2008-09-10

Large Hadron Collider Up and Running

Well, that's it, the Large Hadron Collider is up and running. They've had two beams go all the way round (one clockwise, one anticlockwise). Thanks to the webcast I've been able to follow it pretty much all day (twittering as I went).

It's been absolutely fascinating. Like I said over here, I wasn't old enough to remember it (or, indeed, at the exact time, wasn't even anywhere that had a TV) but I imagine this is what watching the Moon landings must have felt like.

Although, of course, no actual collisions have happened today (and won't happen today) so I guess the "main event" hasn't really happened yet. As such, perhaps today was what watching Apollo 10 felt like?

No matter, I think this is one of those "I remember where I was/what I was doing" days.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What bad luck. Just as it was getting close. Hopefully they can get it going again in few months.

Dave Pearson said...

The cooling failure on the magnets? Yeah. :-(

Anonymous said...

We are looking at Spring '09 now, a restart would collide with the winter maintenance period.

On another note is your WS3600 bahaving Dave? Mine has been fine for a while but when it gets cold it usually goes bad, which is coming.

Dave Pearson said...

Yeah, mostly it's not as bad as it seems is it because of the winter closedown anyway. Still, it's a shame they've run into this problem.

As for the WS3600, generally it's behaving itself just fine. There's the occasional crash of the base station (a long running problem I've had) but, other than that, it's mostly okay. I can't say I've ever had problems with it when it's cold.