The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October. A short technical stop has also been foreseen over the Christmas period. The LHC will then run through to autumn next year, ensuring that the experiments have adequate data to carry out their first new physics analyses and have results to announce in 2010. The new schedule also permits the possible collisions of lead ions in 2010.

In Chamonix there was consensus among all the technical specialists that the new schedule is tight but realistic.

“The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for the physicists waiting for data,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “It is cautious, ensuring that all the necessary work is done on the LHC before we start up, yet it allows physics research to begin this year.”

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.

Well if they count everything we will be approaching a 4, yes FOUR, trillion dollar federal budget. The first $1T budget was in 1987. $2T came in 2002. $3T came in, your choice 2006,07,08 as much of the war spending was not 'on budget'. Tack on $900 B and we are at $4T. Note that 30 years ago, in 1979 the budget was about $500B.

This year federal spending will be close to 28% of GDP. The prior, non-WWII peak was 23.5% in 1983. And to put these in perspective, in 1930, Federal spending was 3.4% of GDP, in 1950 15.6%. Is the problem really that the government is now spending too little?

There are two problems at the moment. Unsustainable spending on entitlements and the prevailing need "to do something". We all know about the first. The second though is left in the dustbowl of history - FDR (and Hoover before him). Contrary to popular belief, the massive post 1929 crash / depression time spending did little to change the picture. They were also suffering from the 'we have to do something' problem. While there was an initial rebound in the economy in 1934-36, things tanked again in 37 and 38 with unemployment going back to 1934 levels. Spending however increased 6% in 1930, 8% in 31, 20% in 32, 42% in 34 and 28% in 1936. There is no clear link between the massive increases in spending and resultant changes in gdp and employment.

I’m not a great fan of books that end with cliff-hangers. So you could go in anywhere. One way would be to start with ‘Vacuum Diagrams’, a collection that sets out the overall story of the universe. Then ‘Timelike Infinity’ and ‘Ring’ which tell the story of Michael Poole, then ‘Raft’ and ‘Flux’ which are really incidents against the wider background, and finally ‘Destiny’s Children.’"