Revived LHC Could Run Through the Winter 164
Jack Spine writes "When you are powering nuclear particle beams that could drill a hole through 30 metres of copper, you don't want to be paying a premium for electricity. However, Cern scientists are determined that the delayed experiment will get some workable results, and so are preparing to run the machine throughout the winter."
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Odd... (Score:2, Insightful)
Power being more expensive in the winter is only common sense if you pay your own power bill...
Something he probably doesn't have to do living in his mother's basement...
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
We are not going to shut down LHC for the winter due to high electricity costs. If it never occured to you that we would, since the apparatus and the staff would seemingly cost so much more than the electricity anyways, congratulations, it turns out you were right even when we didn't know it yet, thus we will be running the collider and everything is exactly as you would have assumed had you never read this article at all. Thanks for your time.
Re:competition with Fermilab (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:competition with Fermilab (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Fermilab is unable to probe the highest possible mass ranges of the Higgs. Not without running indefinitely, that is.
The LHC is capable of this, probably by the end of next year we'll have either fully excluded or discovered the Higgs. And a bunch of other stuff
The biggest reason to run through winter is so that we can better understand the experiment. More run time = more interesting stuff for physicists to do! The more time we run uninterrupted, the more quickly we'll be able to fine tune the instruments.
Re:competition with Fermilab (Score:5, Insightful)
This is absurd. We're talking about the cutting edge of physical discovery, and you're complaining about cost? The total cost is a few billion, and it has been spread out over 15 years.
It might make the most startling discoveries in scientific history, but apparently that's not important!
Re:I don't mean to nitpick... (Score:3, Insightful)
If Chaucer read Shakespeare, he would have thought Shakespeare was butchering the language. If Shakespeare read Dickens, Shakespeare would have thought Dickens had butchered the language.
Language evolves. Saying one rule-based system, (this doesn't apply to colloquialisms or slang) is "butchered" is just a modern day form of prejudice.