As Adam noted yesterday, the date now being cited by the CERN Press Office for the restart of the LHC is early summer. Unfortunately, there are two reasons why I’m personally not inclined to take this new estimate too seriously.
First, CERN has an increasingly long history of being over-optimistic on LHC start-up times. At one time it was scheduled to run in 2005. Even into 2007, the official schedule said there would be a low-energy run that year; but in the end, it didn’t start running until almost a year later. After the accident on September 19, CERN initially announced that the incident would lead to minor delays, then that it would take several months because of the winter shutdown, and now we have the revision that the repairs will push into the summer. Obviously some of these delays were due to unforeseen circumstances, for example the recent accident itself. But even if all the schedule changes are due to equally-unforeseeable (if less dramatic) issues, the sheer number of revisions seems to suggest that CERN ought to take a step back and consider how it does contingency planning and the certainty with which it expresses its scheduling announcements.
Second, this new announcement is not accompanied by a new detailed schedule. What would be useful for the experiments is more information about the damage and a full discussion of how the repairs will proceed, along with a range of possible start times depending on how well still-unknown factors turn out; this would let us do better contingency planning for our own maintenance work, not to mention our careers. It’s very possible that CERN doesn’t yet have all the information about what repairs will be necessary, but then why the new announcement? What use can it have beyond publicity, and what meaning can anyone possibly extract from it?
I should be clear here what I mean when I talk about “CERN” making announcements. Obviously I’m not talking about the technicians, engineers, and physicists who work on the LHC; I’m sure they’re doing a great job, and of course they don’t write the press releases or talk to the media. I’m also not referring to anyone in particular in the CERN Press Office or Management; the Press Office does a lot of good work on outreach, including putting forth an extraordinary effort for First Circulation Day, and the folks who write the press releases aren’t necessarily the ones who decide what they say. The truth is that I simply don’t know how decisions about these announcements are made, or who makes them. But somehow the official system for disseminating information is falling short of providing what the physicists working here need or what the public deserves.
Surely this is what “The Management” does? I would guess that Lyn Evans as Head of the LHC has to make these decsions based on the information that he is given from the various experts. I should also imagine there is a fair amount of political and financial pressure being applied. It must be fairly hard for some governments to justify spending large sums of money in these Credit Crunch times on a project that has yet to prove it self. It is too easy for politicians to be very short termist and suggest that the money would be better spent on a local hospital (for instance) than on the possibility that this project may or may not discover new particles etc. More so if the politicians have no concept of the working or time scales involved with a project like this never mind understanding the complexties of particle physics. In my experience of working in large organisations information flow from the top is very poor (and very vague) and more often than not you find your information from alternate sources and the good old “Rumour Mill”. It will be interesting to revisit this in a years time and see how close the actual dates came to the projected dates. In the meantime keep up the good work, and as always a pleasure to read.
oh seth. that goes straight to my heart.
I refer you to some recent news
Late summer at the earliest and possibly not till 2010 if pressure-relief valves are installed on all cryostats.
Patience is a virtue so all physics enthusiasts will have to be very virtuous.
Regarding the recent news, the latest word from CERN is that “option A” — i.e. startup during the summer, with Jörg Wenninger estimating late summer — is the choice that will definitely be pursued. Further discussion and speculation may be found here.