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When appliance of science can't stop the publicity machine
They say all publicity is good publicity.
So when the Hadron Collider was switched on last September amid predictions it could cause the end of the world, suddenly everyone wanted to know what a group of impossibly bright academics were doing in Switzerland.
The minutiae of the experiment remained baffling, but in essence it turned out they were trying to recreate the moment following the Big Bang when the Earth was created. Once they had, the hope was they would find the elusive Higgs boson, otherwise known as the God particle. By even the most exacting scientific standards, unlocking the secrets of the universe was an impressive endeavour, but when push came to shove the experiment failed to meet the hype.
The world didn't end, it didn't even shake and then nine days after the big switch on, the 4bn giant atom smasher stuttered to an inglorious halt.
Struggling to hide their blushes, those at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as Cern, estimated the repair bill to be
in the region of 14m.
It was, they said, just one of those things, but earlier this month when a piece of bread, believed to have been dropped by a passing bird, caused part of the machine to short-circuit, the whole project slid from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The baguette has now been removed and at around 4pm today, when the collider will be started up properly for the first time in 14 months, many will be keeping their fingers-crossed.
"The mood here is fantastic," said Stephen Myers, Cern's resolutely optimistic director of accelerators and technology.
"Everybody here is excited and exhilarated. We're all looking forward to seeing the machine doing what it's supposed to do. We've spent the last year worrying about joints and splices and repairs. Now we can start worrying about what matters most."
All eyes will be on Switzerland and as those involved in previous experiments have discovered to their cost, that's not always a good thing.
Back in 2003, Beagle 2 was Britain's contribution to the European Space Agency's Mars Express Mission.
While it was named after the boat which carried Charles Darwin on his voyages, the project went down in history for far less illustrious reasons.
With the TV cameras rolling, lead scientist Colin Pillinger and his team waited for the signal the craft had successfully landed and very soon their confident grins turned sour. Beagle 2 was nowhere to be seen. Having studied images transmitted from the planet, Pillinger, who bore the brunt of the criticism, later said he was sure the craft had come down very near to the intended landing site.
However, with the doomed project having cost 44m, 22m coming from government coffers, nearly wasn't good enough.
It's a lesson that those behind the Hadron Collider may yet have to learn. While few could doubt the ambition of the Cern team, some have already cast doubt on whether the cost will ever be worth the results and others have predicted that in more fiscally prudent times it will be the last machine of its kind ever to be built. All of which makes it even more important that this evening's switch-on goes without a hitch. The team have been thanking their many well-wishers via Twitter and are now hoping that by the end of next year it will have provided enough bangs for the bucks.
"There's an atmosphere of great anticipation here," said physicist Jim Virdee, who has spent the past year calibrating a vital part of the collider. We're cautiously optimistic and looking forward to finally getting going. We will soon be making inroads into new territory. We'll be looking for new things, but what we find depends on how kind nature is to us."
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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