LHC, revving up again

A piece of cable was responsible last year for the world's most expensive short-circuit. More than £30m-worth of damage was done to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most advanced particle accelerator ever built, a few days after its ceremonial opening. It has taken Myers – and hundreds of other Cern scientists – more than a year to pinpoint the guilty piece of cable and repair the wreckage. "It was a very small piece, but it did immense damage," he said. It remains to be seen whether Myers can fix Cern's tattered technological reputation in the process – when his team restart their great machine in a few weeks. "I am not a nervous person," said the 63-year-old Belfast-born engineer. "And that is probably just as well."
The LHC had been inaugurated at 9.30am on 10 September 2008 to a barrage of global media attention. This was the God Machine that would unravel the secrets of the universe, it was claimed. Beams of protons, one of the key constituents of the atom's nucleus, were successfully fired round the machine's subterranean 18-mile circular tunnel under the Jura mountains outside Geneva.
Over the following weeks, it was predicted, scientists would recreate conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the universe's birth and start making sensational discoveries as they smashed beams of protons into each other.
Discoveries would include the God Particle, a tiny entity also called the Higgs Boson, which is believed to give objects – including people – their mass. In addition, dark matter, a mysterious, invisible form of matter that permeates the universe, would be uncovered, along with a host of other revolutionary discoveries.
"It was all looking so good," said Myers. Then, at 11.45am on 19 September, things went spectacularly wrong. Faulty soldering in a small section of cable carrying power to the machine's huge magnets caused sparks to arc across its wiring and send temperatures soaring inside a sector of the LHC tunnel.
A hole was punched in the protective pipe that surrounds the cable and released helium, cooled to minus 271C, into a section of the collider tunnel. Pressure valves failed to vent the gas and a shock wave ran though the tunnel.
"The LHC uses as much energy as an aircraft carrier at full speed," said Myers. "When you release that energy suddenly, you do a lot of damage."
Firemen sent into the blackened, stricken collider found that dozens of the massive magnets that control its proton beams had been battered out of position. Soot and metal powder, vaporised by the explosion, coated much of the delicate machinery. "It took us a long time to find out just how serious the accident was," said Myers.
A 400-metre chunk of the £2.5bn device had been wrecked, it was discovered. Worse, when scientists traced the cause to a tiny piece of soldering, they realised that they would have to redesign major parts of the collider's entire safety systems to prevent a repeat event. That has taken more than a year to achieve.
Now Cern scientists have begun firing protons round one small section of the collider as they prepare for its re-opening. Over the next few weeks, more and more bunches of protons will be put into the machine until, by Christmas, beams will be in full flight and can be collided.
The LHC will then start producing results – 13 years after work on its construction began.
"There was so much expectation that we were about to make great discoveries last year and then the accident occurred," said Cern researcher Alison Lister. "Morale was very low when we found out just how bad it was. However, we should now be getting results by Christmas, and you couldn't get a better present than that."
When fully operational, the LHC will soak up 10 times more power than any other particle accelerator on Earth, consuming 120 megawatts of electricity – enough for an entire Swiss canton – to accelerate bunches of protons, kept in two beams, each less than a hair's breadth in diameter, to speeds that will come "within a gnat's whisker of the speed of light", according to Myers.
One beam will circulate clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. Then, at four points along the collider's tunnel, the beams will cross.
Bunches of protons – each containing 100bn particles – will slam into other oncoming bunches, triggering collisions that will fling barrages of sub-atomic detritus in all directions.
These explosive interactions will form the core of the great collider's operations and will generate new types of particle, including the Higgs, that will pop fleetingly into existence before disintegrating into a trail of other sub-atomic entities. New physics will be uncovered with Nobel prizes following in their wake. And that is not all, say sceptics. They argue that miniature black holes will be created and one of these could eventually grow to swallow up the Earth. The LHC would then not only be the world's biggest experiment – but its last. This fear has led protesters to make legal attempts to close down the LHC, one even making it to the European Court of Human Rights. All have failed, though one case – in Germany – has still to be resolved.
Even stranger is the claim by another group of physicists who say the production of Higgs bosons may be so abhorrent to nature that their creation would ripple backwards through time to stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller trying to halt his own birth.
"All Higgs machines shall have bad luck," said Dr Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Thus the cable meltdown that afflicted the LHC was an inevitable effect of the laws of time, a notion that leaves most Cern scientists scratching their heads in bafflement.
In fact, the real problem facing the LHC is simple. It is a vast device the size of London's Circle Line but is engineered to a billionth of a metre accuracy. Ensuring that no flaws arise at scales and dimensions like these pushes engineering to its absolute limits.
Cern almost succeeded last year. Now it is convinced that it has got it right this time. "All I can say is that the LHC is a much safer, much better understood machine than it was a year ago," said Myers.
Most physicists believe he is right. "If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history," said one. "If not, we will have assembled the world's most expensive piece of modern art."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/01/cern-large-hadron-collider

