CERN's starting it's 'Big Bang' experiments today - anyone else remotely interested? I've been looking forward to this, I have to say

But I'm guessing it'll be a while before the results come back and are analysed...

Was listening to LBC on the radio last night at work, and this was the topic for most the night. It was very interesting listening until they started concentrating on the black hole end of the world bit, at which point I lost interest. It will be a while until they start getting results from it, but there should be some great fidings me thinks.

It broke.

Which is a shame, I was quite looking forwards to seeing a black hole.

Its apparently going to start again within the next 5 weeks. It will rain.

Latest news:

http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2009/091109.html

It looks like it has rained. On 14 December, CERN posted a bulletin which mentioned the Large Hadron Collider would be switched off on 16 December. At the foot of the page, a power cut on 2 December is mentioned:

'The power cut affected all the accelerators on the Meyrin site (PS, Booster and the injectors, etc) as well as part of the Computer Centre and momentarily plunged the entire Meyrin site into darkness. The diesal back-up for the secured power network then kicked in, supplying power to all the safety systems on the site and to the main part of the Computer Centre.'

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin...s/1227580?ln=en

Also, you can observe the recent low frequency of news postings in comparison to the previous frequency: http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/News.htm

Latest news: they're still busy fixing it, you can check out the damage:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin...s/1237567?ln=en

Bear in mind the collisions were supposed to take place in January, the replacements and upgrading is due to the damage.

Some people want a world free on nukes.

Off to the south of france in July, hoping to pop over to switzerland, Cern do guided tours.

They were looking for the Higgs boson. It is the particle in between energy and matter...or light and mass, if you wish. Some 2-4 years ago CERN shut down just to equip itself for this. Priviously, the Fermi Lab and the Dallas collider had come the closest. Fermi claimed it had found it, but the conclusions are not proven.