Here's some nice hocus pocus to cheer us all up that I just found on my homepage. 


Williams' alien encounter

(Wednesday September 10, 2008 07:10 AM)

Robbie Williams' ongoing search for extraterrestrial beings was given a boost after he was paid a visit by a mysterious spirit.

The Angels singer has become reclusive in recent years, chasing a lifelong interest in the paranormal by searching out aliens from observatories in the Arizona desert.

And the star claims his beliefs were confirmed after he encountered a being - shortly after writing a song about aliens.

He says, "I had just finished writing a song called Arizona, which is about alien abduction, when there was this glow. It was magic."

HEARSAY WARNING #1: I haven't read this thread too closely, nor have I read the linked articles.  Generally all these sorts of safety-of-the-world debates go along the following lines

"Physicist is it safe to be colliding these particles under these conditions blah blah blah"
"I'd guess so: there's been stuff more or less like that happening on the moon for an awfully long time: I wouldn't get worked up about it"

HEARSAY WARNING #2: Also, to my knowledge the LHC isn't actually ready yet, and they won't be taking any measurements.  They're just under pressure from the financial backers to do something.

Well, we all live to see another day then!!

Better at least than a motorway, which as we know starts fast and gets slower. 

OMIGOD!  I don't like the sound of this.  These people were assuring us that there were no problems with this thing and that they knew what they were doing.  The black hole beckons......


Hadron Collider forced to halt 
 
Superconducting magnets are cooled down using liquid helium


Plans to begin smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be delayed after a magnet failure forced engineers to halt work.

The failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C.

The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.

The LHC beam will remain turned off over the weekend while engineers investigate the severity of the fault.

A spokesman for Cern told the BBC it was not yet clear how soon progress could resume at the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator.

While the failure was "not good news", he said glitches of this kind were not unexpected during testing.

Delays

The first beams were fired successfully around the accelerator's 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring over a week ago.

The crucial next step is to collide those beams head on. However, the fault appears to have ruled out any chance of these experiments taking place for the next week at least. 
The LHC has been in construction for some 13 years

The quench occurred during final testing of the last of the LHC's electrical circuits to be commissioned.

At 1127 (0927 GMT) on Friday, the LHC's online logbook recorded a quench in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors.

The entry stated that helium had been lost to the tunnel and that vacuum conditions had also been lost.

It added that the Cern fire brigade had been called to the scene.

The superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9C above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit.

As a result of the quench, the temperature of about one hundred of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C.

A spokesman for Cern confirmed that it would now be difficult, if not impossible, to stage the first trial collisions next week.

Further delays could follow once the damage has been fully assessed over the weekend.

The setback comes just a day after the LHC's beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.




 

I thought having to call in Cern Fire Brigade was really funny.    The mental picture......

That's the one!