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Hope They Bought the Service Plan

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Buried in the election and Wall Street coverage last week: The Hadron Collider is broken.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 6:38 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Hope They Bought the Service Plan”

  1. #1 |  ktc2 |  September 28th, 2008 at 7:12 pm

    “Good news anyone! The Swedish robot from pi-kea is here with the super collider I ordered.”

    “Bad news, nobody! The super-collider super-exploded. I need you to take it back and exchange it for a wobbly CD rack and some of those rancid meatballs.”

  2. #2 |  tim |  September 28th, 2008 at 8:23 pm

    What I’ve heard is that this is pretty typical. One of the many differences between this Collider and others (outside of the size) is the long times it takes to cool down and warm back up – extending repair times.

  3. #3 |  Cynical In CA |  September 28th, 2008 at 11:59 pm

    Made in China, no doubt.

  4. #4 |  Kit Smith |  September 29th, 2008 at 9:01 am

    What Tim said. They blew out a transformer on one of the parts of the ring, and since the equipment it powers runs near absolute zero for the superconductors, they’ve got to warm it all up to room temperature before they can disconnect everything.

    It is indeed broken, but it is repairable and will be back online in a couple of months.

  5. #5 |  Stormy Dragon |  September 29th, 2008 at 11:56 am

    A critical part probably got sucked into a miniature blackhole. ;)

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