Looking forward to doomsday? You’ll just have to wait…
Welders working on interconnections of magnets in the last sector of the LHC (April 2007).
Seems things have gotten off to a rough start at CERN headquarters. In the lead-up to so-called God-particle maker, several things have gone awry; most recently, it was hijacked by hackers (see below) and now overheated magnets have delayed the groundbreaking experiments for at least two months.
The culprit: “Electrical interconnection between two magnets,” according to CERN spokesperson James Gillies.
The glitch led to helium leaking into the tunnel, bringing in the nuclear research organization’s in-house fire brigade (yeh…they have one).
However, considering the magnitude of the project, I’d be worried if there were no reported problems.
“It will take a couple of months to fix it because we operate at a very low temperature and we will have to warm the magnets up to room temperature, fix the fault, then cool them back down again,” added Gillies.
To steer the particles, the collider needs temperatures barely above absolute zero (-273º Celsius or -459º Fahrenheit).
My guess is we can wait on this one…
