Earliest LHC Restart Slated For Late Summer 2009

gaijinsr writes "The damage done in what CERN calls the 'S34 Incident' (and what other people call a major explosion in the cryogenics system) is much more serious than originally admitted: The earliest possible restart date is late summer next year, but with some proposed improvements to avoid repetitions of the incident, it looks more like 2010. They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN."

What do you expect?

[imsabbel]

The LHC has been longer in development than the WWW exists (there are screenshots around from the "first website ever" that had design drawings of the atlas detector on it.

It has happened. They got to fix it, piece by piece. Do you really need a "what cf flanges we replaced today" blog?

With the data...

[FrameRotBlues]

They've got a lot of data to figure out what probably happened. But, FTFA:

Most likely cause : an electric arc due to rupture of the interconnection. Unfortunately this is difficult to prove, since the whole dipole interconnect was 'vaporised' during the event!

Re:Information policy

[girlintraining]

The submitters original comment was about how this doesn't seem like CERNs typical "information policy". You put this down as your subject line and then stated that this release of information may have been delayed "perhaps scientists don't like to make statements that they aren't reasonably sure of?" -- My reply was merely to point out an alternative possible explanation, namely that the delay in the release of information may have been motivated by politics. The scientists working on the project likely don't have such motivations, but the people who are providing the funding for this project certainly do, as would those managing the project (and thus responsible for press releases). I'm sure I don't need to tell you of all people the role politics plays in funding of scientific research. -_-

Re:Information policy

[owlnation]

This is a work funded by taxpaid euros. There, fixed it for you

Francs. The currency of Switzerland is the Franc. Not in the Eurozone, not in the EU, not in much at all actually.

Though, some of the LHC's funding does come from some Eurozone countries. (and part of the LHC is in France too)

Re:Information policy

[neuromanc3r]

If we all are happily nit-picking, I think you should have a look at the Cern member states [wikipedia.org]. While you are right, major parts of Cern are located in Switzerland, the majority of taxpaid $currency used for its funding is definitely Euro, not Franc (and saying that "some of the LHC's funding does come from the Eurozone countries" is a ridiculous understatement...)

Re:What do you expect?

[bckrispi]

Not only that, but the WWW was invented for the purpose of supporting the work being done on the LHC. [w3.org]

Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - "Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?" This proposal provides an answer to such questions. Firstly, it discusses the problem of information access at CERN. Then, it introduces the idea of linked information systems, and compares them with less flexible ways of finding information.

It then summarises my short experience with non-linear text systems known as hypertext, describes what CERN needs from such a system, and what industry may provide. Finally, it suggests steps we should take to involve ourselves with hypertext now, so that individually and collectively we may understand what we are creating.

This being said, I'd say that the LHC has already paid for itself a thousand times over.

Re:My prediction

[4D6963]

But if not for that date, then when else would we set our upcoming Impending Doom day? We need those for, you know, having the feeling of being at the ends of times and therefore on a sort of historical cutting edge, rather than in the middle of a long era during which our precise time isn't much more important than any other time in history.

Re:My prediction

[Kamokazi]

It's one of the common apocalypse dates. It started with the Mayan calendar, but it also applies to some chinese fortune telling book, and one of the major Nostradamus types also predicted it as well. What's funny is there is a web crawler bot program used to predict stock market trends that also predicts this date, and supposedly this system predicted 9-11 90 days before it happened.

Not that I buy any of that bullshit..I was just poking fun.

Re:Anthropic principle

[Bryan Ischo]

Do you actually believe that incoherent, illogical, unscientific, unprovable baloney?