Higgs boson spills secrets as LHC prepared for return (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website

It's nearly time. After shutting down last year for vital repairs and upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider is being prepared for its comeback.

Engineers at Cern in Geneva have begun cooling the huge machine to its operating temperature of -271.3C, which is colder than deep space.

And the accelerator system that supplies the LHC with its proton particle beams - which are smashed together to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang - is up and running for the first time since 2012.

Teams are working to get the LHC - located in a circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border - back online by January 2015 and this time it will operate at its full energy of 14 trillion electron volts.

After the $10bn machine was switched on for the first time in 2008, problems were found with many of the electrical splices between the 1,200 superconducting magnets that bend particle beams around the 27km-long underground ring.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28089987

[packman]

1. In the Beginning

Higg's Boson created the heavens and the earth and Higgs said ,"We should have a mass to celebrate this" and thus religion also was created. But alas, all was forgotten about the Boson until a scientists got a Hardon and discovered there was still a particle of Boson left in the universe.

That's it, I'm done, can't stretch this any further without going into a Black Hole.

[jmowreader]

2. If I was the director of CERN something would keep me up at night...

...the thought that I would have spent huge amounts of political capital and professional credibility finding $10 billion US and a shitload of land to build a 14-TEV machine to search for a particle that actually lives at a higher energy. As it was, the particle they built this 14-TEV machine to find, showed up at half power...but what if they aimed too low?