9:20 am Pacific Time: Let’s be clear. Tonight’s start-up is a symbolic event, not a physics event; as I understand it, the beam will only be circulating in one direction, so there won’t even be any collisions. Still, it’s a very important symbolic event! The first time the beam goes through the entire machine. So, just for fun, here will be a running commentary throughout the day, with links and musings and all that makes the blogosphere special. Co-bloggers are welcome to chime in, and any particle physicists out there who want to say something about the LHC are welcome to comment or email.
9:45 am (Pacific), Sean: Feel free, in the comments, to make predictions about what the LHC will discover (ultimately, not today). Here are mine. Crackpots not welcome. And seriously, folks — black-hole/world-ending jokes are only funny the first million times.
1:14pm (EST), Mark: Here at Cornell there’s going to be a public forum this evening with refreshments, chats with physicists, two talks (by Yuval Grossman and Peter Wittich) and with various instruments and components of the detector on display.
10:26am (PDT), JoAnne: Actually, it is the end of the world as we know it. I will never again have to write a paper detailing the signatures of some crazy new Terrascale theory, wondering if there is any chance of connection to reality. I will never again have to plot a cross section as a function of the Higgs mass. In fact, I will never again have to do a loop over the Higgs mass in a code. I will never again wonder how electroweak symmetry is broken, how the hierarchy between the electroweak and gravity fundamental scales is maintained, whether there is a WIMP dark matter particle, or whether supersymmetry or extra spatial dimensions actually exist. Fundamental questions and roadblocks that have plagued us for literally decades will finally be answered and we will at last be able to move forward instead of spinning our wheels. Yes, indeed, the world will be truly different.
10:47am (Pacific), Sean: Of course we are not the only blog covering this. The US/LHC Blogs have lots of information, and Tommaso Dorigo offers some inside scoop. There is also main CERN page for the event, and one for press releases.
12:02pm (Pacific), Sean: The real excitement of the LHC startup is, of course, that it’s an excuse to party. Mike in comments already mentioned the Fermilab pajama party. Here at Caltech, where it’s not quite so ridiculously late at night, we’re having pizza and beer. And (for the wimps who can’t stay up), a lunch BBQ tomorrow. Everyone should feel free to put together their own party! Suggested soundtrack. (Dammit, I’m violating my own rules.)
12:54pm (Pacific), Sean: I’ve asked some experts to chime in. Here is Gordy Kane, University of Michigan:
The Standard Model(s) of particle physics and cosmology are wonderful established descriptions of the world we see. They leave out a lot we would like to understand, from dark matter and the matter asymmetry of the universe, to WHY the forces and particles (quarks and leptons) are what they are. LHC won’t tell us much more about the world we see and how it is made, but the discoveries there will point the way to “WHY”. It’s a WHY machine.
The discovery that makes sense is supersymmetry, i.e. the superpartners of some of the Standard Model particles. There’s a lot of indirect phenomenological evidence that indeed some superpartners will be seen at LHC, such as the unification of the forces at very short distances, the absence of large new effects at the LEP and Tevatron colliders, and the very good indirect evidence for a light Higgs boson. A supersymmetric world is also one where we can understand how the electroweak symmetry is broken and how the matter asymmetry arises, and it has a dark matter candidate. I estimate ten or twenty gluinos and a lot of Higgs bosons will be produced in October this year (but not seen unless we are very lucky about the decay signatures). IF the LHC indeed establishes the world is supersymmetric, there is a great bonus – we can write string theories at the Planck scale where the laws of nature should be written and calculate predictions for LHC experiments and dark matter from them, and we can extrapolate data from LHC and dark matter experiments to the Planck scale to see what theories are suggested. Without that window we might never learn the underlying theory from which everything emerges.
