This episode of the CERN Podcast features comedians Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery, taken on a tour of the LHC by physicist Brian Cox. The conversation takes a weird turn when they start discussing the feasibility, difficulty, and complications inherent in colliding hamsters at relativistic speeds, and they end up deep in Derek and Clive territory ( Read more... )

The Superconducting Super Collider, almost three times more powerful than CERN's LHC, ended up costing US taxpayers $12 billion over the ten years it was being planned and built from 1983 to 1993. That's $17 billion in 2007 dollars. The LHC was built on the cheap so it only cost $4.5-$9 billion.

The bailout of just AIG - not counting Bear ( Read more... )

If you're jazzed about the Swiss/French Large Hadron Collider you might want to observe a moment of silence and pour a 40 of liquid hydrogen out on the curb for the superconducting supercolliderThe LHC is 27 km in circumference with a beam strength of 7 TeV. The SSC was planned to be 87 km in circumference with a beam strength of 20 TeV. The ( Read more... )

Yet another case to file under "why it's dangerous to believe antiscientific insanity". A week ago an Indian teenager was so worried about the Large Hadron Collider that she killed herself by drinking pesticides. Partial blame goes to the Indian media, who "held discussions airing doomsday predictions over a huge particle-smashing machine buried ( Read more... )

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Earlier this week I was idly wondering what would happen if you stuck your head into the Large Hadron Collider while it was powered up. Would you have a problem, or would you not have a problem because hadrons are so tiny?

One of my friends found this article:

Even at the local level, the size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering ( Read more... )