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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."
I find it ironic or at least counter-intuitive that it's necessary to create one of the coldest spaces to look for particles that flourished when things were at their hottest. It makes sense once explained, but I doubt Joe Sixpack would stick around long enough to hear it, let alone grasp it. They just think this thing is going to make a black hole that eats the planet.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
In the scifi show Lexx, Earth is a type 13 planet which will shrink to the size of a pea due to physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson_in_fiction
I agree, it's the scale of the cooldown that's impressive. In fact, when the LHC is running at full power, it will be drawing more power than the entire city of Geneva, and most of that power will go towards cooling.
I didn't mod the comment "Troll", and I don't consider it so. You cannot moderate and comment in the same thread - when you comment, your mods are cancelled.
As for burying it, how else in Europe are you going to build something 27 km across and dead level, with mounting points for thousands of tons of equipment? It is not below a mountain, it is below farmland. Anywhere reasonably flat in Europe is covered with towns and villages and criss-crossed with roads. And the flatness requirement is *exact*, so if the ground is only fairly flat, you will have to have bits in tunnels and/or on stilts anyway. On stilts is bad for carrying heavy loads. And you don't want your hypersensitive particle detectors triggered by cosmic radiation, so they will have to be heavily shielded anyway. Since the equipment needs to be well protected from accidents and weather for purely engineering reasons (big magnets, huge currents, super-cooling, vacuum). I could see problems with those magnets distorting every CRT-based television for hundreds of yards. The reason for burying it is purely for experimental purposes rather than safety. It is re-using the tunnel dug for an earlier detector, decommissioned a few years ago.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.