Being sucked at the speed of light in a head-on, face-first collision with every speck of matter on Earth will have to wait: a large helium leak on Friday has shut down the LHC (which I guess we’re now supposed to call “Halo”) for two months… two months not required to fix the leak, but to warm up the chamber from absolute zero to repairman-tolerable working conditions.
LHC helium leak will shut collider down for two months [Scientific American Blog]
Halo? Now I fear for the end of the world. Damn that Bungie…
With this thing being 100 meters underground and all, one wonders what the impact of any significant tectonic movement could be on such an obviously sensitive piece of equipment.
Marcel #2.
I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference if it was 1 foot deep or 100m or even a couple of Km. Being that particle physicists make rocket scientists look like morons, I would hope that somebody did some checking before they mapped out the ring.
If after spending all this money and effort, the LHC got cracked in half by a tremor, well that would be embarrassing!
Yah! Two more months that pickup line works.
Gah! Not Absolute Zero. They get it very close to Absolute Zero (within a few degrees). Theoretically Absolute Zero is impossible.
Smart-ass filter is on:
Actually Agies (#5) absolute zero is totally theoretically possible! I ran the proof back in grade eleven chemistry like everyone else, except I used a slide-rule.
You should have said: Absolute zero is practically impossible… ;{)
Smart-ass filter is off.
Wimps.
The view of the event horizon will be FANTASTIC!!!
Nah – it warms up fairly quickly, the two months is mostly for cooling it down again. See Cern sources.
They probably boosted the anti-mass spectrometer to 110 percent. Probably not a problem… probably.