Number 61 » LHC

Eureka?

Matthew Gipp — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:47:04 +0000

The Large Hadron Collider finally worked.

Granted, it was only a low-power calibration run—pure bush league stuff. Stay tuned for the real, reality-ending stuff.

On a semi-related note, here’s your required viewing for the weekend: The Quiet Earth.

Yes, there will be an exam.

LHC, Cont’d

Matthew Gipp — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:47:23 +0000

The Large Hadron Collider is stalled again. This time, one of its cooling units was mysteriously jammed up by a baguette sent from the future.

Also, Bill Bryson visited the LHC and wrote an article about it for The Times .

Last: In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson, Clarified

Matthew Gipp — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:43 +0000

Seed‘s eloquent description of the Higgs boson theory for the Large Hadron Collider’s string of bad luck:

Essentially, the theory is that the Higgs is so destructive that no possible future universe of ours contains one. Thus, any effort to find the Higgs in the present is doomed to failure.

Now that’s the sort of concision I was looking for the first time.

A Quantum Humdinger

Matthew Gipp — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:04:19 +0000

The short, accident-marred life of the Large Hadron Collider has some physicists suggesting a real humdinger of an explanation: the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that scientists are hoping to produce with the collider’s help, is “so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”