alt Hacker NewsCERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
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I feel like the title is a little overdramatic.
They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.
I've read that CERN is storing more than 1 exabyte of collisions data these days (up from 600PB during the last long shutdown https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/default/fil...). Not too shaby...
The typo that sometimes got through in official literature still makes me giggle
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acern.ch+%22large+hard...
I visited CERN last July. Was lucky enough to get into a group tour. The tour guide was a postdoc researcher who said the only times that public tours are allowed to take an elevator down is during long shutdowns. So while they do this work on LHC might be the best time to swing by for a tour (I might even try to return).
Even without the descent, my tour was great with showing the 70 year timeline, historical early particle accelerator equipment, and a cool view of the ATLAS control room. The facility is awe inspiring and a testament to Europe's willingness to make long-term commitments to furthering science research for the public good.
Having done my little contribution to ATLAS TDAQ/HLT in the early 2000's, it is an interesting feeling to see the next steps taking shape.
El Psy Kongroo.
Too late, damage is already done. We have been on the wrong timeline for years at this point.
I was surprised to see .cern as a TLD - i would not expect it to need a family of websites in the way .gov or .mil do.
I wonder whether the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider was a net positive or negative for science.
If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020?
I could see a timeline in which the SSC got built and discovered the Higgs boson before LHC came online, causing the LHC to be canceled, delayed, and/or starved of funding -- only for the SSC to be shuttered during the "great recession" of 2008 or during any other US Gov't belt tightening exercise. Today we would have neither the SSC nor the LHC.
Or, perhaps SSC would have accelerated other discoveries by 10 to 15 years (SSC go-live was to be in the late-1990's versus LHC's Higgs discovery in 2012).