Princeton Student Finds Bug In LHC Experiment 243
An anonymous reader writes "A Princeton senior has found a bug in the hardware design for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the hardware used to record and capture events in the LHC, she discovered errors that were leading to the appearances of double images because of particle streams known as jets. 'Xiaohang Quan '09 was working on her senior thesis when she found a miscalculation in the hardware of the world's largest particle accelerator. Quan, a physics concentrator, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last week with physics professors Christopher Tully GS '98, Jim Olsen and Daniel Marlow for the annual meeting of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). This year, however, they also came to discuss Quan's discovery with the designers of the hardware for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which, as part of the Large Hadron Collider, has the potential to revolutionize particle physics.'"
Re:This is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
Smart people think of ways to understand the world better, other smart people review it, find errors and discuss their finding with other scientists.
Absolutely. I'd be curious to know whether anything like this has ever happened in the world of Intelligent Design or any other theological science disciplines. "Regent University Senior find new method by which God created the universe!"
Re:This is awesome (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know about ID, but if you want a cleric and a scientist, try St. Albert the Great [newadvent.org]
Before my last move I attended a Catholic church named after him. The quote up on the wall was 'Use all the wisdom of man to delve the mysteries of God'
I expect he would be really excited about the LHC if he was alive today.
Re:This is awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely. I'd be curious to know whether anything like this has ever happened in the world of Intelligent Design or any other theological science disciplines. "Regent University Senior find new method by which God created the universe!"
Actually ancient Indian spiritual literature is filled with accounts of various spiritual leaders debating each other. Often times, if one lost the debate they'd have to study under their victor. It was during this era that one of the world's great international universities, Nalanda [wikipedia.org], was created. Later it was burned to the ground by invading Muslims.
Re:Eliminate bugs BEFORE the experiment: +1, Helpf (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that there's already black holes slowly destroying THE UNIVERSE. They're going to the whole thing eventually; there's a giant one busily destroying THE GALAXY right now. Maybe you're more concerned with the microscopically small part of THE UNIVERSE that is necessary to sustain your own life?
Yours in Pedantry,
Ekhben
Re:This is awesome (Score:1, Interesting)
I know (secondhand) of a case where a Nobelist basically told a postdoc of his: 'If you don't choose to take a second postdoc with my group, I will make sure that you never work in this field again.'
Please, have no illusions about the purity of science. If you become very closely involved in any human field of endeavor, you will find soon enough that many of its participants suffer from bitterness, jealousy, paranoia, perceived personal slights, ethical lapses, and so on. This is human nature, and scientists are not immune.
And then there is the well known adage that academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics precisely because the stakes are so small.
Re:A concentrator! (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not arrogance. There's a group of ~100s of people without any formal CS or even programming training who are writing software that I wouldn't be surprised if it hit a couple million LoC. There are some people who aren't physicists who are doing the 'core' work, and that stuff is good, but as someone who has to actually work with it, the rest of it is a giant PAIN to use.
I could go on all day about it, but CMSSW _is_ really rough around the edges, and it _is_ at least partially due to the fact that the people who are writing the code don't know a single thing of C++ outside of the one class they took in college. A lot of the dudes are amazing physicists who are suddenly tasked with building a part of a retardedly complicated program. Sure, bugs happen anywhere, but I'd argue (and say that it's not arrogant to say) that there's a lot more in that situation than if they actually understood what they were writing.
Re:A concentrator! (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a way for experienced coders to volunteer to help?
Re:A concentrator! (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that Physics is probably the hardest of the Sciences (unless you class Math as a science rather than as it's own area of study). I also agree physicists are almost certainly intelligent enough to learn to be great programmers.
The problem is that a lot of physicists I've met don't want to be programmers or don't have time to learn to be good programmers on top of everything else. They want to use computers to help them solve problems but they don't want the hassle of dealing with memory allocation and all that.
Just as many great physicists have required the assistance of great mathematicians through the years, I think the dawn of computing does bring a place for computer scientists to work alongside physicists.
It's also worth pointing out it's not just about writing effective code, it's about writing zero/low defect code, efficient code, possibly even maintainable and reusable code. A physicist may be able to learn what's needed to solve his problem, but if his problem is one that with his solution may take weeks on the university computing cluster then it makes much more sense for him to work with a computer scientist who may be able to tweak/re-write his program to solve it in days or even hours instead.
Computer scientists are important to science not because they can necessarily contribute directly to science itself, but because they have invested the time, likely years and years into learning how to use computers in the best way possible, sure a physicist can learn to use and manipulate them, but there's no way on top of their own discipline they can learn the ins and outs a computer scientist does.
Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, Physicists, all have their place and all augment each other well, none are as effective alone as they could be with others. Even Steven Hawking, arguably our finest living physicist has always had (even before he became so severely disabled) to work with the great mathematicians are Cambridge and computer scientists.