It’s very lucky that our technologies and our society allowed us to afford and to build the LHC to study nature so deeply (another anthropic idea?). It’s very unlikely (because of technological and financial and cultural limits) that we can ever have a further facility to extend this study, so we’re very lucky that a framework like string theory has emerged, one that addresses all the basic questions, at the same time we may be able to get from LHC the data that can test and establish it.
1:24 pm (PDT), JoAnne: The History Channel (US cable TV) is airing
The Next Big Bang at 8 PM this evening. The show details our expectations for the LHC and features David E. Kaplan of Johns Hopkins as well as many other of your favorite physicists, so don’t forget to tune in!
1:58pm (Pacific), Sean: Ph.D. Comics weighs in.
6:53pm (EST), Mark: BBC World News America, starting in a few minutes on the East coast, and repeated later, will have a piece on the LHC.
4:05pm (Pacific), Sean: Prize for the best paper title goes to Mihoko Nojiri, arXiv:0809.1209.
The Night before the LHC
Authors: Mihoko M. NojiriAbstract: I review recent developments on the use of mT2 variables for SUSY parameter study, which might be useful for the data analysis in the early stage of the LHC experiments. I also review some of recent interesting studies. Talk in SUSY08.
4:25pm (Pacific), Sean: There will be a live webcast from CERN beginning at 11pm Pacific, with the actual beam scheduled for half an hour later. But right now you can click the link, and listen to a pre-packaged CERN video. You can also watch the startup on EVO, if you know what that means (or care to learn).
4:50 pm (PDT), JoAnne: Yours truly has just been recruited for a 5 minute live radio interview on KCSB (the station is on the UC Santa Barbara campus) at 7:30 tomorrow morning. I guess David Gross has the good sense to be asleep at that hour! In any case, I’ll be sure to drink some coffee first, lest I spew some gibberish on blackholes.
6:55pm (Pacific), Sean: Sorry, the “live” blogging took a hiatus while I was talking to Hal Eisner, a TV reporter (“extraordinaire,” he asks me to add) from the local Fox affiliate. He, quite rightly, was hectoring me mercilessly in an attempt to explain the purpose of the LHC at a level accessible to six-year-olds. (He also tried very hard to get me to say “God particle,” which I mostly resisted.)
What is the purpose? It’s to discover the laws of nature, of course, or at least extend our knowledge of them. But that doesn’t always quite cut it for people. I think it would suffice to the aformentioned six-year-old; kids are naturally curious, but adults have it beaten out of them by a relentlessly pragmatic world. Among other things, the LHC represents a tremendous triumph of the basic inquisitiveness of the human species.
7:20 pm (PDT), JoAnne: There’s a host of First Beam Day activities planned for tomorrow across the US. Check the listings for an event near you. Here in SF Bay area, swissnex, the annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, is throwing a party tomorrow night in coordination with SLAC and LBNL. Much fun will be had by all!
7:53pm (Pacific), Sean: If you’re wondering whether the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the world yet, see here.
If you’re wondering whether physics is more or less tawdry than politics, see here.
8:17pm (Pacific), Sean: The right response to end-of-the-world chatter is to change the subject — it’s just crackpottery, not a legitimate scientific debate. But damn, you have to be impressed with the vigor of the meme. Far and away the first thing that comes to mind when a person on the street hears “giant atom-smasher in Switzerland” is “might destroy the world.” How do we combat that? What is the one idea we would like to pop into people’s minds when they hear that phrase, and how do we get it there?
11:52pm (EST), Mark: Gotta sleep, but will try to tune into BBC Radio 4’s Big Bang Day when I wake up!
9:26pm (Pacific), Sean: Reporting now from the High Energy Physics conference room here at Caltech. In an hour and a half we’ll open a live feed to our colleagues at CERN, who will be updating us on what happens. Of course, the best answer is simply “all systems nominal.” The only way a detector will actually see anything (as I understand it) is if the beam is not focused perfectly from the start, which is perfectly possible. If the beam is well-behaved, it will just zip through.
