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LHC Will Be Shut Down In 2011 Because of "Mistake"
astroengine follows up to a story about the LHC shutting down that seems to have hit all the news replicators today. "It's to be expected when pushing the frontiers of physics, but the LHC's epic 'will it or won't it' saga continues. Due to an unforeseen construction mistake, the LHC will cease experiments for a year (starting around late-2011) so repairs and upgrades can be carried out. For now, accelerated particles will have a maximum energy of 7TeV (half the power of the LHC's design maximum), which is ample for at least 18 months of experiments before shutdown."
As a physicist, all I can say is we've been asking for this kind of press.
When you hype the bejeezus out of the shiny new multi-billion dollar tool, it's reasonable for the people who paid for it to expect results. It is jarring when people hear for over a decade about the great results that will come out of an experiment, and then later hear that we have to spend ~50% of the time doing maintenance on the equipment, and the first few years just testing it. I know this is the way things work, this is the way my (much, much smaller) experiments work. This is not a complaint about the science, or being careful. This is a complaint about politics, funding structures and a lack of ability across fields to communicate effectively with the general public. We can't keep doing this to ourselves if we want the public to trust us. We have to manage the media better.
To begin with, the great achievement of the LHC *is* the LHC, not the search for the Higgs boson. It's enough that this is the most complicated, impressive, advanced piece of technology on the planet, and that it required input at the cutting edge from nearly every major field of physics. Just like the point of going to the moon was to go to the moon, not to bring back moon rocks.