I have always loved the idea of giant magnetically levitated flywheels in a vacuum storing energy as they spin at incredibly high speeds.

Can Flywheels Help Balance Electricity Supply and Demand?: Scientific American.

Magazine.

I post this in good faith that you will still come here to Hadron Hater because you love the witty comentary.

The lawsuit has been thrown out as the judge decided that the US has no jurisdiction on the LHC.

You can see the Cern press release, I will spoil it for you by telling you it is entitled, “LHC re-start scheduled for 2009″.

It will not take until spring 2009 to fix the problems, the long wait is due to the fact that it takes about a month for the system to warm up enough to work on it. Then once, the repairs are in place it takes another month to cool it back down to -271C.  This combined with the issues of electrical grids being able to supply the necessary electricity makes spring 2009 the next time the collider could possibly be up and running at full power.

It should be stated, in conclusion, that these black holes are not dangerous and do not threaten to swallow up our already much-abused planet. The theoretical arguments and the obvious harmlessness of any black holes that, according to these models, would have to be formed from the interaction of cosmic rays with celestial bodies, mean that we can regard them with perfect equanimity.

Thanks science geeks. I feel so much better. I totally appreciate you allaying my fears about black holes by writing 2 whole sentences after you just went on and on and on for 10 pages about them. No wonder people are scared about the earth being swallowed by black holes.

LHC: Large Hadron Collider (duh?)

ATLAS: A Toroidal LHC Apparatus

CMS: Compact Muon Solenoid

ALICE: A Large Ion Collider Experiment

I think it is really hard to argue that evil conspiratorial scientists would knowingly take any odds to end the universe in a machine called Alice or one whose name is self referential acronym. (ed. note: Save the self referencing names for PHP and GNU. Heh.)

I guess you could make the argument for ALICE referencing Alice in Wonderland and her time- and space-bending trip through the rabbit hole being the same as how the LHC is a time machine that is going to suck us all into a black hole or portal to another dimension… Wait, never mind.

For everyone else, add two more months to the time we wait to find out if the Higgs Boson exists. 

Ctv.ca Damage to new collider forces two-month halt

Doesn’t helium always leak? It is the second smallest atom! Hydrogen is smaller but since it hangs out in pairs diatomic hydrogen is slighly larger than helium. According to Wikipedia: “…due to the small size of helium atoms, helium’s diffusion rate through solids is three times that of air and around 65% that of hydrogen.^[34]“, It would be harder to keep a 27km long tube full of hydrogen. Well, thank the engineers the LHC uses helium.