Large Hadron Collider Working Again

IEET readers have weighed in with their opinions about why the LHC project kept running into seemingly endless delays on its way to running protons into each other. Now that it’s back up and operating, perhaps some of our more far-fetched conjectures will be proved wrong.

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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/21  at  12:21 PM

I wonder how many people voted "the universe will end" for humors sake. I think, just for shits and giggles, CERN should bring it up to full power on Dec. 21, 2012. Just to get people's panties in a bunch. Bring on the Chaos.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/22  at  08:52 PM

Physics has been in the doldrums for some decades now with no fundamental advances (see Lee Smolins' excellent book "The trouble with Physics"). It would therefore be quite marvellous if the LHC gave new impetus to our basic understanding of the universe in which we live. I am not phased by the teething troubles the project has faced: they were to be expected. I know of no-one who has written a computer program of moderate complexity and have it work first time. The LHC project is millions of times more complex. It would have been miraculous had ther been no hitches!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  12/06  at  08:38 PM

It's a wonder to me that people get so worked up about the LHC, which at full power may be able to generate a paltry 14TeV center of mass energy, while every second of every day we are bombarded by cosmic rays with energies many times that. The entire field of cosmic ray astronomy relies on collisions that are sometimes millions or billions of times this energy, because highly energetic collisions are necessary to produce the particle showers that the larger ground based cherenkov detectors are sensitive to. What the LHC scare really indicates is a media that would rather sell scare stories about the end of the world. After all, Doomsday is good for ratings...

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