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Weasel Apparently Shuts Down World's Most Powerful Particle Collider
- ChuckMcM 11y agoFortunately the weasel in question wasn't struck by the beam turning it into a hyper intelligent creature with unusual powers and great manual dexterity. [1] http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelmovies/images/2/25/Rocket_Cutout_Render.png/revision/latest?cb=20140627191149 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelmovies/images/2/25...
- zkhalique 11y agoFirst birds dropping bread, now this? http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1937370,0... Perhaps the animals are trying to tell us something...
- nickpsecurity 11y agoIt's going to be one of those SciFi situations where: (a) Gaia or The Planet is sending her children to stop what's about to kill the rest. or (b) The time travel implications of the black holes it might create are having the future push back on it 11/22/63 style.
- jonah 11y agoI had no idea about Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories and multiple publications on them. I love the serious way their (I assume trolling) ideas are taken. Good fun in the high energy physics communy.
- zamalek 11y agoIs that the one where tachyons are produced, travel back in time and ultimately interfere with their own creation? Fascinating stuff, although I struggle to believe it myself, I think that science's best ideas have historically come out of the blue - more attention to "the blue" is something that I would like to see more of from modern science.
- jonah 11y agoYes. And interestingly the GP's article spends a lot more time on that than the bird/bread. (Though that bird may have come back from the future as a saboteur[1].) [1] Even though it doesn't have wooden shoes.
- zamalek 11y agoThere's quite a few consequences, though - wrong as it might be. Regardless of how preposterous it is, imagine it to be true. What would that do to our concept of "science: the art of disproving falseness"? Science already struggles with the precision of components (telescopes, as an example) and, what's cognitively pleasing, is figuring out how you would devise an experiment for that. It doesn't matter if it was not true, how would you prove that? How do you say, for certain, that particles are not travelling back in time? That's the wonder that science has seems to have lost.
- zkhalique 11y agoWell, it can be linked to the more serious Everett's many-worlds explanation and quantum immortality ... we don't live in a world in which we successfully fired up the LHC and the black hole destroyed everyone on Earth, because in that world, there is no life on Earth. So we live in one of the other worlds in which, by whatever improbable means, the black hole never materialized. Why is this not a serious topic? See also the "Doomsday argument". It makes similar arguments in a different context without resorting to many worlds. Just the fact that we are alive at a certain time affects the probability that we are part of a doomsday scenario. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
- daveguy 11y agoThese things come up and are always amusing (my favorite was the "video" of the LHC starting up). I wonder though, assuming no supernatural world-ending phenomenon, what is the worst that could happen given the energy involved? This is high-energy particle physics, using magnets to guide collisions? How high is the energy? Can we put a value on the intensity of a complete and 100% efficient conversion of the particle collider energy to kinetic energy? Would it be like a 1 megaton nuclear bomb? Not even that? 1000x that? Do all concerns involve some unknown-maybe phenomenon like a runaway black hole? If we assume conservation of energy, what is the worst? Anyone know?
- the8472 11y ago> what is the worst that could happen given the energy involved? The beam alone carries enough energy to melt a tank, that's why they need those massive, water-cooled beam dumps. All the magnets combined store 11GJ of energy, which is 2.6 tons of TNT energy equivalent. Considering that they're distributed along the accelerator I guess it would result in a spectacular destruction of equipment, but no fireballs on the surface or anything like that.
- beamatronic 11y agoThe whole tank? Or did you mean it can make a teeny tiny hole all the way straight through it?
- the8472 11y agoNow that I looked it up, the analogy used was "could melt half a ton of copper". So it's less than your average car. Still a lot of energy to get rid off at short notice, in case of emergency shutdowns. If I recall correctly they modulate the beam with steering magnets so it sweeps through an area and water-cool the target material. And its absorption can't be too high so the energy gets deposited over some depth. Or from wikipedia: > Each of the two beam dumps, in case, for instance, of a dipole magnet quench, must be able to dissipate 362 MJ of beam energy in the 90 μs circulation time, which equates to a power of 4 TW.
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- danellis 11y agoOh, a literal weasel. I was picturing someone like Walter Peck.
- abruzzi 11y agoI love the last paragraph: > Of course, small mammals cause problems in all sorts of organizations. Yesterday, a group of children took National Public Radio off the air for over a minute before engineers could restore the broadcast.
