Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Various things that have been piling up in the “Bloggable” folder. But together they tell their own story.

Part of the stimulus package includes money for high-speed rail. That’s good — if the government is going to be spending piles of money in an attempt to kick-start the economy, it would be nice to get something of lasting value in return, and mass transportation connecting distant cities is certainly of lasting value. Of course opponents are playing politics with it, which is to be expected. And here is their fun strategy: to highlight on such proposed high-speed rail line, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and label it the “Sin Express.” Get it? Real Americans don’t travel between those two dens of iniquity, only shady reprobates who want to divert stimulus dollars from hard-working blue-collar Midwesterners who would never step foot inside a shiny Vegas casino.

Unfortunately, it’s not even true — there is no money set aside for high-speed rail between LA and Vegas, and it’s not listed as a high priority on the Federal Railroad Administration’s list of officially designated high-speed rail corridors. Which is too bad, as I’ve driven along several of those hypothetical routes, and the one between LA and Vegas is certainly one of the more useful places to plunk down some high-speed rail.

Read Jessica Valenti on “hook-up culture.” In case you don’t know what that is, it’s a catchphrase invented by cultural conservatives who would like you to believe that kids today are disrespecting America’s Puritan heritage by having sex with each other. And they may be right! I suspect that some kids are having sex with each other. Sex is fun. But it is also something to be careful about, with possible unintended consequences ranging from emotional pain to disease to unplanned pregnancies. So we might hope that responsible cultural conservatives would want to equip young men and women with the knowledge necessary to avoid those pitfalls while enjoying the fun parts of sex. But that agenda seems to be well-hidden under a campaign to shame people, under the theory that other people having sex is a dirty and disgusting thing.

You may have heard that Michael Phelps, former paragon of American purity and might and speediness in water, has been uncovered as a shocking moral degenerate. Apparently he intentionally inhaled the fumes from a slowly-burning psychoactive herb, funneled through some sort of device designed expressly for that purpose, while “chilling” with his “buds.” Now all of his recent success at the Beijing Olympics must be called into question — how do we know that his fantastic performances in competitive swimming weren’t artificially aided by “toking” on a “doobie” before hopping in the pool? Naturally, Phelps has been suspended from competition, stripped of lucrative sponsorship deals, and forced to wear a sackcloth and ashes while parading around the town square with a giant scarlet “M” hanging around his neck.

Here is the letter Michael Phelps should have written. If only.

This is Annette Obrestad from Norway, one of the best poker players in the world. She is also a young woman, and a great role model for girls in what has traditionally been a boy’s game. She burst on the scene when she was only 15 years old, winning online tournaments in Europe. At the age of 18 she proved that her prowess extended to live play, winning $2 million by taking first place at the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event.

But Obrestad can’t legally play poker for money in the United States. She’s too young, and will have to wait another year until she turns 21. You can join the army, or vote, or sign multi-million-dollar basketball contracts if you are 20 years old, but you can’t play poker for money. (Michael Phelps participated in the 2000 Olympics at the age of 15.) America is afraid of poker. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, smuggled through Congress in 2006, led many online poker sites to stop accepting money from U.S. players, no matter how old they are.

I’m not sure what it is that makes America so puritanical, compared to Western Europe. (It’s also substantially more religious, but the direction of the causal arrows is not clear.) Hopefully we can scold the country into taking a more grown-up attitude toward sex, drugs, gambling — maybe even, someday, rock and roll. A few more blog posts like this one should do it.

From ScienceDebate2008.com comes word that funding for science, particularly for NSF and the DOE Office of Science, was largely restored in the House-Senate conference. The relevant passage of the preliminary report is here:

Transform our Economy with Science and Technology:
To secure America’s role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America’s investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the marketplace. This will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.

Investing in Scientific Research (More than $15 Billion)
o Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering – which spurs discovery and innovation.
o Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences – areas crucial to our energy future.
o Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency in collaboration with industry.
o Provides $580 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
o Provides $8.5 billion for NIH, including expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease.
o Provides $1 billion for NASA, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research.
o Provides $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.

