Are we all going to die on Wednesday next (about tea-time)?

[drone]

I wouldn't call the LHC potentially life threatening.

You haven't read the title to this thread, have you?

I don't know how the LHC works, but I would imagine there are safety precautions that are observed. What happens if the magnets get turned on when maintenance crews are inside? Can messing with the magnetic timing damage the equipment? This is why control systems should not be on the series of tubes. Same with medical equipment.

[PBI]

It wouldn't be possible for hackers mucking around with the control systems to blow up the universe, but they probably could cause some expensive damage. As for being dangerous, I suppose it could potentially be dangerous for the personnel working there, but the hackers would need to really know what they were doing, the LHC has all sorts of automatic safety cut-outs so that if something goes wrong, the beam just gets shut down and dumped into the side of a mountain.

I can definitely see that it's not ideal for the LHC to be connected to the tubes, but unfortunately it's unavoidable. The LHC produces such a staggering amount of data that it's just not possible for the computers at CERN to process it all; instead it gets analysed at various top universities all across Europe who have had their tubes to CERN specifically upgraded to be really big tubes specifically for the purpose.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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I reckon this is the third next Wotan's Day since the thread was posted. So who's dead except BJ and Ronin?
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[Viking]

The LHC is damaged and halted for two months:

Damage to new collider forces 2-month halt

GENEVA - The world's largest atom smasher — which was launched with great fanfare earlier this month — has been damaged worse than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months, its operators said Saturday.

Experts have gone into 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border to examine the damage that halted operations about 36 hours after its Sept. 10 startup, said James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

"It's too early to say precisely what happened, but it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out," Gillies told The Associated Press.

Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed up well above the absolute zero temperature used for operations so that repairs can be made — a time-consuming process.

"A number of magnets raised their temperature by around 100 degrees," Gillies said. "We have now to warm up the whole sector in a controlled manner before we can actually go in and repair it."

Perhaps it was a black hole.

[CrossLOPER]

The LHC is damaged and halted for two months:

Damage to new collider forces 2-month halt



Perhaps it was a black hole.

You know, you'd think that they would buy good parts...

[Viking]

A quick update here from NASA:

The Day the World [...] End

First of all, yes, it is true that the LHC might create [...] black holes.

Actually, once the LHC is running again and begins producing collisions, physicists will be ecstatic if it creates a [... ] black hole. It would be the first experimental [...] to support an elegant but [...] controversial [...].