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Comment by RiderOfGiraffes | Hacker News Reader

Prof Brian Cox has just said on Twitter:

  > There is nothing wrong with LHC - lazy journalism.
  > Schedule announced in Jan, 18 months physics, 12 month
  > engineering shutdown afterwards

  > I just saw the BBC "news" story about LHC schedule -
  > I know I'm a BBC person but it's really shoddy! This
  > kind of thing really annoys me.

  > ALL particle accelerators have 6 - 12 month regular
  > shutdowns for maintenance and upgrades. That's how
  > complex machines are operated !

  > I repeat: #LHC will run for 12 - 18 months now. It will
  > then shut down, AS ACCELERATORS DO, for maintenance and
  > upgrades. ENGINEERING !!!

This is causing something of an uproar in TwitterSpace:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23LHC

Edited for layout and to add link to twitter search. And this comment.

View on HN

Indeed. It surprised me reading this BBC article, as we hadn't heard anything along those lines here at CERN. In fact, the Director General sent a note (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/msg-dg-1003...) to all CERN personnel, very much cheerful about the future, without mentioning any kind of unforeseen interruption in operations.

All levels of management at CERN are very open, both about successes and failures. Even more so about the latter: bad news travel fast and all that (and we are a quite close community here on-site).

So he needed only 4 tweets to make a coherent argument on Tweeter. Not bad.

Social media (straight from the source) trumps traditional media once again.

He wouldn't have needed to say anything if there was no traditional media. They were the ones that implied the LHC was broken.

In light of this, could someone change the title?

so it was never intended to run at full power without further engineering? or is the article wrong about it staying at half power?

from the article: So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year ...

All planned in advance. See, e.g., http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/01/29/...

Relevant quotation: "After a one to one-and-a-half year shutdown in 2012 to retrofit the rest of the machine and make other preparations, the LHC will attempt to double the energy, to 14 TeV in the center of mass, in 2013 and accumulate substantial physics data."

thanks!

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