October 1, 2009

Latest entry from Brians Dreams is:
"new crack runs straight through earth on opposite ends of world - look at epicenters? W Orbital tilt 23.44 to 5.27 in 779 days?"
that leads us to the date of December 2011.

Tectonic plate cracking is bigtime for all the planet If anything is to survive, there would be no seasons with a tilt of only 5.27 degrees. The summation would also be that climates would become far more stable, less extreme, bringing in an entirely new epoc.

The world quakes

The principal research interest of Prof Sieh is earthquake geology, which uses geological layers and landforms to understand the geometries of active faults, the earthquakes they generate, and the crustal structure their movements produce. His early work on the San Andreas fault led to the discovery of how often and how regularly it produces large earthquakes in southern California.
More recently, his students and colleagues along with himself investigated Taiwan's multitude of active faults and figured out how their earthquakes are creating that mountainous island. they are currently exploring the earthquake geology of Myanmar (Burma). their principal current research interest is the subduction megathrust that produced the devastating giant Sumatran earthquakes and Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004 and 2005. That research suggests that the megathrust is poised to produce yet another giant earthquake in western Sumatra.
Prof. Kerry SiehDirector, Earth Observatory of SingaporeProfessor of Geology

South Australian cyclone

A tornado which tore across farming areas of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia has been filmed on a mobile phone. Local Billy Branson captured the footage, while another ABC listener Mark, at Cummins, also photographed the tornado on his mobile phone.Matt Collopy from the Bureau of Meteorology said it was an unusual weather event for South Australia ."To actually get a report of a tornado itself is very rare," he said. Senior forecaster Mark Anolak said storms were likely to continue throughout the state into Thursday."With the thunderstorms we are expecting generally five to 10 millimetres across eastern parts of the state, probably less than five millimetres over the western parts of the state, but in the far east with the thunderstorms, local heavy falls are possible, getting up to 20, 30 millimetres," he said.Local resident Darren Kelly said the wild weather came without warning."We just see a bit of cloud an lightning kicking around out west, or north-west from here, from Cummins and then it sort of just come in and dumped a fair amount of rain in a short amount of time," he said.

