Higgs Boson?
Graviton?
Mirror matter?
Naked black holes? 
OK, probably not or I would have heard of it…but are they finding even somewhat tantalising?
They created quark-gluon plasma a couple months ago if I remember correctly, which is the densest matter ever created and observed by humans (denser than anything in the universe except black holes I think). But the Collider is still running at only about half power; it’s not expected to get to full power for a couple of years yet, and even once it does it could take up to another year to collect enough data to draw meaningful conclusions, for instance regarding the Higgs-Boson. So it’s going to take a while.
How does that work—what’s the holdup? Why can’t they just flip the switch and see what that baby’s got under the hood?
IIRC they have had issues with some of the systems (not that they would just crank that sucker up to full power immediately anyway…the thing cost billions and they aren’t going to risk damage or destruction of the thing by jumping the gun).
-XT
Break in period
I believe some of what they are hoping to ‘find’ can’t be observed directly, so they have to gather several months worth of data, computer analyze it, then they are able to show that they did find/create some specific phenomenon. (Rather takes the fun out of experiments, I’d think.)
I definitely agree. Real-life science should be more like movie science. Middle-aged male professor and his female, mid-20’s, super-model assistant (with 3 PhD’s) flip a switch and get real-time results that appear in color-coded charts or 3-D models, allowing them to instantly realize that they’ve revolutionized science as we know it.
Of course, the flip side of that is that military/political/corporate supervisors would pressure the scientists to take unnecessary risks; the LHC would then produce a mini-black hole that would threaten to swallow the Earth, rip the fabric of space-time and/or create a portal allowing slavering demonic beings to come through and eat us.
They basically tried that when the LHC first started up in September 2008. They ‘flipped the switch’ and planned to have it operating at full power within two months. But just over a week later some of the magnets blew out and they had to shut it down for 14 months while they fixed the problem. It was fairly embarrassing for them because they’d had a big publicity campaign going for the LHC in the media to celebrate the opening, and then a week later they had to announce it was broken. So they’re taking it a lot slower this time, and apparently it’s been working better than expected and they’re ahead of schedule. They still don’t plan to get it to full power until 2014, but it’s possible they can find interesting stuff in the meantime - even at half power it’s still more powerful than anything that’s been done before.
I hope this thing has a pedal, above a metal floor.
There’s nothing we can do, except…it’ll never work, it’s a million to one chance.
It’s produced an excess of hadron/hardon puns. What more do you want?
Y’know, you could Google these, but it might get interesting toward the end…
All I know is that I’ve spent half my life in science labs of various types and haven’t gained a single goddamn super power.
Yeah, better keep it on SafeSearch ‘moderate’
I thought you moonlighted as Purchase Order Man along with your sidekick Memo Boy.
Especially when you accidentally leave the ‘l’ out of ‘holes’ :smack:.
There were rumours circulating this year of a possible particle discovery around where we think the Higgs might be, but no official announcement has yet been made following up on them. As noted above, they need more data (and then plenty of time to analyze it) before making any announcements.
Thankfully, the birds have been cooperating for the most part.
OK, you got me curious, so I Googled “naked black hole” with SafeSearch turned off. There were a few hits that weren’t actually about the relativistic object, but nothing dirty as of when I gave up, after 5 pages of clean hits. Google’s smarter than we give it credit for.
All these gamma rays and nothing!
This is the end of human society and we don’t even realize it yet.