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So, the LHC has turned on, and has circulated protons both clockwise and counterclockwise inside of its main ring. These particles, at their fastest, will get up to 7 TeVs of energy apiece, which means they’ll be moving at 99.99999898% the speed of light! To give you a feel for how close that is, the speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. In the LHC, these protons move at 299,792,454.9 meters per second. Pretty damned impressive!
... with our current understanding of physics.
Originally posted by jjkenobi
Just a thought - perhaps they made up the leak story so they could ditch all the media scrutiny and perform the experiments more or less in private?
Problems occurred on 19 September 2008 during powering tests of the main dipole circuit, when an electrical fault in the bus between magnets caused a rupture and a leak of six tonnes of liquid helium. The operation was delayed for several months.[59] It is currently believed that a faulty electrical connection between two magnets caused an arc, which compromised the liquid-helium containment. Once the cooling layer was broken, the helium flooded the surrounding vacuum layer with sufficient force to break 10-ton magnets from their mountings. The explosion also contaminated the proton tubes with soot.[33][60]