Saturday, November 21, 2009

And some good news

BBC, The Guardian and other news sites report that the LHC is technically up and running, scientists having managed to circulate two stable counter rotating beams of protons in the tunnel.

CERN though seems to be taking it more casually cautiously this time -- there is no media hype that they engineered last year, a few days before the machine suffered a catastrophic failure. The CERN bulletin still blandly reports news from last weekend, that "during the weekend of 7-8 November, CMS also saw its first signals from beams dumped just upstream of the experiment cavern. " Having burnt their fingers once, CERN clearly doesn't want to draw too much attention to the (re)start up unless they are sure of stability and other issues.

2 comments:

Rahul Siddharthan said...

CERN though seems to be taking it more casually this time

I think you mean "cautiously" -- I'm sure they aren't taking it casually!

Rahul Basu said...

Well, what I meant was that keeping the media updated on a hour to hour basis was no longer being done, not that they were taking the running 'casually'. But I guess, it came out sounding different :)