But of course, there are many steps along the way, and “first protons circumnavigating the accelerator” is as good a “turn on” event as any. Folks in the know have assured me that CERN will not be hosting multiple “trust us, this is the real start” events — this is it.
9:48 pm (PDT), JoAnne:
From looking at our comments, it’s clear that some folks are still genuinely frightened by the LHC. This should not have happened. The LHC is one of the most exciting scientific journeys in our lifetimes! We should all watch it in wonder and be amazed at its discoveries.
Many a thoughtful, carefully analyzed and written scientific treatise has appeared which thoroughly disproves the claim that the LHC will destroy the Earth. But these aren’t published or mentioned or taken seriously by the press…. (HELP – I’m sounding like a Republican!)
So, let me present a different, non-scientific, but emotional argument. We physicists are human beings too. We have children, parents, siblings, friends, etc, that we care deeply about. We care about this planet and its future and the future of our families. There are literally thousands of physicists, worldwide, involved in the LHC. If there was a serious concern, the scientists themselves would have stepped forward.
As for me, one of my best arguments is that my bottle of 1990 LaTour remains in my cellar. I’m going to pull it out when we achieve collisions at the next accelerator after the LHC! Oh – and the fact that I’ve just spent the last 8 months undergoing intensive, arduous treatment for cancer so that I too can have a future and be a part of the LHC.
10:00 pm (PDT), John:
B minus two hours. Oh yeah! We’ve waited a long time for this.
11:03pm (Pacific), Sean: Action is heating up, although the pizza has yet to arrive. So I’m going to start paying attention to the “real world.” I’ll come back if any disasters occur.
11:30 pm (PDT), John:
Looks like CERN has stuck a PR video in place of the live webcast…not too surprising…maybe the site got hammered, or they have that up until it starts.
The SPS is cycling nicely. That’s what they’ll use to inject the beam in 30 minutes.
11:37 pm (PDT), JoAnne: This is the error message I’m getting:
Due to a huge interest for this live video feed of the LHC First Beam day, you may not be able to see the live video stream and we apologise for this.
Please try reloading the page, come back later, or check the other connection options available on this page.
Many thanks for your interest in CERN and the LHC!
The folks at CERN should have planned for heavy traffic – I’ve waited 25 years for this and I’m disappointed.
11:48 pm (Pacific), Sean: Getting updates from CERN. No disasters, but there was apparently a tiny glitch with one of the collimating magnets, which has now been fixed.
The current beams are low energy (450 GeV, lower than the Tevatron at Fermilab). They want to ramp up to 5,000 GeV (5 TeV) by the end of October — on October 21st, there is a get-together featuring heads of state, and they would love to have actual high-energy collisions by then.
They will be circulating the beam in both directions — just not at the same time, at least today.
The computing system involves about a hundred thousand processors — soon to be upgraded to a few hundred thousand. Data flies from CERN to Caltech at about 40 GB per second, which they also want to upgrade by a factor of ten.
11:58 am (Pacific), Sean: The webcast is limited to 2000 connections! Who’s the rocket scientist behind that?
Midnight (Pacific), Sean: First beam! Or so they say. (See below.)
12:03 am (PDT), John:
Woo hoo! Did it work?
I think it actually starts in a few minutes. The press kit says
9:00 Live satellite broadcast and webcast begin with an introduction from the commentators in the CERN Control Centre, an animation showing the passage of a beam through the LHC, and highlights of the LHC operators’ daily meeting where they lay out the procedure for getting the first beam circulating in the LHC.
9:06 Coverage begins of the first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC. Lyn Evans, LHC project leader, will narrate the proceedings from the CERN Control Centre. Video of accelerator operators at work in the CCC will alternate with views of the LHC apparatus in its tunnel 100 meters underground.
12:08 (Pacific), Sean: Well, there was a video countdown. No human being has actually confirmed yet…
12:11 am (PDT), JoAnne: Only 2000 connections? No wonder nobody can get on! With all the hype they should have planned better than this….
