Science News Reporting Today

[hummingwolf]

From this story, one of many stories about the sad hardware malfunction at the Large Hadron Collider which will put the LHC out of commission for at least two months: "Spokesman James Gillies has been unable to give much more detail regarding the nature of the malfunction, but stated that in order for repairs to be made the tunnel will have to be warmed up to around absolute zero."

Warmed up to absolute zero, eh? What was the temperature before this???

Well, since the piece goes on to say that "Once the repair is made, the tunnel will then have to be cooled back down to its original operating temperature of -271C," one presumes that the spokesman probably meant--and probably even said--that it would be warmed up to something sensible, like zero degrees Celsius*. Still, the idea of the tunnel needing to be warmed up to absolute zero is delightfully bizarre.



* A different article says "CERN spokesman James Gillies said that the damaged section must be warmed up to 273 degrees Celsius before the system can be repaired," which seems a bit excessive somehow.

Comments

[dcjensen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they misstated, it's *from* near absolute zero. Which sounds like the grades the reporters and editors got in science.

Absolute zero being the temperature that all molecular motion stops beyond that which is necessary to bind the element together, colder than that is pointless.

AbZero is −273.15°C, so apparently they have to get the parts near zero degrees to work on them, or they aren't getting the LHC really close and just need them up to room temp, which is likely.

In fact the laws of thermogoddamics say it's going to be nearly impossible to get really close to 0˚K, with diminishing returns for extra effort.

Still sucks that it'll take all that time to fix, but you can't hurry thawing or you run the risk of more damage.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Well, I did include the quote about cooling it back down to "its original operating temperature of -271C," which isn't terribly warm. Whether you consider that "really close" to absolute zero or not is dependent on what kind of experiment you need to do, I suppose.

From what I gather, they want to warm the tunnel up to a temperature that humans can work in. I still don't know whether they want to go for zero degrees C or something closer to what most of us would consider room temperature...