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoI was even more amused that they linked to Gawker for the story about themselves. Feel bad for the TD who brought his kid to work and was rewarded with 73 seconds of dead air, though. That would be enough for the average radio engineer to put that little troublemaker up for adoption. You think people take an outage on your site seriously? Dump about fifteen seconds of silence onto an operating radio station, much less a network, and people lose their minds. Executives run out of offices shouting. Phones light up. It's amazing. My record was 46 due to a router failure and I had the station's general manager riding my shoulder before I could restore air. I've heard of firings for a minute, so joking aside, hope everything worked out. If they're joking about it on a listserv I'd assume so.
- johnchristopher 11y agoI don't understand why you are being down voted so I clicked the upside triangle.
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoThanks. I don't really pay any attention. It's not worth it. Mobile mistakes, people who don't like me, meh. Giving downvotes time of your day is mismanagement of your well-being because nothing good comes of it, and people like you usually correct it anyway.
- phjesusthatguy3 11y agoI brought my daughter to work with me once when she was three years old. She managed to turn off our main UPS, back before everything was virtualized. Restarting 30+ physical servers while everyone else was losing their minds was a learning experience. I can't say I blame my employer for instituting a strict "children are not welcome" policy after that, but I'm still rather annoyed.
- hyperion2010 11y agoGood time to repost the classic: http://cybersquirrel1.com/ http://cybersquirrel1.com/
- nrjames 11y agoIt's almost just like this children's book! Weasels: Elys Dolan http://www.amazon.com/Weasels-Elys-Dolan/dp/0763671002/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1461954961&sr=8-1&keywords=weasels+elys+dolan http://www.amazon.com/Weasels-Elys-Dolan/dp/0763671002/ref=s...
- Aelinsaar 11y agoIt must be Mustelidae, not Friday.
- idealform01 11y ago"There have been previous incidents, including one in 2009, when a bird is believed to have dropped a baguette onto critical electrical systems." Animals be trollin
- tomsmeding 11y agoThey be rollin
- username223 11y agoIt sounds like a caricature of a French person was involved: "Euh... c'etait un oiseau avec le pain. Vraiment!"
- Grue3 11y agoWell, obviously it had to happen. All the universes where the weasel didn't stop it ended up being destroyed.
- f_allwein 11y agomaybe it was sent by this guy: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/man-arrested-at-large-hadron-collider-claims-hes-from-the-future/ http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/man-arrested-at-large-hadron-col...
- DennisP 11y agoWhile they were still trying to start up the LHC and having weird failures, some guy calculated how many failures we'd have to see before taking that hypothesis seriously. He came up with about 30. Shortly after that, it failed because a bird dropped a biscuit in precisely the wrong place. It was like living in a Douglas Adams novel.
- zamalek 11y ago> The Higgs is believed to endow other particles with mass Please correct me if I'm wrong, but after digging into things a bit I've determined that the Higgs Boson is nothing more than evidence of the Higgs Field - which is the thing actually responsible for mass as a result of energy moving through it. Is this a common misconception or is it me that has the misconception?
- brian-armstrong 11y agoYou are right. The Higgs boson is a particular resonance in the Higgs field itself.
- 21 11y agoAs another non-expert which investigated this, there are two Higgs related things which give mass. One of them, the Higgs mechanism, gives mass to bosons (force carrier particles) by direct interaction between the Higgs field and the bosons fields. The other one gives mass to fermions (matter particles). This one is more related to the Dirac equation. There are basically two kinds of all fermions, a left kind and a right kind (chirality), and one electron for example constantly "oscillates" between these kinds. At each such oscillation it emits or absorbs a Higgs bosson.
- jessriedel 11y agoThis is a little like asking whether observing a grain of sand is evidence that beaches can exist. (Yes, but its really not the sensible thing to ask.) The Higgs particle is to the Higgs field as the photon is to the electromagnetic field, or the electron is to the electron field. You've heard of the electromagnetic field because it's a boson and so can pile up into macroscopic amounts such that the particle granularity is negligible. (Electrons are fermions so they can't.) In principle the Higgs can do this too, but presumably the energy required to create a macroscopic Higgs field is unimaginable.
- linuxfan2718 11y agowhen I read this headline I thought "Weasel" was a hacker crew I hadn't heard of before.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoWe all attribute different initial meanings to common words. When I read "weasel" I at first thought politician. (No, I'm not making a joke).
- rootbear 11y agoAnd I first saw it as Weasley and thought sorcery was involved...