12:22am (Pacific), Sean: Robert Aymar, CERN Director General … is speaking in French. Translation: in a few minutes we will let the beam zip through the LHC, sector by sector. (They stick absorbers in the way of the beam at certain points, just to check things in each sector before letting it go.) Sounds like the whole thing will take some time.
Liveblogging closer to the source from Adam Yurkewicz, and from David Harris.
I can’t update our blog because too many people are trying to read it!
12:33am (Pacific), Sean: First beam for real! We saw it! Not yet all the way around, as per previous update.
12:36am (Pacific), Sean: BBC reporter: “Ooh! This is exciting!”
12:38am (Pacific), Sean: Okay, I think the beam they had was … actually still in the injector, not the LHC. Because now there is really beam in the LHC! Still not all the way around.
12:40am (Pacific), Sean: Carlo Rubbia seen wandering around the LHC control room.
12:46am (Pacific), Sean: They removed another absorber, and now the beam has reached CMS! I think that’s 3 octants from the beginning.
1:02am (Pacific), Sean: They’ve made it about half way around, and are preparing a beam dump. Sadly, our reserved time on the videoconference has run out, as has my stamina, so I’m heading home. They’re predicting that a full circle will be achieved in the next half-hour or hour.
See you tomorrow!
1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!
1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.
1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.
1:43 am (PDT), JoAnne: SkyNews has just interviewed folks in the control rooms for each of the 4 experiments. All of the detectors turned on without trouble and are excited to be getting beam halo and beam gas events. LHCb and ATLAS saw the muons from the beam dump!
Now that the beam has safely travelled through the full accelerator, it’s time for some shut-eye.
7:38 am (PDT), JoAnne: Turns out that the live radio interview was with KCBS here in the Bay Area (which makes much more sense than KCSB in Santa Barbara – our communications department got that wrong!) and just finished. They mainly asked questions about the operation of the accelerator, what comes next, etc. They did ask if the research was open and if all the results would be public or if some of it would be kept secret. And, yes, the subject of those pesky blackholes came up…
9:34 am (Pacific), Sean: As commenters have noted, Google has caught the fever:
But here is something better: the signal from ATLAS when beam first went through.
Click for the full glory!
Comments
156 responses to “Live-Blogging the LHC Startup!”
[…] Sean Carroll Is Live-Blogging The LHC Startup Filed under: Current Events, Media, Nature, Public Debate, Science — chr1 @ 7:08 pm Tags: Cosmic Variance, LHC, Physics, Sean Carroll His posts here. […]
Why was my comment deleted? I am curious to know if the collisions would cause tsunamis or weaken the earth structure and cause earthquakes? All that energy got to go somewhere. I’m not a troll. I’m a concerned citizen who want to know some informed answers from the experts.
Tonight on NBC News Brian Williams said something like, “I hope they know what they’re doing” re LHC “problem” issues. I think the MSM have been pretty reasonable about it, saying most scientists don’t expect trouble. But BW did explain they have switches on the magnets, to turn off the experiment if weird stuff happens (more like safety than bizarre physical effects.) OK, here’s a serious question: I heard from buddies at J-Lab that protons may have a bit of “strangeness” despite their simplistic composition as uud, apparently things in practice can be more complicated than those combinations show. It looks to have something to do with “sea quarks” which are like virtual quarks I presume. This link to a piece by J-Lab beauty (why not give her that credit too) Sarah Phillips discusses this:
http://qd.typepad.com/33/2005/06/strangeness_in_.html
Wouldn’t very high-energy collisions stir up virtual quarks a lot and stimulate other flavors to an extent beyond the ordinary?
The startup of the LHC is as ‘symbolic’ as humankind’s first look through a telescope.
I know the headlining physics is the particle physics we learn after they get to top energy collisions, but give the accelerator physicists, designers, engineers and operations crews some credit! Some of them have been working on the project for over a decade and have in the process solved very interesting problems in physics, math and engineering.
