Not much more to say about the Large Hadron Collider. As seemingly everybody wrote in the last two days, a circuit overheated, it melted, it popped some gaskets with previously-cryogenic helium…and so much for new physics this year at CERN. It takes so long to warm the parts up to fix them, and then plunge them back down to superconductive realms, that the full-on colliding aspect of its business may wait until next year some time.

If you’d like a laugh in the meantime, a usually-disappointing Brit site, The Spoof!, has a newsy and wicked version of events attributed to writer Crystal Clear, and that’s funny right there.

Other stories:

Reuters Anne Richardson calls it a “technical glitch” but one bets the operators didn’t say “oh, glitch” when it went south ;  Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield calls it a major blow ; Guardian (UK) Katie Cooksey just can’t help herself, putting a reference to the now-hackneyed planet-eating black holes in her lede ; BBC Paul Rincon says here’s what happened: “massive magnet quench..” ; NYTimes Dennis Overbye reports that the gala party in Geneva next month is still on ; AP Alexander G. Higgins says glitch happens or, as one source explains, “There are an awful lot of these connections between wires…” ;

Grist for the Mill: CERN statement “Incident in LHC sector 34″ .

-CP

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.