Beam may come, and beam may go...

...but meetings go on forever. That's the motto I've decided to take up because of the recent events. As you may have heard on the media, the LHC had a major "incident" on Friday - coincidentally 2 years almost to the hour from the time of B's birth. Yep, while B was celebrating his birthday the LHC was "blowing a gasket" quite literally. But remember: "simultaneity does not necessarily imply causality." After all, in a different inertial frame they wouldn't even have been simultaneous, right? Can I hear an "Amen!"?

Here are some links that tell the story:

Official CERN press release
Story in the London Telegraph

I won't even bother linking the AP story, it's so poorly written. I heard today that they may have actually gotten some of their source material from blogs, perhaps like mine, that were not so well informed. Well. You certainly won't be misled by the likes of me! Actually it was eco-terrorists. Little green men. Global warming! And I'm sure you can blame Bush in there somewhere.

Excuse me while I extract my tongue from my cheek...time to get serious now.

The incident was serious enough that it took time for the CERN Fire Brigade to even enter the tunnel; they had to wait for all the helium to dissipate. So we're all still waiting on pins and needles to find out more details about how serious the damage even is, what it will take to repair. They seem fairly certain however that it will mean two months minimum before the collider is back up again, as explained in the Telegraph article.

Some people are bummed about this, and other people are relieved. It certainly gives detector teams like CMS and ATLAS to get their detectors more ready without all the schedule pressure. CMS needs the time to more thoroughly commission its own magnet. (Here's a picture, by the way, of the whole detector completely closed, taken by a fisheye camera mounted in the cavern.)


But on another level we all would have liked to see collisions this year - especially those of us who banked considerable effort and time and money to come out here to live and participate in the activities, to be here for the critical turn-on phase. People have asked also how this affects our (mine and K's) plans. Well, the strategy for finishing my degree was to use the data collected from this year's run, before the winter shutdown, for my thesis; and then take advantage of the lengthy shutdown time to do a lot of analysis and writing. This incident may postpone the plan by the better part of a year, so I'm hoping against hope that the prognosis turns out to be a good bit better than that.

Others take a fatalistic approach. One of my older colleagues suddenly turned to me in the men's room while we were doing our business and said, "I'm being reminded of my Greek mythology: 'Hubris is always followed by Nemesis'." I just smiled a knowing smile and wished to h$#% I knew what he was talking about.

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"But...what about the meetings," you ask? Eh? You want to know about meetings? Well, if you must. This week is another quarterly "CMS Week", which means meetings piled on top of meetings. Timely, that, I suppose. We can discuss "what to do now."

Our technical coordinator tried to cheer us up today in the opening plenary with this clipping from the Daily Mail, another British newspaper, ironically dated the 19th of September, the date of the incident (I'm a Libra too, although I put no stock in such things):




Keep us in your prayers,
-PKBD