Life and Work On the LHC At CERN 81
An anonymous reader sends in a CNet Crave interview with a working physicist at CERN. The interview is full of detail about what it's like to work in this geek paradise (if a bit dumbed-down for an audience assumed not very technical). Dr. Paul Jackson, a particle physicist working on the LHC's Atlas experiment, says there's no chance of black holes wiping us out, and that the time travel speculation is bunkum. He is 100% convinced that they will find the Higgs boson. The scientists there favor Macs, while computers in the control room are Linux-based. "What would happen if you were standing in front of the beam? You would die. It would be a pretty spectacular death, and you wouldn't know a lot about it. ... It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body."
mythbusters have to test the 87kg of TNT part now (Score:5, Funny)
"It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body." jamie wants big boom
A Modest Proposal (Score:4, Funny)
What would happen if you were standing in front of the beam? You would die. It would be a pretty spectacular death, and you wouldn't know a lot about it. ... It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body.
So you're saying it'd be pretty painless? You could revolutionize flawed processes we have in the United States [latimes.com] by providing an alternative that may have a more expensive start up cost but would solve budget problems by providing needed services for both our prison system and science research at the same time. I mean if we ignore the ethical problems with televised executions, the costs of an LHC could be mitigated by commercial segments ...
Working physicist (Score:5, Funny)
Look, kids! A real life working physicist. He's got a job that doesn't involve waiting for an internship to open up at a University.
Re:Higgs boson (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder if they drink much tea there...
Tom...
Sort of like .... (Score:3, Funny)
It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body.
.... Mexican food.