DOE Office of Science and NSF funds had been zeroed out in one version of the Senate measure proposed last week, and were set to $330 million and $1.2 billion respectively in the bill the Senate passed. This is a huge boost for our scientific infrastructure in this country, and will immediately create large numbers of jobs for a broad range of workers. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event: let’s spend the money wisely!

Our next challenge: the 2009 and 2010 budgets for science. We are still operating under a CR, and without an increase in funding, the national labs and universities will have to shed personnel. Stimulus money will not be used to directly fund scientists and engineers at the labs, or postdocs or graduate students at the universities. That money comes from the yearly budget. Obama has pledged to double funding for the physical sciences in 10 years. Let your congressfolk know you care about this!

After the devastating quench incident on September 19 of last year, resulting in the rupture of the cryogenic vessels within the LHC magnets , CERN has worked furiously to repair the damage, prevent any future similar failure, and get the LHC back to its commissioning program. Following a meeting of technical experts and the leadership in Chamonix, France last wee, the CERN Directorate has issued a press release with the new plan for LHC restart:

The CERN Management today confirmed the restart schedule for the Large Hadron Collider resulting from the recommendations from the Chamonix workshop. The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October. A short technical stop has also been foreseen over the Christmas period. The LHC will then run through to autumn next year, ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010. The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010.

This new schedule represents a delay of 6 weeks with respect to the previous schedule which foresaw LHC “cold at the beginning of July”. The cause of this delay is due to several factors such as implementation of a new enhanced protection system for the busbar and magnet splices, installation of new pressure relief valves to reduce the collateral damage in case of a repeat incident, application of more stringent safety constraints, and scheduling constraints associated with helium transfer and storage.

In Chamonix there was consensus among all the technical specialists that the new schedule is tight but realistic.

The enhanced protection system measures the electrical resistance in the cable joints (splices) and is much more sensitive than the system existing on 19 September.

The new pressure relief system has been designed in two phases. The first phase involves installation of relief valves on existing vacuum ports in the whole ring. Calculations have shown that in an incident similar to that of 19 September, the collateral damage (to the interconnects and super-insulation) would be minor with this first phase.

The second phase involves adding additional relief valves on all the dipole magnets and would guarantee minor collateral damage (to the interconnects and super-insulation) in all worst cases over the life of the LHC. One of the questions discussed in Chamonix was whether to warm up the whole LHC machine in 2009 so as to complete the installation of these new pressure relief valves or to perform these modifications on sectors that were warmed up for other reasons. The Management has decided for 2009 to install relief valves on the four sectors that were already foreseen to be warmed up. The dipoles in the remaining four sectors will be equipped in 2010.

That the delay would be a year, in total, was not unanticipated given the magnitude of the incident, and the good news here is that the root cause is now believed to be understood. The retrofit to the quench detection and pressure relief systems should prevent this from happening or causing such great damage in the future.

Hopefully this was the worst of the birth pangs of the LHC! With such a complex and enormous machine, however, it would be overly optimistic to hope that it will be the last.

The experiment I work on, CMS, is open now and in March we are going to remove the innermost detectors, the forward pixels, do minor repairs, and reinstall them by mid-April. We are taking advantage of the fact that so far, anyway, the detectors have not become radioactive from high intensity beam, after which any work on them will be far more difficult.

And, we are preparing to do the physics once we do get data. The extra year, though painful, gave us extra time to refine our approaches, and physics will emerge faster as a result, I believe.

