Aarin Institute of Technology

Did anyone catch a few slip-ups during second beam circulation when they lost traces of protons for a second (assuming you watched a live webcast)? Taking it in consideration, I'm not sure whether CERN is technically competent to detect bosons if such errors continue to happen.

@SolarCat: Nothing will happen. Possibility of a black hole being produced during collisions is extremely low, and even if it happens, Hawking radiation will probably cause it to die out.

The negative thing is that the experiment can take up to 15 years, meaning that Peter Higgs will die before getting the Noble Prize. On the other side, I don't want Hawking getting one although he's my fave, since that cries out for generation of black holes at LHC.

Anyways, regarding the nuclear weapon, it's not relevant whether they'd use it or not. We've had weapons for mass destruction for about seventy years, so yes, we've hit the final bottom. The problem is, if certain country takes advantage and produces something harmful out of this, that practically gives it complete immunity and predominance, which would shatter the world; and that's something that poses the danger even if weapon never gets used.

Don't worry, Xenosari. They'll be able to detect bosons; I've read that they need to figure out what they're doing with the thing before they stop making mistakes like that. It's supposed to be about two years before that point is reached.

Now that the hackers hit LHC, I don't think they're capable of anything. If they can't protect one of their most important detectors, then they're a waste of time. And why in the world would someone want to deface data files in the middle of a risky experiment? No matter whether they wanted to stop it or not, breaking into systems in such a bad time is merely idiotic and dangerous, though, it seems that those GST hackers were mocking CREN technicians rather than trying to abort operations, which is like a constructive criticism. Well, I hope they actually have brains along with skills, so that they won't repeat similar things once collisions start. But even so, who knows what's behind this all.

Wow. I looked up what this whole "hackers" thing refers to and I've actually been surprised. Cynicism aside, that was a big surprise. See, I figured hackers would be a little smarter than to think that they're doing something by hacking into a DETECTOR. Ok, they'd be screwing up the experiment, but they wouldn't be stopping anything other than getting RESULTS from said experiment (since oh it's not getting stopped), so why would they pull that crap? If anything, it looks like CERN underestimated what kind of irrational morons people can be...*grumble grumble* I so wish I had a personal paramilitary force to give some..."education" to the group that did the hacking...

Just so this post is a little less angry and there's some fun around, go check out http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos for...well, it's incomplete right now in certain ways (as in they need to update some videos with more info), but they have a video for each element on the Periodic Table and one (117) that's not there yet *cough*

May as well make the first post since this came back:

2^37,156,667 - 1 (with 11,185,272 digits) and 2^43,112,609 - 1 (with 12,978,189 digits) are both prime. The guy who found the latter hit it about two weeks after the guy who hit the former and so the guy with the bigger number will be getting the $50,000 out of the $100,000 prize for the first person to prove primality of a 10 million-digit number. Sucks to be the second guy with his whole getting nothing...

Now I have to ask myself: do I keep hunting for primes where I'm at or go for my half of the $150,000 prize for the first 100 million-digit prime...

I'm a bit late with the reply but anyways... Yes, even if they hacked all six detectors, they still wouldn't be able to affect an actual course of the experiment. Also, press came up with the story that they just wanted to demonstrate that CERN security system is terrible; but everyone is aware that any system is hackable, so this entire story seems a bit odd. I think they were rather hired by some third party with completely ulterior motives.

What they need is a real education. "We are 2600 - dont mess with us." You'd at least expect a proper punctuation from someone who can hack one of the world's largest systems.

As for the math thing, it's funny that you get prize for every single discovery, and in my country, you can even discover the Higgs boson, and you won't get anything.

Well, you could have gotten a prize for this one. The "record prime" prize is something that's privately funded, so if you want to go for the next prize by putting your system toward testing 100 million-digit Mersenne numbers for primality, well, hope you have a quad-core (since it'll take forever) and have fun. Trust me, if it weren't for the private source being interested in prime numbers, there'd be no prizes for this.

*edit* wait, no, the private source is interested in distributed computing and sees this project as a way to get people more into it. Either way.

Anyone heard the bad news? Due to that helium leak incident at LHC, collisions are probably going to take place in the spring of 2009. This is becoming ridiculous. They can't do anything properly - first the hack attack, now this, what's next?

You really can't blame them for the hack attack, but this one...ugh. For all we know, the Tevatron could finish their experiment and find the Higgs boson before things really get going over there...

...one more reason I wish the US government hadn't figured that $40 billion or whatever was too much to spend on the collider they were working on in Texas. We'd have had all of this years ago and it'd have cost well below 1/10 of what they're trying to do right now...

Since we don't have anything to talk about LHC-related thanks to the helium thing...and I haven't been getting in my science mags lately (they're all back at home while I'm at college)...what sort of areas are you all waiting to get information on? There are a bunch of things I really want to hear progress on...a list of the more interesting ones:

1) The creation of superheavy synthetic elements. I know that some labs are trying to synthesize element 120; either way, it still peeves me that 117 is a hole in the Periodic Table at the moment.

2) Very large buildings: I'm interested in seeing how the Burj Dubai turns out and I've heard that some people have gotten the crazy idea that the Ryugyong Hotel might be worth investing in. Of course, then there are all of the 600m/2000ft+ buildings that people are considering putting together right now...and all the things like "farm skyscrapers" (yes, 30+ stories of...farmland in the middle of a city) and other reimaginings for the whole point of a skyscraper...