In the control room, they’ll be looking for obstructions in the vacuum pipe, discovering all the survey errors in the machine (remember we’re talking about steering with millimeter precision over the course of many kilometers), checking for kinks in the pipe that may have occurred that as the beamline contracted while the magnets were cooled to superconducting temperatures. They will doubtless be test their beam loss and quench protection equipment as well (purposely or otherwise). This is all just for the first turn. It is a serious problem in nonlinear dynamics to design a machine that can maintain stable beam over the course of the millions of turns needed to provide useful numbers of collisions.
The accelerator (and the detectors) are marvels of physics and engineering in themselves. Beautiful ships for a spectacular voyage, and the first turn is the first real test of their seaworthiness.
It’s a good day to be a nerd, let’s celebrate all the science!
So they will be creating a miniature Big Bang? And perhaps, a miniature little universe along with it? Is that where our “universe” came from, someone’s LHC experiment? And all the mass we see is what leaked into a dimension the experimenters can’t find?
Terry, I am not a scientist but I have been reading stuff on this today. In a few places they remark that the mini collision is like a mosquito slapping into your office. The energy of the collision of the particles in the large hadron collider is the energy of a mosquito flying into your face and slapping it in collision. That then will be no where near a tsunami or earthquake. Living in an earthquake zone myself, I have seen the floor move sometimes its shakes slightly and sometimes it sort of bends (west coast ).
Vbar, I thought they commissioned it in Nov 207 or was that delayed and this is the commissioning? If they commissioned it earlier then the matter you mention would have been mor or less addressed then. This time is a trial run of one round around the 27 km pipes. Also I seem to read they have all these wires, which role I am not sure, but maybe combined with the magnets, help keep the direction travel of the particles in the proper direction. To prevent unforeseen now or in future, it might be why they buried this pipes 100 km below ground level so they hit no one?
Shannpn
# So they will be creating a miniature Big Bang?
-When I first heard of this idea a year ago, I was enthralled. It whetted my appetite seeing the 27 km of circular large hadron collider in pictures and the spots (detectors) where the several experiments will be carried out. If it were a mini big bang then it follows as you suggest it will bring along # “And perhaps, a miniature little universe along with it?” That cannot be to my mind, because our universe is 13.7 billion years old. and we are probably not waiting even more than a month or a few months to get the results and maybe then CERN will move onto other experiments. So there is no time of billions of years for the mini universe to unfold as ours is said to have done over that 13.7 bi yrs.
# Is that where our “universe” came from, someone’s LHC experiment?
– That’s a touch of humor but to theists, that is an important point as the universe began at that point of time 13.7 bi yrs ago as a creation of God, the someone you elude to.
# And all the mass we see is what leaked into a dimension the experimenters can’t find?
– I just read some of the science stuff on branes and M theory and it seems to be suggested that gravity prevents objects ( that is if I equate your mass with objects mentioned, and pardon me, if they should not be so equated, not being a scientist) crossing from one dimension/universe to another parallel universe in a multiverse universe. The point was made as follows on UFO sightings at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7598996.stm
“In fact, we theorise that if they do exist, the force of gravity is the only influence that can pass between them. This would prevent any material objects from crossing from one set of dimensions to another. So, no, UFO enthusiasts must look elsewhere. (BC)” Professor Brian Cox is one of the LHC scientists at Cern.
Shannon– Creating a miniature Big Bang is overstating the case a bit. We’ll be re-creating events that are closer to those of the Big Bang than ever before. I don’t think any universes will be created — that’s a long shot.
Interested– It’s not so much that we will understand what mass “is” (since we already understand that pretty well), but that we’ll understand better why certain particles (like the electron!) have any mass at all.
Questions like “What is the dark matter?” and “Why is there more matter than antimatter?” are potentially up the LHC’s alley. We’ll have to see what it has in store for us.