WA quakes

There's been a whole lot of shaking going on, of the earthquake variety, in a small West Australian wheatbelt town.Beacon, 320km north-west of Perth, has had roughly 100 earthquakes in the last month, Geoscience Australia seismologist Phil Cummins said on Sunday.
Between three and six earthquakes registering three and above on the Richter Scale had been detected in the area in the last month."A few of those have been in the mid to high fours," Mr Cummins said.The largest, which registered nearly five on the Richter Scale came within 24 hours of earthquakes in Melbourne and off the coast near Broome on Friday."That could be felt over a wide area, it could even cause damage if you were right on top of it, minor damage," Mr Cummins said."Certainly these were as big as the ones that shook all of Melbourne."I think for the people in the wheatbelt who are used to earthquakes, they probably don't get too upset about it but you take the same earthquake and put it in Melbourne where people haven't experienced it and people can be very upset."The earthquake clusters, known as swarms, were not unusual for the wheatbelt area but what was unusual was the migration of the swarms around the wheatbelt.Similar patterns were noted in Koorda in 2003 to 2005 and Burrakin between 2000 and 2002."These ones like the Beacon case where you seem to get several moderate earthquakes and then lots and lots of smaller quakes, it is a bit unusual," Mr Cummins said."It's called a swarm because it doesn't follow the typical foreshock, minishock, aftershock pattern or at least it doesn't seem to," he said."That's this migrating swarm, I'm not sure I've ever heard of that before."For that area it would seem that this behaviour is not typical."Seismologists were uncertain if the swarms were related to larger earthquake events such as the wheatbelt's Meckering earthquake in 1968, which registered 6.8 on the Richter scale.
The seismic activity could be relieving stresses and avoiding larger earthquakes or it could result in a big rupture."We just don't know ..." Mr Cummins said."The big question really is whether it has any relationship to larger earthquakes which occur."How long the seismic activity lasts for the residents of rural Beacon is anyone's guess, Mr Cummins said."They seem to die out gradually, we don't really know that much of what to expect, I mean Burrakin went on for a couple of years, Koorda sort of gradually started up and faded out," he said."It could continue for a while."

South western oz rock & roll

The earth tremor that rocked the centre of Melbourne was one of three quakes that hit Australia in the one day, a seismologist says.Melbourne residents reported buildings shaking across the metropolitan area when a tremor struck at 8.55pm (AEDT) on Friday.Geoscience Australia, which monitors earthquake activity, said the tremor measured magnitude 4.6 on the Richter scale , with the epicentre at Korumburra, about 90km southeast of Melbourne .The US Geological Survey reported on its website the tremor measured 4.7.Geoscience Australia's duty seismologist Phil Cummins said residents across a wide area felt the Melbourne tremor - one of three quakes to hit Australian that day."There were many reports from across a wide area - this was felt across a 100km radius," he told AAP on Friday."It was certainly a moderate earthquake that was likely to be felt across a wide area but is unlikely to have caused any damage, except possibly some minor damage near the epicentre."He said tremors were also felt near Broome in WA and near Beacon in WA's wheatbelt."Those were both close to magnitude five," he told ABC radio on Saturday."They occurred in remote areas so they were felt by far fewer people than this (the Melbourne ) one."But it is quite remarkable that we get three of roughly the same size in the one day."Victorian State Emergency Service (SES) spokesman Allen Briggs said the service was inundated with phone calls from the public after the Melbourne tremor but there had been no reports of any damage."It was certainly enough to rattle windows and we've had reports it was felt in metropolitan Melbourne and as far down as Warragul and Leongatha in Gippsland," Mr Briggs said on Friday.Ron Smith, who lives in Kew, in Melbourne's inner northeast, said he was relaxing at home when he felt the building shake."Jeez, it came as a bit of a surprise. We were just sitting around when all of a sudden the place starts vibrating," he said.Residents in Reservoir, in Melbourne's north, and householders in the Dandenong Ranges east of the city, reported feeling the tremor shortly before 9pm."It felt like a large truck driving past the house," Charisse Ede, of Monbulk, said, adding she felt a second, smaller tremor a few minutes later.A spokeswoman for Victoria Police said the incident had also been reported to the police but she advised members of the public to only dial triple-0 in an emergency situation.

comments from people who experienced the quake were:rumbling shook my house, the wooden floors were what made the most noise, squeaking nails and creaking wood; I heard a deep rumbling sound; We live in a two-storey home with a concrete slab in Ringwood North. Upstairs I was laying in bed and felt the tremor. Sliding doors were knocking together, bed shaking, lasting at least a minute. Interestingly enough I came down stairs to see what was going on and those downstairs on the slab felt nothing; as the rumbling reached its peak, everything started to shake back and forth and slightly up and down; we heard a wind-like sound; it felt like a wave passing through the house

HQJOC opens officially

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has officially opened the new Australian Defence Force (ADF) headquarters near Canberra, today.

Up to 750 ADF staff will work at the $300 million centre in Bungendore, NSW.

"This is a great and good day for the Australian defence community," Mr Rudd told the crowd at the opening ceremony on Saturday.