LHC boffins turn lead into quarko-gluotic Big Bang incrediblo-stuff

International boffins are vying with one another in a race to topsy-turvinate the world of physics this week, with a flurry of results due in imminently from radical fabric-of-time-and-space-rending experiments at the Large Hadron Collider - most brutally powerful particle-pummeller ever assembled by the human race. “It …

[DI_Wyman]

Very good, but..

....will it shorten the time period between Monday morning to Friday pubtime?

[bradders]

Loonies!

They're crossing the streams! Have they never seen Ghostbusters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will no one think of the universes?

Just think of all those proto-universes generated by these random acts of particle crunching and then discarded callously by the unfeeling monsters of CERN!

Will no-one think of the child universes?

[Captain Save-a-ho]

Actually...

I'm sure the bastards that were running their own LHC-type atom smasher in another universe were thinking that very thing when they created our universe. And don't they all regret it now, as of of course the creation of the universe has been generally regarded as a very bad idea.

Now, stick out your thumb and let's get off this planet already!

[Mr Young]

Ye man!

All this mashup and no custardification yet - we looking ok now?! pheewww....

[Destroy All Monsters]

"Radical fabric-of-time-and-space-rending experiments"

Extraordinary rendition then?

Spacetime waterboarding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't Panick!!

It will lengthen the universal value of 'pubtime' ensuring that plenty of quenching can occur

Explanation: (Non-science types might want to look away...) The more ions in the fire, the more quenching will occur - As spacetime is an instrinsically bound volume, more ions in the limited spatial confines of the LHC means that the temporal dimention must increase to accommodate the growing demand for quenching.

Simples!

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Indeed, but

will it turn lead into Glod?

Can we have a Discworld icon please?

[Aaron Em]

Of course they do

I've always known the world would end on a Monday; why not this one?

[Anonymous Coward]

catastrophic electro-blast-triggered helium superfluid explosion mishap

surely you could have got a little more scaremongery on that one.. the words Meltdown, Cryogenic, Contamination and Gasification all sound good too..

catastrophic electro-meltdown-initiated-cryogenic-helium-superfluid-boiloff-contamination-and-gasification-explosion mishap

[Fluffykins]

Title; letters, digits. OK?

I had a curry like that, once.

[Pirate Dave]

Shutdown?

"Meanwhile the Collider will continue to smash heavy ions until 6 December, when it will shut down for the Christmas break."

I do hope they are leaving some guards on-site while everyone is at home enjoying Christmas. Who knows what otherworldly/otherdimensional creatures could crawl out of the collision caverns when no one is looking...

[Graham Marsden]

Cthulhu...

... ftagn!

[Annihilator]

Don't worry

A guy named Dr Gordon Freeman is covering for the folks that are on holiday. Apparently he's trained in this sort of thing.

[Lottie]

topsy-turvinate

Superb phrase.

It worrys me that we are close to creating invisible lead soup.

[Paul Crawford]

@Lottie

"creating invisible lead soup"

I though the Chinese already managed that, otherwise what is one-ton soup made of?

[Parax]

invisible lead soup

nah, its the invisible custardification you have to worry about.

[Roger Greenwood]

"..until 6 December.."

Thats some non-denominational winter holiday (Winterval). The rest of us have another 3 weeks to work after that. Maybe they do the cleaning etc., and a lick of paint while the beam is down.

[Anonymous Coward]

6th Dec

It's not a 'non-denominational winterval' - It's St Nicholas Day, which is when many people on the continent celebrate the 'commercial' side of Christmas as opposed to the 'religious' bit... continental kids have their visit from Santa then.

They're closing it down because nobody will be sober enough to operate it. ;-)

And who are we to spoil their party?

[The First Dave]

Holimadays

Boffins == Universities === Very long sabbaticals

[MrCheese]

Enough hyberbole

Now go get that scrubbing brush and make you you get all the gluon-plasma soup out of the inlets before it custardifies

[Bassey]

Christmas

Do you reckon atom-smashing physicists decorate their labs/offices for Christmas? I hope so but I just can't see them running tinsel around the 27km of the LHC.