The new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, addressed the national labs in an all-hands video transmission today. I was not there, but my colleague and friend Rob Roser at Fermilab was there, and sent me a very nice bulleted summary. So, you are getting this second hand, and people who were there can add nuances in the comments, but here goes:

• Energy is the defining issue of our time.
• Addressing the environment is the major reason Chu took on this job.
• These problems provide a tremendous opportunity for the DOE, but it comes with a burden: we can not fail.
• The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
• This was part of the message of the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report.
• The DOE should endeavor to replace the great industrial labs that no longer exist as they once did.
• The DOE will be the “go to” organization for a multitude of key problems — will depend on all labs to help.
• The DOE can quite literally “save the world” by developing a sound energy policy going forward, and invent new science that will provide new technologies.
• Our current use of energy not sustainable — have to move forward.
• We are facing something society has never been asked to do before: to deal with ominous problems with climate change. If half of the things climate science tells us are half true, we have a huge problem on our hands and the DOE has to work to provide those solutions.
• The Obama administration is creating a new Energy and Climate Change Council which will serve as a coordinating body including all stake holders in this arena. DOE is first and formost in this but Interior, Agriculture, Treasury and Defense etc. all play a role.
• The DOE is the science and technology “arm of energy”.
• There is a core of truly oustanding scientists at the national labs, and these labs have trained many successful scientists.
• The national labs are “crown jewels that the US doesn’t want to lose”.
• Restimulation of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.
• We can’t be completely overwhelmed by the short term economic woes; we need to still find a path to solve our long term problems. The DOE has to invent transformative technologies that will allow us to get to the next level of energy independence.
• Chu sees a lot of young and middle age scientists shifting careers to deal with energy, and the DOE is optimistic to capture the best and brightest to work on these issues.

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.

The US House unveiled an $825 billion, two-year stimulus plan today, crafted by the Obama transition team and House Democrats. There is a hefty amount for basic research in the sciences, totaling some $10 billion! My eyes are instantly drawn to the $1.9 billion directed to the DOE Office of Science, which funds my own field. It is hard to overstate how fantastic, and sorely needed, this is. Here is the relevant part of the plan summary:

TRANSFORMING OUR ECONOMY WITH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
We need to put scientists to work looking for the next great discovery, creating jobs in cutting-edge technologies and making smart investments that will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.

Broadband to Give Every Community Access to the Global Economy
• Wireless and Broadband Grants: $6 billion for broadband and wireless services in underserved areas to strengthen the economy and provide business and job opportunities in every section of America with benefits to e-commerce, education, and healthcare. For every dollar invested in broadband the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment.

Scientific Research
• National Science Foundation: $3 billion, including $2 billion for expanding employment opportunities in fundamental science and engineering to meet environmental challenges and to improve global economic competitiveness, $400 million to build major research facilities that perform cutting edge science, $300 million for major research equipment shared by institutions of higher education and other scientists, $200 million to repair and modernize science and engineering research facilities at the nation’s institutions of higher education and other science labs, and $100 million is also included to improve instruction in science, math and engineering.
• National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research: $2 billion, including $1.5 billion for expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease – NIH is currently able to fund less than 20% of approved applications – and $500 million to implement the repair and improvement strategic plan developed by the NIH for its campuses.
• University Research Facilities: $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants. The National Science Foundation estimates a maintenance backlog of $3.9 billion in biological science research space. Funds are awarded competitively.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: $462 million to enable CDC to complete its Buildings and Facilities Master Plan, as well as renovations and construction needs of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
• Department of Energy: $1.9 billion for basic research into the physical sciences including high-energy physics, nuclear physics, and fusion energy sciences and improvements to DOE laboratories and scientific facilities. $400 million is for the Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency.
• NASA: $600 million, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research, including Earth science research recommended by the National Academies, satellite sensors that measure solar radiation critical to understanding climate change, and a thermal infrared sensor to the Landsat Continuing Mapper necessary for water management, particularly in the western states; $150 million for research, development, and demonstration to improve aviation safety and Next Generation air traffic control (NextGen); and $50 million to repair NASA centers damaged by hurricanes and floods last year.
• Biomedical Advanced Research and Development, Pandemic Flu, and Cyber Security: $900 million to prepare for a pandemic influenza, support advanced development of medical countermeasures for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats, and for cyber security protections at HHS.
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellites and Sensors: $600 million for satellite development and acquisitions, including climate sensors and climate modeling.
• National Institute of Standards and Technology: $300 million for competitive construction grants for research science buildings at colleges, universities, and other research organizations and $100 million to coordinate research efforts of laboratories and national research facilities by setting interoperability standards for manufacturing.
• Agricultural Research Service: $209 million for agricultural research facilities across the country. ARS has a list of deferred maintenance work at facilities of roughly $315 million.
• U.S. Geological Survey: $200 million to repair and modernize U.S.G.S. science facilities and equipment, including improvements to laboratories, earthquake monitoring systems, and computing capacity.

