One of the Coolest Places In the Universe

phantomflanflinger writes "The Cern Laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider, is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe. According to news.bbc.co.uk, the Large Hadron Collider is entering the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) — colder than deep space. The LHC aims to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang and continue the search for the Higgs boson."

Comments

Re:!news

[Gromius]

and was that Bose-Einstein condenstate 27km long? This is news because its a huge massive object cooled down to 1.9K.

Re:Another example of useless science journalism

[shma]

I agree, the scale is something impressive. And certainly the scaling issues could make for an interesting and informative article. Or maybe not. Maybe it's one of the easiest of the many challenges they faced when building this thing (This is the cue for any slashdotters working on the project to chime in and educate us). The article certainly has little to say about the engineering challenges. But look at the headline and lede of the article:

Cern lab goes 'colder than space'
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

A vast physics experiment built in a tunnel below the French-Swiss border is fast becoming one of the coolest places in the Universe.

Now tell me, what do you think a reader without any scientific knowledge will take away from this article, that the scale of the cooling is what makes it challenging, or the temperature itself? That 1.9 K is an exotically low temperature for physics experiments, or that it's mundane? This is what bothers me about most science journalism. The misleading statements and lack of information.

Come to think of it, that's the problem with most non-science journalism too.