What the OPERA collaboration claimed was that they had an anomaly in their data, which led to a possible interpretation of nneutrinos travelling faster-than-light. Since they found that a very extrordinary claim, they knew they needed extrordinary evidence, and after a few months of searching within, they opened up to the scientific community to help find their mistake, if any. They were very scientific about the whole thing, and didn't at any point claim "hey look here, we found neutrinos to go faster than lightspeed!".

In summary, TFS contains crap on the part I know about, so I'm not inclined to go read TFA... I'll hear it from a more reliable source if it turns out to be anything important.

TFSFS, i.e. The First sentence of TFS, is a load of crap. Physicists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for *predicting* the Higgs Boson, *not* for discovering it!

And the rest of the summary doesn't make me a bit interested in reading TFA either. There's been Higgs imposter models out there from before the discovery was made. And sure they have their merit. But as long as we have no new physics observed, the Standard Model covers it just fine.

Blowing karma on being pedantic: gravity is by far the weakest force known!

Nope, GP was right. The centre-of-mass energy in collisions of UHE cosmic rays with our atmosphere is of the order (slightly above) of the centre-of-mass energies reached at the LHC. That's another reason why we build colliders: it's hard to reach high energies in fixed-target collisions.

Don't forget that the LHC is colliding the quarks and gluons inside the protons, and the speed (momentum, you mean of course) of the incoming particles is never mathematically equal. Still, you have a valid point, this is an important difference between the LHC collisions and the comic-ray ones.

I'm sure the grad students on those experiments that rely on it _not_ being impossible would not call this distinction pedantic.

But hey, what do I know, I'm not even one of them.

It can't collide with itself? Good to know that the Majorana versus Dirac particle question is settled then. Oh, wait...

Of course, I didn't bother to RTFA...

A circular one would be preferable to a linear one when your goal is to reach as high a number of collisions as possible at your target energy (as it is here), because in a circular accelerator you can store the beams instead of having to produce and dump them continuously. But unfortunately a circular collider is not possible due to the enormous synchrotron radiation at the energies aimed for, which forces you among other things to continuously pump enormous amounts of energy in your beams.

There's a CMS lego model too: http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroups/hep/LegoCMS/

"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped."

By the way, "koeieuier" is a real word!

Easy!

aa ee ie oo uu ui ei ij au ou eu oe eeu ieu aai ooi oei

I love my language!

Nice black-white thinking.
The people tried, at least in the cities, after the elections in 2008. Remember that uprise? Many risked (and some lost) their lives. It was not just a small minority, but it was suppressed.

I was in Esphahan just before those elections and the ordinary city people I met were in general very open, interested, longing for change.

And what about the people, they all turned extremist and dumb all of a sudden? I find this all quite insulting to the several Iranians I have met and worked with. They (also women!) typically are well schooled, well opiniated, and very different from the neighbours you mention.

In my language, as in many others, nobody ever says "March 8th 2013". It would sound silly in that order, and indeed it leads to a lot of confusion. It may be news to you, but you are not the center of the universe.

This is wrong. They were shooting lead nuclei around in the past month even, and have done before.
When the LHC will come back, it will run protons again, and again lead nuclie at some more future point.
Heavy-ion collisions is something the machine was designed for.
It's the higher energy that requires the extensive repairs and upgrades, and the downtime.