LHC Prepares Marathon Higgs Hunt 101
gbrumfiel writes "Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider are preparing to run the collider until the end of 2012 in the hopes of finding the Higgs particle, part of the mechanism that endows other particles with mass. The machine was originally supposed to stop in 2011 for a year long upgrade, but scientists now think they can find the Higgs if they run for longer. 'If we stop the machine with 3,000 people apiece in the experiments waiting for data, there is no way we could get home at night without having slashed tyres on our cars,' says Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's director for research and computing."
Re:slashed tires? (Score:3, Informative)
Not paining a very good picture of their community there, is he?
Work on your humor detector. Ask Penny for help.
Right back at ya. That was a joke.
Also, did anyone else read his name as "Silvio Berlusconi?" Seems like a misspelled version, or something...
Not if you're Italian or speak Italian. But it's always like that, if you're not familiar with some class of objects, it's difficult to tell apart the sub-classes (as in "for Asians all Europeans look alike" and vice versa).
I happen to speak Italian, and I grew up watching Italian TV. So yeah, take your haughty tone and get off my lawn.
Re:Gee, why cooperate when you can be redundant? (Score:4, Informative)
So, the first half of your discussion is a great explanation of why the guys running those projects don't want to cooperate. It has nothing to do with why those of us paying the bill shouldn't force them to do so anyway.
If the past century of the so called communist countries has taught us anything, it's that real people don't work that way. Results of forced co-operation can't match results of real competition, even if co-operation theoretically has twice the resources. There are things you just can't force.
Not to mention, work is shared, by sharing the results. Established results of others may be verified, but they're not done "from the scratch". Instead new research is done based on previous shared results of everybody.