[Stoneshop]

Oh yes they do, kindof. The scientifically advanced way

They simply feed the tinsel into the particle source whatsits,crank up the accelerator thingamajigs a bit, then continuously adjust the collision aim doodad so that the point of collision gradually moves along the entire length of the tunnel. You can see the result of those collisions in the pic in the article; if that's not festive I don't know what is.

[Ian Moffatt 1]

It'll have a heart of gold

The ones that don't get invited to the party could always try and invent the Improbable Infinity Drive. As long as someone leaves them some rubber bands ;-)

[peyton?]

My god....

It's full of screensavers!

[Boris the Cockroach]

C.E.R.N.

Where they are putting the very fabric of space-time through the wringer.... whether it wants to be or not

Quote inspired by a phrase in a discworld book b4 I get stamped on

[Paul Crawford]

Diskworld quote

I like the one about the Unseen University's research pushing back the boundaries of ignorance...

[Anonymous Coward]

The CERN view

Yes, offices certainly are decorated. We are all people too, really! The Ion results are really, really nice - it's quite a privilege to be peering back in time.

This article, too, reminds my why I enjoy reading El Reg. You'll be pleased to know that links to these articles are usually doing the rounds at CERN.

[Ugotta B. Kiddingme]

turn of phrase

"jets of quarko-gluotic unfeasiblo-plasma"

Most excellent.

[Greg J Preece]

As a child of ReBoot and Tron...

...that animation was the coolest thing I've seen in weeks.

That is all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imminent alien invasion?

Hmm.. sounds like a few corners could be cut trying to get those last few TB of data before they shut down for the winter break.

Needless to say any aliens visiting our solar system are going to be picking up some very strange readings very shortly and might show up to have a look.

If there is a massive unexplained "seismic event" and mass UFO sighting near Geneva on that date don't say I didn't warn you.

Methinks the recent UN "Alien Ambassador" appointment is no coincidence.

AC, because he can't find his crowbar OR hazmat suit... but does have a substantial collection of strange and exotic metal fragments which seem to levitate a magnet when cooled to 5.2 deg C...

[Mark Graybill]

until December 6th...

They're going to be home and ready the moment that Cataclysm is released, of course. Unless they manage to release a Deathwing of their own. Then CERN looks like Auberdine...

[frank ly]

Glossary/Dictionary Please

"..quarko-gluotic.."

I understannd 'quarko', but what is 'gluotic', exactly. Derived from 'gluon', yes..... but why not 'gluonic'?

Is this difference related to the difference between 'biotic' and 'bionic'?

P.S. If Z bosons are 100 times mire massive that protons; where do they come from and where do they go to? (Since I assume they don't hang around for long; otherwise we'd keep bumping into them, in a manner of speaking.)

[Bleepme]

Where do they go to?

Ask Peter Sarstedt - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE89OeM5nmU he can help you...

[Anonymous Coward]

E=MC^2

They can come and go... if they change state.

[Lghost]

where do they come from and where do they go to?

Magical woodland pools..

Narnia

Mr Tumnus and Prince Caspian will explain further ..

They are both here ..I saw them post ..last week

[Anonymous Coward]

haha

lol that was Caspian Prince.. I aint seen no Aslan round these parts either, though I have heard there is a sturn white moderatwitch ruling over these parts...

oops now I'm banned.

[Bleepme]

strong? weak?

Surely you mean "strong nuclear" and "weak nuclear" forces, not just "strong and weak forces".

Of course, if you do just mean "strong and weak forces" you can study them in the scrum at any rugby match, you don't need a LHC.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bloody contortionists

It's always the same with Agile people. You start talking particle physics, they haul in a User Story about a Scrum Master.

SCROB or bust!

[Mystic Megabyte]

Get up to date!

Big Bang? WTF That is sooo 90's!

Dontcha know that we exist in a sorta oscillating matrix type-a-thingy...

[ShaggyDoggy]

Narnia

You mean we spent 8 billion thingies building a circular whatsit in Switzerplace thingy and all we needed really was a wardrobe. It figures.

[El Richard Thomas]

Higgs

No mention of the search for the Higg's Boson in this article, nor any explanation for the change in focus.

I reckon an HB turned up the first day they switched on the LHC and said in a bad brummie accent "You aint seen me, roit?"

Where's the Fast Show icon?