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...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Typing in "Tritology" in Google to see what it meant, you came up first in the list, then typing in "tritology definition" and I got myself a googlewhack.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Brilliant! A tritology is like a tautology but worse.

Anonymous said...

"The likely discovery of the Higgs particle..": I hope so. I knew Peter Higgs years ago; I have cavorted at his parties. It would be more fun to boast of that than to retell yet again my story of how Gordon Brown came to bounce a cheque on me. I'm afraid it's much too late to tell my Robin-Cook-is-a-shit stories.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Nah ... let's hear the Robin-Cook-is-a-shit-stories. You're not his ex-wife, by any chance? THat doesn't count.

Anonymous said...

His wife? Gay marriage wasn't legal then!

My first Cook yarn: I was a fresher and one of my new pals says "I've just bumped into a bloke I've not seen since Primary School. He claims to be a Very Important student politician." "Has he changed much?" "Oh no, still a shit."