US/LHC Blogs

This has already been batted around a bit, but for those of you who depend on CV for absolutely all of your news, there is a new US/LHC website, brought to you by the collective US institutions involved in the Large Hadron Collider. Like any hip contemporary internet presence, it comes complete with a blog. A group blog, in fact, featuring four physicists working on different aspects of the LHC: Monica Dunford, Pamela Klabbers, Steve Nahn, and Peter Steinberg. (I thought Peter already had a blog, but apparently some people can’t be confined to just one.) It’s great that we’ll get more inside scoop about what is happening at the LHC, in addition to the awesome scoop you can already get here and elsewhere.

There has been some fretting that the LHC, scheduled to turn on next year, is already getting too much hype. On the list of my own personal worries, this does not crack the top million. If you’re someone who reads several physics blogs and scans the Science Times and the wire services for stories about particle physics, you may have been subjected to a lot of stories about an experiment that hasn’t yet collected any data. But the more casual reader is very far from reaching a point of LHC over-exposure. This is by far the most important experiment in the last thirty years in an undeniably significant subfield of physics. The excitement is perfectly justified, and there will be much more to come.

ATLAS cavern

The ATLAS cavern. Those poor particles won’t know what hit them!

13 Comments

13 thoughts on “US/LHC Blogs”

  1. There have been some problems, but no disasters, despite some very incorrect rumors that “grew legs”, so to speak. No changes to the schedule have been announced or decided yet. If changes are made, the recent issues would more likely (guesswork here) result in relatively small changes (i.e. a couple of months rather than a year). Large problems are entirely possible between now and design luminosity running, but the recent ones are not of that scale.

  2. The link f15mos posted, http://simkiott001.blogspot.com, looks entirely correct to me. There’s certainly a variation in how serious the current problems are viewed to be (and likely will be until they are fixed). It is considered likely that the full present and future combination of issues will probably end up pushing the startup until at least the end of 2008, if not perhaps beyond. The PIM copper finger problems have been and are under intensive study. We’ll hear a lot more in the next couple weeks.

    Just to note: I am clearly and most certainly _not_ any sort of official spokes-blog-commenter or anything of the sort. I comment only because no one else did and because there really is no public relations official or any specific person responsible for answering people’s questions on blogs. So please take what I say with a grain of salt just as you’d take any other anon/pseudonymous commenter (or named one). (The main reason why I am pseudonymous is that if/when I say something stupid, I don’t want to end up pilloried for it!) Cheers.

  3. Hi Ellipsis,

    Thanks for posting the link that I posted before. I started to suspect that the subject of vacuum fingers and resulting LHC delay is some kind of tabu and information is being censored.

    Also, as I understand CERN council did not shift the schedule so I can surmise they either still evaluating the impact on the schedule or impact is negligible. The latter I doubt as beam on May 2008 is goal w/o any contingencies. So not to mention helium production.

    I do not want to seem nasty, but what I hear from experts of all sort – first beam in the machine in September 2008. Now, in CDF it took 2 years to get physics quality data and that is with “old” detector and experienced personnel. Here we have humangous detectors and crowded collaborations so I do not see how the schedule of getting physics data can be more optimistic than at the Tevatron experiments.
    So, this puts us in the beginning of 2011 when CMS&ATLAS are producing quality data.

  4. Pingback: Seed's Daily Zeitgeist: 9/24/2007 - General Science

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top