LHC in the House!

[Squid]

Ladies and Gentlemen! It's Science Tuesday and life is smashing....

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could restart as early as this weekend after more than a year of repairs.

"The LHC was first switched on in 2008, but had to be shut down when a faulty electrical connection caused one tonne of helium to leak into the tunnel. "

One TON(NE) of helium??? I have visions of squeaky-voiced physicists chasing each other around with balloons. But that's probably not how it went down.

[Liesbeth]

with so much helium things probably didn't go down, but up?

[No You Are]

So is it fixed enough to destroy the world now?

[Moni]

http://twitter.com/lhcstatus: #LHC 13:22:57: Stable beams!

"It’s a great day to be a particle physicist!"
Aww nerds. :)

[Squid]

Good God. I've been following asteroid watch and never thought to follow the LHC? How RUDE.

I feel CERNtastic! This is AWESOME! And the BBC loves to illustrate things !!!

[Moni]

"CERNtastic" might just be my new favorite word!
Speaking of which, CERN-poster boy Dr. Brian Cox stated that "...a cup of black coffee has about 10^23 electron Volts of energy - that's 3 kcalories. LHC at the moment is 7 x 10^12 eV. That means that each LHC collision has 10,000,000,000 times less energy than a cup of black coffee - tell that to the black hole nobbers :)"

I guess that means that Starbucks has a bigger chance of destroying the world than the LHC. Who knew!

[grant]

That BBC electron volt image sure is purty....

You have brought me joy.

[Liesbeth]

That twitter feed is amazing, a sparse list of comment devoid of any clutter.
The CERN website looks boring as hell though, they don't believe in making science look sexy, do they?

sorry about not paying more attention to the actual news, I get easily distracted when I can't see it, smell it or apply it in daily life.

[Squid]

It doesn't look sexy because we're meant to do like the Einsteins and imagine myriad nanouniverses between our ears!

And also, sadly, the REALLY sexy thing would've been to tour the place (I wonder if they would let you ride one of the bikes that they used to tool back and forth!) inside out - but I understand that now that it's active, tours cover limited ground. Something about scrillions of euros worth of extremely delicate equipment. Or something.

[Liesbeth]

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future
this hilarious story has too many great lines to quote, but my current favourite is "Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age".

[sour29]

That article made me ACTUALLY lol, and I don't do that frequently. Absolutely brilliant, and I wish it wasn't published on Thursday. :(

[Squid]

Ladies and Gentleman, the awesome:
Particle Pings: Sounds Of The Large Hadron Collider.

Yay!

[grant]

Aw, yeah.

[Squid]

In some not-so-happy LHC related news, it appears that the Tevatron at Fermilab is closing. It's my understanding that much learned in the Tevatron was used at CERN.

:(

[grant]

Weren't they expecting this? I know I read about accelerators closing right about when the LHC was nearing completion.

[Squid]

Yeah, I think you're right Grant. And it appears that what Tevatron doesn't finish up, LHC will take over?

On that note: POTENTIALLY NEW STUFF !!

[grant]

Whee!

I feel so fundamentally different. More forceful....