Make it or Break it time
Feb. 27th, 2007 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIn half an hour, CMS will begin lowering the Yoke Barrel 0 segment down into the pit at CERN and into position. The entire operations team is probably crapping bowling balls at this point.
To give you an idea of what's involved, this piece took essentially ten years to design and build, and represents millions of dollars of hardware and manpower at work. This particular chunk weighs 2,000 tons, more than eight Statue of Libertys put together, and will have to be winched down 100 meters, a process that will take over ten hours. If even one cable twitches or snaps, that's ten years of work, millions of taxpayer dollars, and a lot of thesis projects, gone down the drain. It's half the future of particle physics, dangling on the end of a taut cable in midair, in the hopes that physics really does work and the entire thing won't just plunge to the floor below.
I don't plan to watch and chew my fingernails. I have a backup thesis after all. But it feels odd to sit here, knowing that on the other side of the world, the cumulation of some people's lives is beginning the most dangerous part of its journey. Hopefully, when next I check, it will be firmly in place.
Else I get a lot of vacation days ahead of me.
Just for reference, here's the smaller YE+3 segment being lowered. It only weighs 400 tons.
The walkways and the stairs give a good idea of its size.
The Forward Hadron Calorimeters arriving in the collision hall:
Close up view of the tracker to give an idea of the size:
To give you an idea of what's involved, this piece took essentially ten years to design and build, and represents millions of dollars of hardware and manpower at work. This particular chunk weighs 2,000 tons, more than eight Statue of Libertys put together, and will have to be winched down 100 meters, a process that will take over ten hours. If even one cable twitches or snaps, that's ten years of work, millions of taxpayer dollars, and a lot of thesis projects, gone down the drain. It's half the future of particle physics, dangling on the end of a taut cable in midair, in the hopes that physics really does work and the entire thing won't just plunge to the floor below.
I don't plan to watch and chew my fingernails. I have a backup thesis after all. But it feels odd to sit here, knowing that on the other side of the world, the cumulation of some people's lives is beginning the most dangerous part of its journey. Hopefully, when next I check, it will be firmly in place.
Else I get a lot of vacation days ahead of me.
Just for reference, here's the smaller YE+3 segment being lowered. It only weighs 400 tons.
The walkways and the stairs give a good idea of its size.
The Forward Hadron Calorimeters arriving in the collision hall:
Close up view of the tracker to give an idea of the size:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 09:18 am (UTC)Seriously, though, best of luck to those at CERN.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-28 02:42 pm (UTC)All I know is that we probably have better tracking, and certainly have better electromagnetic calorimetry. ATLAS most definitely has a better hadron calorimeter. I'm not sure which is more important. We're both betting on different things.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-03-02 11:27 am (UTC)Um, in laymanese.