- hinkley 11y agoWhen I was a kid my town had three blackouts caused by substation failures. Once by mylar party balloon, and twice by squirrel. Turns out having a bushy tail can be a liability. Later I was reminded of this when I was reading a biography of Tesla, who was doing the calculations for the arcing distance on his equipment and was building the largest coils that could safely be placed into his workshop(s). One day he accidentally turned on the equipment while he was on the wrong end of the room and he had to army crawl across the floor to get to the shutoff switch without turning into one of those squirrels. [Edit] The point: Maybe we're designing the safety margins on these systems a little too tightly. Maybe a Squirrel radius should be added to these things.
- nxzero 11y agoReminds me of why software bugs are called bugs; ironic give most software bugs are caused by humans.
- nxzero 11y ago>> "Mounting evidence suggests a hacker trained the weasel to take down a particle collider." Right, that's believable - what's next, killer dolphins that take out submarines?
- captainmuon 11y agoGreat, I skip reading the daily run meeting slides once, and then find this in the news (I work on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC [1]). There are a couple of nasty images in the (internal) presentation. That poor weasel tried to eat a cable or something and got completely fried :-(. For those wondering how this can happen, it looks to me like a normal outdoor transformer station, like there are many all around the world. I actually wonder why you don't hear about power outages like this (not at CERN, but in regular cities) more frequently. Maybe public power supplies are more redundant? ([1] Note I'm only posting as a private person and not in any official function. Disclaim disclaim yadda yadda.)
- kogus 11y agoI used to work in the IT department of a steel mill. A racoon once got into a power transformer station behind the mill and managed to ground something that shouldn't have been grounded. The mill was down for 12 hours as a result. It was both extremely annoying and highly entertaining.
- digi_owl 11y agoI guess it was accompanies with a very loud pop and a very fried squirrel.
- keithpeter 11y agoI was wondering about that: Birmingham UK we have outdoor transformers at various points around the outskirts of the city and plenty of wildlife (including ASBO squirrels and nonchalant foxes) but no history of power outage. Perhaps the trips are set really sensitive given the value of the equipment being run from the supplies?
- dguaraglia 11y agoHah, "ASBO squirrels". ASBO is a Britishism I hadn't heard in so long.
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- martincmartin 11y ago"It is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking the secrets of the universe." Ok, that made me smirk.
- Filligree 11y agoSeems like an opportune time to link to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1eh/hamster_in_tutu_shuts_down_large_hadron_collider/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1eh/hamster_in_tutu_shuts_down_large... ;-)
- linker3000 11y agoSomewhat uncannily, I am currently in Switzerland (from the UK), working on a project to install a 13PB object store for the Montreux Jazz archives (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040853). Last night, we had a meal out in Lausanne with our hosts and when walking back to the car, we saw a small animal dash across the road. Our hosts, in French, described this 'animal who eat cables', and we ended up translating this into 'ferret'. Maybe our 'ferret' was on his or her way to/from the scene of the crime. Regrettably I cannot give a description that will aid in its capture for interview. PS: We completed the initialisation of the object store today (Friday 29th April) and will be testing with the customer on Monday for handover on Weds. We started work within one hour of flying to site last Saturday (I have two colleagues over from the USA) and we worked some 8am-11pm days to make it happen. We are knackered!
- jdminhbg 11y agoGiven that the investigation turned up the charred remains of the perpetrator, he probably wasn't on his way from the scene of the crime...
- linker3000 11y agoThat appears to be a reasonable assumption! Unless of course there's a plot twist.
- sizzzzlerz 11y agoWas Ted Cruz anywhere in the vicinity?
- towlejunior 11y agoLol, I read "Weasel" and assumed it was the name of a startup or a python lib or something... I need to get outside more.
- gamesbrainiac 11y agoWhen we finally get quantum computers, bugs will be called weasels.
- userbinator 11y agoMaybe LHC workers should adopt the term "deweaseling" for troubleshooting problems.
- gm3dmo 11y agoWeasels don't get sucked into jet engines. But they do get fried in large hadron colliders.
- siliconc0w 11y agoWeasel was obviously sent by advanced alien race to 'lock' our technological progress.
- robbrown451 11y agoThey are now saying it was probably a marten, not a weasel. But the possibility remains that it is an elusive mammal that has been conjectured since the 1960's, but has yet to be confirmed to exist.
- molmalo 11y agoAlways remember to debug and deweasel your systems.
- stuaxo 11y agoPop goes the Weasel ?