Saturday, September 20, 2008

LHC Crash and Burns

Looks like the Large Hadron Super Collider is going to be down for 2 months. So, the world gets a few months reprieve from the possibility of blowing up. Well, maybe it was the hand of God that crossed a few wires between a pair of magnets that caused the collider shut down. Then again, with a machine so complex and expensive as the LHC, some breakdowns where bound to happen at some point. Apparently, this is a fairly common occurence on colliders, but since the LHC operates at or near absolute zero, there is more complexity to the problem.

2 comments:

L. Venkata Subramaniam said...

Down? Are you sure. I thought the experiment is going on and the collision will actually happen sometime next month.

JAMcLynne said...

Yep, there was a story about it on CNN, said it will be down for a few weeks.