They had a malfunction in the LHC last year. There was a bad connection in one of the superconducting cables, which quickly heated up, and I can't remember exactly what happened now, but it involved a heck a lot of the magnets (very strong ones too, 5-8T iirc - note they might sound low but they provide an extremely uniform field) going out of alignment, and then they also went boom, causing a lot of damage). Took a year to fix, implement new safety systems, and hopefully low energy collisions will happen in the next 2-3 weeks.


No it isn't.


By church you probably mean the catholic church; not all (christian) churches, or religions are against this.
The discovery of the Higgs boson would be experimental confirmation that the Higgs mechanism for particles exists.

I honestly don't think that Godel's Incompleteness Theorems actually apply to these things (well, they do, because most, if not all of physics rely on the Peano axioms for natural numbers)

I think he's talking about if a GUT/TOE can actually be found, would this mean that we'd be able to predict every single thing that will happen next? (determinism)

This post has been edited by bgeh: Dec 16 2009, 02:02 AM