Linked: NYT on ‘Giant Particle Collider Struggles’
Wed Aug 5 2009
Post a commentKudos to Dennis Overbye over at the New York Times for telling it like it is in his story today on CERN’s upcoming restart announcement(s):
The biggest, most expensive physics machine in the world is riddled with thousands of bad electrical connections.
Many of the magnets meant to whiz high-energy subatomic particles around a 17-mile underground racetrack have mysteriously lost their ability to operate at high energies.Some physicists are deserting the European project, at least temporarily, to work at a smaller, rival machine across the ocean.
After 15 years and $9 billion, and a showy “switch-on” ceremony last September, the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator outside Geneva, has to yet collide any particles at all.
But soon?
This week, scientists and engineers at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, are to announce how and when their machine will start running this winter.
We shall see.
Related: What went wrong (and what’s next) at the Large Hadron Collider
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