> There is nothing wrong with LHC - lazy journalism.
> Schedule announced in Jan, 18 months physics, 12 month
> engineering shutdown afterwards
> I just saw the BBC "news" story about LHC schedule -
> I know I'm a BBC person but it's really shoddy! This
> kind of thing really annoys me.
> ALL particle accelerators have 6 - 12 month regular
> shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how
> complex machines are operated !
> I repeat: #LHC will run for 12 - 18 months now. It will
> then shut down, AS ACCELERATORS DO, for maintenance and
> upgrades. ENGINEERING !!!
This is causing something of an uproar in TwitterSpace:
Indeed. It surprised me reading this BBC article, as we hadn't heard anything along those lines here at CERN. In fact, the Director General sent a note (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/msg-dg-1003...) to all CERN personnel, very much cheerful about the future, without mentioning any kind of unforeseen interruption in operations.
All levels of management at CERN are very open, both about successes and failures. Even more so about the latter: bad news travel fast and all that (and we are a quite close community here on-site).
Relevant quotation: "After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data."
I don't think that it would be someone (or something) traveling back from the future to sabotage the LHC. Rather, it's possible that the LHC, if fully operational, would destroy the universe, and we just happen to live in one of many universes in which hardware failures and birds dropping baguettes have prevented it from doing so.
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron] collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
With each delay, the theory becomes a hair less fanciful.
I don't think that is science from academia, but rather popular science that is trying to be speculative so Discovery will be tempted to make a tv-show about it..
Well, whatever it takes to get kids more interested in science... right? How many folks at SpaceX do you think started their careers as Star Wars junkies?
I think it's one of those things where if they pushed it to far and really broke it they wouldn't have the resources to fix it. It's such a long term project already that it is wise to take every precaution.
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23LHC
Edited for layout and to add link to twitter search. And this comment.