Obviously it will be some weeks of Senate/House wrangling to arrive at a final plan, but my expectation is that something along these lines will become reality very soon…how the DOE divvies it up will be an interesting exercise, I imagine. But it’s the kind of problem we want.

I have said it before and I will say it again – if we are going to mortgage our children’s futures, mortgage it on this. And better health care. And infrastructure. Oh, and education, public housing, energy…hmmm. I can see that $825 billion may be about right.

CERN has issued a press release detailing the extent of the damage from the September 19 incident, the plans for retrofitting the magnets to ensure it does not happen again, and a new schedule. The skinny: the machine should be back up and running in July of next year, resuming the commissioning that was underway when the incident occurred. There are now some impressive photos of the damaged components, showing what tens of megajoules of energy can accomplish in a few seconds.

Six tons of helium was released in the incident, and is presumably gone into outer space now, since at atmospheric temperatures the helium atoms readily attain escape velocity. (Helium is not a renewable resource, per se, though it is continually being produced within the earth from radioactive decay.)

But what caused the incident to begin with? Here is a quote from a talk by Robert Aymar, the outgoing CERN Director General:

On 19 September 2008 morning, the current was being ramped up to 9.3 kA in the main dipole circuit at the nominal rate of 10 A/s, when at a value of 8.7 kA, a resistive zone developed in the electrical bus in the region between dipole C24 and quadrupole Q24. No resistive voltage appeared on the dipoles of the circuit, so that the quench of any magnet can be excluded as initial event. In less than 1s, when the resistive voltage had grown to 1 V and the power converter, unable to maintain the current ramp, tripped off, the energy discharge switch opened, inserting dump resistors in the circuit to produce a fast power abort. In this sequence of events, the quench detection, power converter and energy discharge systems behaved as expected.

Since the interconnect bus subsequently vaporized, it has been difficult to tell exactly what triggered the event. The retrofits to the magnets will improve the quench detection and helium pressure relief systems, but I’ve not heard what, if anything, CERN will do to prevent other interconnects from “developing resistive zones.” Hence the question: will it happen again? It is clear that the new systems will help prevent serious damage to the machine, but there are thousands of these interconnects, so…

Anyway, quite a number of magnets have been removed from the tunnel and are being refurbished and will be reinstalled in the coming months. The experiment I work on, CMS, is in the “open” state now with the end caps pulled back, allowing access to the inner detectors. Our team on the forward pixel detectors plans to remove and reinstall our detectors, making minor electrical and cooling repairs and modifications, starting in February. The photo of the detectors being installed last summer shows the beam pipe, the installation fixtures, and the detector half-cylinder going in, like a ship in a bottle.

Once more, from the top, this time with feeling!

As of my last post on the LHC, following the quench incident on Sept. 19, little was known about the cause of the incident nor the extent of the damage. In fact, so much liquid helium was released into the tunnel in the affected sector of the machine that it was too cold for people to enter until last week. A colleague of mine quoted the team who entered the sector as saying that when they got to the magnets that were affected, “it wasn’t a pretty sight”.

CERN has released a report today giving an initial summary of what happened and the extent of the damage, and indeed it turns out to have been quite serious: 24 of the long dipole magnets and 5 of the quadrupole magnets (which focus the beam) suffered serious mechanical damage when the liquid helium enclosure between two of the magnets ruptured, allowing helium into the vacuum jacket surrounding the enclosure. This led to a chain of events which resulted in an extreme overpressure in the vacuum jacket on a long chain of magnets, seriously damaging them. The forces were great enough to physically tear the magnet stands out of where they were bolted to the concrete floor.

