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LHC Repair To Cost At Least $21 Million
ThanatosMinor writes "September's quench at the Large Hadron Collider is going to cost CERN at least $21 million and delay future collisions until June of 2009 at the earliest. Enjoy your last few months outside of an event horizon."
Complete sense-of-humor failure over there. It's also in a couple of the above replies.
Rob
Great work if you can get it. Need 20 million in funding? Drop a wrench into something that looks complicated. :)
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
They should have planned for this kind of thing and taken it into account, like by having a few months of performing shake-down tests and finding any problems then!
Oh, wait...
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
14 million quid is the price of a decent footballer. It's really not that much money at all. CERN's total budget runs to something like £700 million per year.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"The media portrayal of the LHC experiments has been branded as irresponsible and sensationalist by psychologists - especially since the death of a 16-year-old Indian girl, who killed herself after being distressed by the coverage on an Indian news channel."
The threat to human life from people like KDawson posting sensationalist anti-LHC garbage to places like /. is real and documented. At least one person has actually, demonstrably died due to the precise behaviour that KDawson is exhibiting on this story.
The supposed threat from the LHC, on the other hand, is a fantasy made up and promoted by irresponsible, money-hungry media shills like KDawson to sell ads.
The LHC is safe. People like KDawson kill.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
At least one person has killer herself because she went into an irrational panic, and did something stupid and rash. That's often a sign of psychological problems.
Yeah, the media coverage has been sensationalist and dumb. But it didn't kill anyone.
Sure you can. You'll have an almost infinite amount of time to contemplate it ;)
Whether something is a black hole or not is not determined by mass but by density. In theory, if you can sqeeze the mass into a small enough volume it will collapse into a black hole. No one ever said that any produced black hole will destroy the solar system, let alone impact the galaxy.
The worst case senario is the blackhole spirals through the Earths crust for the next few hundred thousand years, hardly ever absorbing any matter because of its extremely small size. Even if it were to eventually absorb all the matter of the Earth you would have a black hold smaller than the head of a pin, going around the exact same orbit with the exact same amount of gravitational attraction that the earth had.
Of course, this ignores the fact that such a small black hole will almost instantaniously evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation. It also ignores the fact that most likely the LHC is an order of magnitude too weak to produce the micro black holes at all. Finally, it ignores the fact that neutron stars exist. If the LHC is powerful enough to produce a stable black hole, then cosmic rays hitting neutron stars are too. After a few million years we wouldn't have neutron stars as they would all be converted to black holes.
The point is, there are lots of reasons that the LHC won't destroy the Earth. Not having enough mass to produce a black hole isn't one of them.
I thought all slashdot moderators, by now, would be savvy to the practice of replying to a fp in order to get comments listed earlier in a discussion.
And I also thought that most slashdot posters would be savvy to the use of tongue-in-cheekery... which assumes that the reader actually knows what's going on (which, if they are a regular slashdot reader, they should).
Seriously. Whoosh.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai