Science
CERN Announces Non-delay Delay
As we wrote a few months ago (yes, the science column has been getting short shift), the catastrophic failure of the 'inner triplets' in a vacuum test in March would likely delay the startup schedule of the LHC. With a press release this past week, CERN has both denied and confirmed our assessment by keeping the originally planned full startup date of May, 2008 but canceling the initial low-energy test run.“The low-energy run at the end of this year was extremely tight due to a number of small delays, but the inner triplet problem now makes it impossible,” said LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans. “We’ll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go.”This seems to us a foolish course of action which only serves to make management look 'effective' by keeping to the original full startup date. However, by tossing out the low-energy warm up run CERN risks finding out about more problems the hard way. Prudence suggests that with a machine this complex and costly, caution should be the order of the day and an abbreviated test run should be scheduled to kick the tires before driving the new Porsche off the dealer's lot.
