The Large Hadron Collider has been put out of action and won’t be back up for a couple of months.
Could it possibly be a coincidence when Europe’s two largest underground tunnely things go wrong due to heat? I suspect it’s the revenge of the irritated moles.
Or possibly the LHC just got embarrassed with all that rubbish about the world coming to an end, and had a hot flush… actually all that twaddle did mean the LHC got a lot more talking about in public than pretty well any experiment ever. Could it all be a cunning plan from the publicists at CERN? We have a right to know.
PS – I see from the BBC article that the superconducting magnets have to be ‘supercooled to 1.9 kelvin above absolute zero’ – that will be 1.9 kelvin, then.
That’s what happens when you try to run Eurostar trains via CERN.
So basically, it was like buying an extremely expensive car, which gets terrible gas mileage, and which only presenters on Top Gear can drive, and then only if all the weather and celestial conditions are perfect, and if they stay on the smooth track.
birth pangs. remember last fall when, what, a monstrous magnet fell off the side of the accelerator? i’d give it a good two years before anything useful emerges from the LHC.
I agree with Robert: give the LHC a break – it’s a ferociously complicated piece of kit and this snafu is no surprise. But don’t let Jeremy Clarkson anywhere near the thing!
{channels Clarkson} “It’s the best hadron collider here, and you’ve broken it.” {/channels Clarkson}
I can’t wait to see what happens when they give it to the Stig.
I can’t wait to see what happens when they give it to the Stig.
Sorry, didn’t mean to do that twice (do that twice) – but NN is so BLOODY SLOW today, I hit the submit button twice.