice" thing was a pretty weird "prank" in my mind. A bit worrying. I'm not going to go full blown tin foil hat about it but there are echoes of the Bohemian Grove weirdness.
 
The statue was a gift from the Indian government, it seems. I'd thought of the Oppenheimer quote too but apparently it's unrelated in this instance.

Curious. I was also thinking the Oppenheimer thing.

Some actual occultists are known to have a rather pernicious sense of humour, so it being a prank doesn't rule that out as a motivation - I'm thinking particularly of Genesis P-Orridge and the great deal of trouble he ended up in after a not dissimilar 'human sacrifice video' that he made as an 'art' film was passed off as factual by Dispatches.
 
Escet reckons the 'ceremony' might be down to summer students - they're an odd bunch.
 
Physicists excited by latest LHC anomaly
A series of odd findings have theorists hoping for new particles.
Davide Castelvecchi 19 April 2017

Physicists are debating whether data from the LHCb, shown here, hint at a new particle or are just statistical artefacts.

The latest in a series of anomalies spotted in five-year-old data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could point the way to an entirely new elementary particle, physicists hope.

The most recent finding, reported at an 18 April seminar at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, may turn out to be a statistical fluctuation that fades as new data are analysed. But it is intriguing because it seems to chime with previously-reported oddities. And it matches the predictions of new physics that some theorists had already made based on those earlier reports.

Particular short-lived particles called B-mesons, created when the LHC smashes protons together, seem to be decaying in unexpected ways, Simone Bifani at the University of Birmingham, UK, told physicists at the CERN seminar.

The standard model of particle physics predicts that pairs of matter-antimatter particles should be among the B-mesons’ decay products: and specifically that electron-positron pairs and muon-anti-muon pairs should be found in roughly equal numbers. (The muon is a heavy cousin of the electron). But researchers see more of the electron-positron pairs, Bifani said, based on data collected at the collider’s LHCb experiment. ...

http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-excited-by-latest-lhc-anomaly-1.21865
 
I wonder what this means for the standard model, having particles with +2 floating around!

Scientists have detected a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.

The discovery will help researchers learn more about the so-called "strong force" which holds the centres of atoms together.

The existence of the new particle was theoretically predicted but this is the first time it has been identified.

The details of the Xi-cc++ particle were presented at a high-energy physics conference in Venice.

The study was carried out at the LHCb experiment and led by Dr Patrick Spradlin of Glasgow University. He said that the discovery would "shed light on a longstanding puzzle and open an exciting new branch of investigation".

His colleague, Prof Paul Soler, also from Glasgow University, described the development as "a new frontier in understanding the strong force".

BBC
 
The Earth could be REDUCED to a tiny inhospitable sphere by the Large Hadron Collider cautions scientist

according to a new book by well-respected scientist Professor Lord Martin Rees.

The cause of this catastrophic, but entirely theoretical, event would be quarks reassembling themselves into compressed objects called "strangelets" within the collider, Professor Rees says.

These, apparently, have the potential convert everything into a type of matter which would create a runaway effect that would compress the Earth into a football-pitch-sized ball of death.

According to CERN , the organisation which operates the LHR, the strangelets are only hypothetical . An American experiment, called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, has been looking for strangelets for years but has never detected any.

escargot, can you tell your boy I will be extremely cross if this happens & will hold him personally responsible.
 
The Earth could be REDUCED to a tiny inhospitable sphere by the Large Hadron Collider cautions scientist



escargot, can you tell your boy I will be extremely cross if this happens & will hold him personally responsible.

Yup, he cops for a lot of that. A few years ago I was chatting online to him while a joiner was attempting to work in my unevenly-subsided house. Poor bloke was reduced to telling me to ask Escet to please change the laws of physics so he could hang a door straight in a skewed space.
 
Anyway, here's the latest CERN news, and it's not good. Egg on face, what.

I'm quoting Physics World here 'cos they know what they're on about, innit. Could have chosen any of the qualities.

CERN describes physicist’s gender talk as ‘highly offensive’


The CERN particle-physics laboratory in Geneva has described an invited talk given last week at the lab by an Italian physicist as “highly offensive”. The presentation was given on 28 September at an inaugural CERN workshop on high-energy theory and gender by Allesandro Strumia of the University of Pisa. In the talk, he claimed that men, not women, face discrimination when seeking jobs in physics.
...

Indeed, in one slide, Strumia claimed that he was passed over for a job at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics, despite having many more citations than the successful female candidate.

Speaking to BBC Radio, Strumia said: “If you want to be hired, it’s easier to be a woman”.

To use a possibly non-PC but rather apt expression, CERN has kicked itself in the bollocks there.
 
Anyway, here's the latest CERN news, and it's not good. Egg on face, what.

I'm quoting Physics World here 'cos they know what they're on about, innit. Could have chosen any of the qualities.

CERN describes physicist’s gender talk as ‘highly offensive’




To use a possibly non-PC but rather apt expression, CERN has kicked itself in the bollocks there.

To be fair though, the women scientists are always falling in and out of love with the men scientists and have to run off to the toilets for a good cry every couple of hours so I’m sure a graph would prove that over the course of a working day, a man gets just as much science done as a woman.
 
To be fair though, the women scientists are always falling in and out of love with the men scientists and have to run off to the toilets for a good cry every couple of hours so I’m sure a graph would prove that over the course of a working day, a man gets just as much science done as a woman.


maximus otter
 
To be fair though, the women scientists are always falling in and out of love with the men scientists and have to run off to the toilets for a good cry every couple of hours so I’m sure a graph would prove that over the course of a working day, a man gets just as much science done as a woman.

It'd be one of those penis-shaped graphs that physicists collect.
 
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