LHC starts beaming Saturday: Collisions Dec 3

Reg reader unlocks secret CERN web

CERN documents reveal First Beam and First Collision dates

Chris has made a more than reasonable effort to check with the various CERN owners of the pages he links to that they're happy for everyone to pile in - we've seen the correspondence. The only ones who weren't terribly chuffed were the ones at the CMS experiment, who wrote:

Whilst you are right that nothing you link to is classed by CERN IT as "private" or "security risk", I don't see any reason really to have more than a link to the CMS Public web site from your portal.

Subsequently the "CMS TV" links from Chris' Portal were secured, which is a shame because they looked like fun. But as of press time everything else is still good to go.

Chris' researches have already told us that the current plan is for the initial full beam of the new LHC era to be fired up by the first shift (midnight to 0800) on Saturday. CERN documents he has unearthed and passed to us go on to say that "over the weekend we would hope to injection, circulate and capture both beams working with one beam and then the other".

That's already a lot more than the CERN PRs have released to the ordinary rubbish media. Better still, the internal CERN plan specifies that the first actual collisions - the real start-up, if you like - are set for December 3, at a relatively gentle 450 giga-electron-volts.

The web having been invented at CERN, this all seems hugely appropriate to us.

But what does Chris personally hope to get out of all this, one might ask? Well, in his own words:

This will provide me many man hours of entertainment watching the Tin Foil Hatters on the forum decry the end of the world.

Plus it's very cool that I can contribute to everybody being able to watch the AWESOME science going on at CERN.

We couldn't agree more. ®