There’s a media storm about the LHC building up as CERN makes last minute preparations to circulate a first beam in the machine. Cosmic Variance has live-blogging about this by a group of theorists, and Tommaso Dorigo will be in the CMS control room. He just might blog about this. For up-to-the-minute news, try the LHC beam commissioning site. Here’s the plan for tomorrow, and the latest news: they’re ready to get started at 6am tomorrow Geneva time. I’ll be asleep.
Starting tomorrow, daily news reports about progress should appear here. They’ve got a very detailed plan for steps to go through, here’s where they are now, here’s where they hope to be Thursday and Friday.
I like how they arranged it so it was September 10 everywhere. I’m guessing the main event is scheduled for just before midnight here.
The Boston Globe has a story today about how Frank Wilczek received death threats because of the LHC. Here is the URL, http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2008/09/mit_physicist_g.html
Well, this is more exciting than a Y2K upgrade of a billing system for sure. Will the threatening fantasy-literature-inspired ones realize that they have to keep the death threats coming until at least first collision (end of this year?), and possibly continuously afterwards, with exponentially decreasing threat level, then do it again when the machine is upgraded in 2010 or so?
Read the affidavit of Luis Sancho concerning LHC dangers. It’s at Harpers website.
Everyone,
Please, don’t post anything on this blog about the supposed dangers of LHC-produced black holes. The way this issue dominates stories about the LHC is an excellent example of the sad phenomenon of attention-getting claims driving out intelligent discussion. I’ve heard way too much about this from too many people (including from the person discussed in the Wilczek story, who has also harassed me). Just stop, it’s a waste of good brain cells.
Peter, thank you for the link but, as you probably read already, my shift in the CMS control room got canceled late yesterday evening, because they wanted “experts” on site for each subdetector. For my own shift, which is attending the tracker, this is hilarious, since the tracker has been kept off for the entire day, given the unstable beam conditions one expects at startup.
Sorry for the disappointment of your readers – I tried to post some useful information anyway today. Your link alone brought to my site about 500 people…
Cheers,
T.
Sorry for posting the story.