The so called God particle.
So called by the Daily Mail. It is not, absolutely not, and should never be, called the God particle by serious commentators. Or the Register. Please.
When the head of infrastructure services at CERN tells you that he has come to the conclusion that there’s nothing intrinsically “special” about the systems at the multi-billion atom-smasher, you naturally want to check you’ve heard correctly. After all, when we sat down with Tim Bell at the OpenStack Summit in Paris recently …
There was an "Oh my god" particle, it was a proton (probably), detected in 1991, screaming into our atmosphere at close to the speed of light. As far as I know, no one is sure yet what produced it, but other particles of a similar energy have been observed since.
(PS, the name "god particle" for the Higgs was coined by a physicist, not the DM)
Sure the original coining was the "Goddam particle"?
But yes, the Daily Mail could never have coined such a usage because:
(a) the Editor is a Scottish presbyterian who will not stomach blasphemy and
(b) All anybody at the Mail knows about CERN is that it is spending our money that could be better spent repatriating foreigners.
... as it really annoys particle physicists :)
Just as you should always tell chemists they are glorified cooks, biologists that its all just plumbing in the end, and management consultants like me that we are all overpaid, know-it-all, useless bastards :)
While perusing the LHC timeline of operations, this data point was detected:
The size of the LHC constitutes an exceptional engineering challenge with unique operational issues on account of the amount of energy stored in the magnets and the beams. While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ (2,400 kilograms of TNT) and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ (173 kilograms of TNT).
This is pretty boss!
CERN Collider has defaulted to the Worlds Premier MUON Plasma Physics site...making IT there critical to CERN Site Operation- there is simply no other, anywhere... The USA folks have deferred to this site, removed their Equipment and repurposed plant to other fields that are now just computer simulations and really cry for a physical test run on actuall physical lab stuff... YUM.
USA has the National Ignition Facility doing similar work in a different area of Physics... IT work there is crutial to allowing that facility to exist.
IMHO= Proper instrumentation of test runs, Adequate Computer power, and complete computer simulation of Eq being designed is crutial in the Scientific Method being applied sucessfully to exploration of new areas in Science... NO MORE= WAGS... NO MORE= Looks Right... NO MORE= Climb in, buckle-up, Light the fire, and if you can land it we'll figure out how to make it go faster (all a really big WAG)...
And the IT guys get to keep it intact and on track...highly needed if any real Scientific exploration gets to be done...RS.