adam_d

>Dark energy is known to make up 70% of the mass-energy of the universe, whereas black holes are a mere fraction of the ordinary matter, which constitutes less than 5% of the universe.

Is there some cosmological constraint that says dark energy compressed into a small volume would exhibit gravitational pull and therefore contribute to our measurements of black hole masses? If not then it feels like this is a weak counterargument that makes a pretty big assumption that dark energy must have the same mass-energy equivalence behaviour as regular energy from a general relativity perspective. If black holes somehow are the origin of dark energy, then surely this is driven by physics at energies far beyond our understanding from either particle physics or cosmology. In that case aren't basically all bets off in terms of what you'd expect to observe in terms of apparent black hole masses?

I worked on the ATLAS experiment for 6 years. The article gives a reasonable description of the management structure and the unique upsides of that way of working. However it mostly skipped over the negative aspects.

Possibly due to the described desire for consensus, I found the organisation to be incredibly bureaucratic with incredibly lengthy processes. Releasing a paper usually involved around a dozen rounds of review with various groups, often arguing for days about linguistic style more than Physics content.

The lack of clear top-down control makes resource allocation very challenging. There were frequent complaints that Higgs analyses had too much manpower while less "sexy" tasks were chronically understaffed.

The lack of clear assignment of responsibilities also leads to lots of nasty internal politics between institutes. Especially the Higgs analysis where people were eternally engaged in attempts to land grab so they could claim responsibility for bits of the eventual discovery.

Overall, I enjoyed working there a lot. It is a unique structure and the sense of teamwork and lack of hierarchy is very nice. But this article is a bit of a whitewash. I don't think it should be lauded as some incredible model, it has at least as many problems as any other organisation of its size.

Interesting! But these aren't the first sounds I've heard from the LHC. They're at least predated by this:

http://lhc-collimation-project.web.cern.ch/lhc-collimation-p...

These are recordings of the noise made when a beam is thrown away at the end of a run. They're fairly terrifying...