CERN's LHC Powers Down For Two Years 71
An anonymous reader writes "Excitement and the media surrounded the Higgs boson particle for weeks when it was discovered in part by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But now, the collider that makes its home with CERN, the famed international organizational that operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory, is powering down. The Higgs boson particle was first discovered by the LHC in 2012. The particle, essentially, interacts with everything that has mass as the objects interact with the all-powerful Higgs field, a concept which, in theory, occupies the entire universe." We covered the repair announcement last month.
TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Repairs...right... (Score:5, Funny)
More like the UN got a death threat from the intergalactic Splugorthian empire to cease with our efforts to open an unregulated worm hole. It was ALIENS I tell you!
TWO YEARS?! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Why print out the collider when you can print out the hadrons themselves?
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't these people realize we're in the 3D printing epoch now? Can they just print out a new LHC in less than two years?
Well, yes but from whose point of view? Remember all those black holes that that LHC was supposed to create? Everyone was afraid they were going to destroy the world. That didn't happen but they did create a bit of a time dilation issue. For the gang working at the collider, they're just shutting down for a couple of weekends to do a little sweeping up. But for the rest of us on the outside, it's two years.
Re:TWO years?? (Score:5, Funny)
I know at least 3 different hippie/steampunk-esque people that have never as much as put a new handle on a kitchen drawer, but yet have a $2000 bag of parts sitting on their kitchen tables that, supposedly, once complete, will be a 3D printer. Granted, those bags have been sitting there for months, even years in one case, but they are determined it will get put together and eventually help them build their straw bail houses. Every single one of them is convinced that the past 10,000 years worth of engineering mankind has been involved in was misguided, wrong and wasteful. They, with their Nikola Tesla biographies in hand, will revolutionize the world with their geodesic domes and modern day dirigibles. They also hunt ghosts on the weekends. Interesting times.
Re:Ruh Roh (Score:4, Funny)
Let's just say that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the second hand on the Doomsday clock back by 5.39106E-44 seconds while the LHC is out of service.
Re:Understandable but still frustrating (Score:5, Funny)
Trust me, no one will be idle.
Trust me. I will be.
Re:TWO YEARS?! (Score:4, Funny)
It serves them right for going straight after the large hadrons. They should have practiced with small or medium hadrons first.