Normally CERN shuts down accelerator operations every winter due to the high cost of electricity in the winter (Europeans mainly use electricity for home heating) and this was foreseen for December. Repairs to the damaged sector will proceed in parallel with the previously scheduled work during the shutdown. But clearly any hope of high energy colliding beams in 2008 was lost following this incident, and it looks likely to be months before the machine will turn on again. At that point, there is still a many-week period of commissioning before the machine can collide protons at high energies, probably 10 TeV initially.

But now the tough questions: what was the ultimate cause of this incident, and what can and must be done to prevent a similar occurrence in the future? The report concludes optimistically that improved quench detection systems and increased pressure relief devices will ensure safe powering of the machine. I take that to mean that they will do a retrofit on the entire 27 km accelerator. I guess we’ll see how long it really takes. The Director General’s statement accompanying the report only says the machine could be restarted “in 2009″…

Every time I hear it, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard: “nucular” instead of “nuclear”. It’s baffling where that locution comes from. I am afraid it really does bring the speaker down a notch in my estimation, on the intelligence scale, though I am usually able to get past it. Even in my field, where we use the word a lot, you hear the occasional “nucular”.

Recently it’s been in the news, with Sarah Palin being a nucular type. But she also likes “heckuva”, “doggone”, and “you betcha” and many more, despite their clear tendency to turn off her audience. Anyway, Palin’s problems go a lot deeper than that – I think Steven Pinker got it right in the New York Times op-ed section today.

There are, if you start to think about it, a ton of words that many people mispronounce, and it doesn’t cause one to necessarily cringe. Though, I have to say, some of the following ones do make me cringe now that I sensitized myself to it:

• “realtor” Somehow, a lot of people pronounce this as “ree-la-tor”. Perhaps it’s because a realtor handles real estate?
• “jewelry” This one comes out of some people’s mouths as “joo-ler-ee”.
• “February” Why do we need that first “r” anyway?
• “Wednesday” Okay, I have to admit no one at all bothers with the “d”…should they?

There are so many more…asterisk, espresso, et cetera. (Yes, people mispronounce that last one.)

Well, you get the idea. Language is ever-evolving, and, alas, common usage wins out in the end.

Well, no one said this would be easy…and it isn’t. The LHC has had its first major incident, the failure of one of the 1230 main superconducting dipole magnets. This was apparently due to a “quench” in which the magnet goes rapidly from the superconducting to the normal conducting state, which then means that the tremendous electric current in the magnet suddenly starts heating it up, causing huge internal mechanical stresses. As pointed out elsewhere, quenches are expected to happen quite often in the LHC. The magnets are designed to withstand these forces, in principle, and were tested extensively. What happened here is not clear yet, and I have not seen an official statement from CERN. Probably best to wait for that.

As for the effect on the LHC commissioning, to repair or replace the magnet requires warming up the relevant sector, then cooling back down after the repair. This takes several weeks (I am being deliberately vague here) and in the mean time, no tests with beam are possible.

This is a setback, for sure! People were getting quite excited about the possibility that the LHC could collide protons at high energy, 10 TeV in the center of mass, by late October or November, before shutting down for the winter in December. Could this still happen? My guess is that it is unlikely given this failure, but we’ll know for sure soon. Stay tuned…

LHC First Beam Day ended with a bang last night in the SF Bay Area – swissnex, an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, threw a party! Around 200 folks were there, with physcisists from all around the area. The champagne flowed, the food never ran out (a minor miracle given an entire roomful of physcists) and the consulate even gave out free bags of stuff. What more could you ask for? It was great to celebrate with colleagues and let our hair down.

Wired magazine was there and commemorated the event by interviewing folks about their LHC expectations:

Well, I did say the champagne flowed…. and we were all giddy in our excitement about the LHC! A truly excellent time was had by all.