I have been following the LHC failure stories with some amusement. I particularly like the Many Worlds version that uses its failures to ‘prove’ Fermi’s Paradox – they ain’t here because they don’t exist because any universe with intelligences capable of making their LHC equivalent work collapsed. We are here so we are the only ones inhabiting this version of the Universe in which our LHC consistently fails. It is also falsifiable – if ‘they’ actually show up, or if we finally get ours to work and do not vanish up our own fundamentals. Of course any others in our particular universe may also be suffering consistent failures, so it is not really a proof other than by unlikeliness.

The LHC is I believe the most complex machine ever built on our planet. With many parts subject to extreme temperature and pressure stresses. The MTBF required for it to stay operational long enough to actually get any results must place extreme reliability requirements on those parts, perhaps more so than everybody involved has experience meeting. Although I have to say, the ASR 33 showed me that lots of moving parts per se can be reliably built albeit on a relatively miniscule scale.

I was born with the Transistor, and have had the great fortune to live in this era of exponential growth in big boys’ toys. And it never lets up. Except for Congress’ inability to see value in funding basic research or space to any serious level, or the short-term profit motive destroying long-established treasures like Bell Labs . Waiting to see Obama’s words come to pass.

See this essay: The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate , New York times, 10.12.2009

“Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.”

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html

Ron: “Hawking held the job for 30 years, but stepped down in September following his 67th birthday, in accordance with a university rule”. So not a casualty of anything but advancing age and bureaucracy.