Umn hello people… Hasn’t anyone watched the movies: “The Core” or “The Mist”?
[…] In the mean time I’m waiting for “Next Big Bang” to start with my alarm set for 1AM to watch the webcast from CERN. Until the show starts (again, I missed the first airing) at 11pm Central time I’ll be watching the live-blogging from Cosmic Variance. […]
Wish I could be closer to the action!
the cern web cast is bad, if you want to real watch it enter this sites from cern of the machinary realtime information:
-the main one- http://pcatdwww.cern.ch/atlas-point1/dcs/status_pages.html
-all this ones are from atlas center, you have to look for more info on other sites
how many hours until it starts?
Sean,
Thanks and I tried to read more. I am buried by the mass of information on the mass of atoms and the origin of mass. Reading again, it seems 70/more years ago, it was known that majority of mass of matter came from the nuclei of atoms ( protons and neutrons). Since protons and neutrons comprise quarks and gluons, most of the mass is from quarks and gluons. Then it is said that 99% of the mass of quarks come from mutual attraction force between quarks in nuclei and only 1% is attributed to the quarks mass. That mutual attraction force is like 15 tons.
A bit elusive to me, is that Higgs boson is supposed to tell us the origin of mass. How the theory does that I cannot get a handle on. Yet at the same time, Large Hadron Collider could show there is a higgs boson that gives mass or that it is something else that gives mass. If Higgs boson does that job, then the decades old standard model of particle physics is intact and verified. If it is not Higgs boson that gives mass, then everything is up for grab again. New theory of origin of mass.
As a lay person, the gap between para 1 and para 2, eludes me. Why do we need Higgs boson to give other particles mass? Isn’t it already shown 70+ years ago that particles have mass, whether it is small mass of 0.05% for electrons and 99% for nuclei, and whether the mass of quarks are 99% from attractive force and 1% from mass of quark.
An analogy I saw on video is that Higgs boson is like a prof walking through a field where his students are. If they like him and want to ask him questions, then they crowd round him and slow down his crossing the field. If they do not like him or have no questions for him, he crosses the field quickly. How this analogy explains the origin of mass beats me.
( http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/the-origin-of-mass/
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2210/stories/20050520005201100.htm
[…] The event is being liveblogged over at Cosmicvariance. […]
Hi folks .
It seems to be great experiance. N way hope we will get some mindblowing results..
I’m sorry if I sound like a fear-mongering crackpot, but the more I read, the less convinced I am that the likelihood of a catastrophic event caused by the LHC in the coming months is infinitesimal. From what I’ve read the chance that mini-blackholes will be formed is small, but significant; Sean estimates it at 0.1%.
Before you jump on me, yes, I know about Hawking radiation, and I know that if Hawking’s proposal is correct the mini-blackholes will evaporate into non-existence. If it’s correct. Isn’t it possible that Hawking is wrong and that this radiation doesn’t exist? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it true that there is no or little evidence for Hawking radiation?
Let’s say that the likelihood that Hawking radiation doesn’t really exist is 0.01%. This means there’s a 0.0001% that permanent blackholes will form on Earth. That’s not a very high likelihood, but isn’t it high enough to warrant delaying these experiments until we have better empirical reasons to believe in Hawking radiation?
[…] about it all over the blogosphere and the internet at large. I recommend that you check here for Cosmic Variance’s liveblog, and the CERN website for information on the startup, as well […]
*sigh* just think what we could be learning now if the SSC had been funded. 🙁
Janus, everyone: Just take a relaxing deep breath and focus on cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are contiunally bombarding the Earth and can have even more energy than the LHC and would have destroyed the universe long ago if these pesky blackholes were actually a problem.
Of course JoAnne is right. There’s nothing the LHC is doing that the universe doesn’t do all the time.
Well another Journey
And the Lord said let there be light !
Any one have any data , Has it begun
Any word? The webcast isn’t working for me, Did they blow up? lol