Showing posts with label Cern. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cern. Show all posts

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

A tritology?

The FT spoil this otherwise mildly interesting article on the Cern Large Hadron Collider with this:

...50,000 tonnes of equipment have to be cooled to just 1.8°Kelvin above absolute zero...

Wrong, wrong, wrong. "Kelvin", in this context, means "°C above absolute zero", which in turn is "the temperature at which nothing could be colder and no heat energy remains in a substance ... by definition, exactly 0 K and −273.15 °C."

So, expanding the above quote, we get:
...50,000 tonnes of equipment have to be cooled to just 1.8°°C above absolute zero above absolute zero...