El Reg's LHC visit - Deleted Scenes
Print'An impossible machine that could not be built'
Posted in Physics, 8th November 2009 10:02 GMT
Free whitepaper – Managing operating systems and applications with the new Dell Management Console
The Large Hadron Collider - the gigantic underground double-barrelled particle cannon assembled by top boffins deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border - is to start up again "around the 20th" of this month. Not only is the LHC tremendously cool (quite literally) in its own right, it's also the focus of a global hypercomputing grid of tremendous potency, giving us an excuse to go and visit it this week.
Do not spill your tea on this.
Sadly the Collider is now largely chilled down to firing temperature, and parts of it are already having test beams fired along them, so it's now pretty difficult for visits to get down into the various underground caverns and tunnels containing the actual good bits. Even the CERN boffins have to undergo a retina scan to get down there now, we were told, for security and radiation-safety reasons. ("It has to be a live eyeball, too", according to our hosts.)
As a result we don't have any first-hand pics of the underground bits. Nor did we manage to sneak down there anyway, get zapped by a freak blast of krenon-rays or something and acquire mysterious mutant powers or turn green and swell into a enormous monster journalist able to crumple up impertinent press officers like paper cups.
Next page: "Some of the collisions should be horrendously messy"
Managing desktop software for fun and profit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Enabling The Agile Data Center
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter