According to Symmetry Breaking:

CERN today announced that the laboratory hopes to run the LHC with 5 TeV beams with collisions in late 2009, producing data suitable for physics analysis. Eventually the LHC will run with 7 TeV beams . . . A CERN management meeting on Monday will determine whether this recommendation is accepted and the start-up schedule does indeed include physics operations in late 2009.

In CERN's regular weekly LHC update, they said that as part of the campaign to avoid another incident like the one that shut down the LHC in September ‘08, a new protection system is being installed in the LHC to detect tiny electrical resistances on the superconducting busbars between magnets. Materials and electronics necessary for the system are being ordered and manufactured, with installation of some components already underway.

via Symmetry Breaking

Things do not look good. Not only was the fire brigade called in to deal with the situation, but vacuum was lost as well as liquid helium. Here's what the BBC had to say:

The superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9C above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit. As a result of the [leak], the temperature of about one hundred of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C. A spokesman for Cern confirmed that it would now be difficult, if not impossible, to stage the first trial collisions next week. Further delays could follow once the damage has been fully assessed over the weekend.

Hopefully this will only be a minor setback, but we'll have to see what the LHC researchers say on Monday.

Hadron Collider Forced to Halt [via BBC News]

The Mist
In a remote Maine town, a thick fog envelops an area near a military base where a mysterious "Project Arrowhead" appears to have ripped down a wall between two dimensions. Unfortunately, it turns out that the universe in the cosmic string next door has really crappy atmosphere and is full of giant monsters with long teeth. And humans, known across the multiverse as a tasty snack, have lured a ton of those monsters over to chomp us up.

Anathem
I've already mentioned that Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem contains references to an LHC-esque device that was doing experiments with recreating the Big Bang. Little is known of this device because switching it on led to something the characters in the novel refer to only as The Terrible Events. Records are spotty, especially 3700 years after the fact, which is when the novel takes place. However, we do know that the Terrible Events probably began with LHC-style experiments, and ended with the science centers on planet Arbre being sacked by outraged citizens. The planet spirals into a dark period of war and chaos before completely reorganizing itself and outlawing massive physics experiments.

Earth
In David Brin's 1990 novel Earth, humans create a microscopic black hole that accidentally drops into the core of the planet. If you'll recall, one of the things that the LHC might do is create tiny black holes that exist for a few nanoseconds. Brin imagines a scenario embarrassingly similar to the one in cheesy flick The Core, where the Earth's core stops spinning and gravity gets fucked.

Quiet Earth
In this classic New Zealand apocalypse flick, a man awakens to find himself on an alternate Earth where only a few humans still exist. He suspects the government project he was working on might have had something to do with the change, and his suspicions grow as reality becomes less and less stable. In some ways, the physics mayhem is really a backdrop to the human mayhem that our main characters find themselves in. Even though the tissue of reality is ripping, there are still enough humans left to have a love triangle.

His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman's trilogy that begins with The Golden Compass is about how a few people have learned to use a special knife to cut windows between dimensions. Unfortunately, the windows are causing a shortage of a basic substance in the universe called (depending on your dimension) Dust or dark matter. The overarching quest of the series is to discover what Dust is and why it's running out, which eventually leads the characters to a physics lab in contemporary Oxford.

Donnie Darko
Sure, Donnie Darko is a weird movie that might just be about schizophrenia induced by the Scariest Bunny Suit Ever. But if you take it at face value, Donnie Darko is about the apocalypse that might be unleashed when Donnie manages to travel through time and prevent a death that was supposed to happen. The question is, whose death was supposed to happen? And can you travel through time when you are dead? Whoa, man. Luckily Jake Gyllenhaal is so smoking hot in this movie that you won't pay attention to the plot when he's on screen. And he's on screen a lot.

Doctor Who
Remember in the first season of the new Doctor Who when we had A Very Special Episode called "Father's Day" with Rose going back in time to save her dad's life and accidentally unleashing a bunch of timespace-rending bat things? Obviously the Doctor travels though time, so he and his companions are constantly screwing up the timeline. But apparently that only results in a possible destruction of Earth when Rose goes back to rescue her father from the fatal car accident he suffered when she was a baby. The two contradictory timelines cause monsters to appear and the world to begin ending in a very Buffy-esque way. How will Rose and the Doctor stuff those bats back into the time crack?

SciFi Channel's Flash Gordon
I know all of you loved SciFi's Flash Gordon series — especially in the good old days when I recapped it every week — but you have to admit it's a perfect example of physics experiments that destroy the world. Flash's dad and the dorktastic Dr. Zarkov have invented these devices that allow them to open a doorway between Earth and Mongo. But it turns out their dimension-tripping is destroying the fabric of reality, not to mention getting Ming all excited about stealing Earth's water. One of the big plot arcs from the only season of this tragically-canceled show was trying to stop everybody from opening up dimension doorways because Something Bad would happen.

A Sound of Thunder
Any number of lameass time travel movies show this most basic of physics experiments — moving around in time — destroying the world. But Sound of Thunder is a standout for two reasons. One, it's based on a famous Ray Bradbury short story, which gives it literary cred. And two, it shows that time travel can completely destroy the human world rather than just causing the Nazis to win or Rome to never fall. When our time travelers return to the present after stealing a butterfly from the primeval era, they discover that dinosaurs have won the evolutionary war and are wiping out the last of humanity.

Lexx
Possibly the most awesome Canadian scifi series ever made, Lexx is about a crew of troublemakers on board the Lexx, a planet-eating sentient spaceship. One of the major subplots in Season 4 involved determining the mass of the Higgs-Boson, which all the characters casually refer to as something that "everybody knows" will cause entire planets to be destroyed. Starting tomorrow, the LHC will be conducting tests to determine the mass of the Higgs-Boson. This might be why robot head 790 pointed out that Earth is of the class of planets that usually destroys itself by war, or by unintentionally smooshing itself into a pea-sized object by attempting to measure the mass of the Higgs-Boson.

The rules are simple. Take a drink of your favorite beverage whenever one of the following occurs:

• A proton crosses the border between Switzerland and France.
• A magnet quench in a superconducting magnet causes all the liquid helium to boil away.
• A Higgs boson is detected (2 drinks).
• Scientists learn the secrets of the universe and go insane (2 drinks).
• A miniature black hole forms (2 drinks if it absorbs Switzerland).
• Strange matter is created (weird, unusual or eccentric matter doesn't count).
• A petabyte of data is generated.
• Someone sings the chorus of the LHC Rap.
• The Super Proton Synchrotron reaches 300 gigavolts (2 drinks if it hits 400 GeV).
• The Compact Muon Solenoid finds something that completely alters our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe.
• Flight 19 suddenly appears over Geneva.
• Particle superpartners are found to have natural supersymmetry.
• An intern confuses muons with gluons.
• The experiment goes awry and someone ends up with superpowers.
• Aliens show up and make us turn off the LHC before we implode reality.
• Scientists go back in time (2 drinks if they create a paradox).
• Someone says "Big Bang."
• Particles crash into each other (2 drinks if there are Batman-tyle visual sound effects, like "Pow!" and "Zap!" when it happens; feel free to construct your own).
• Someone says, "What's a hadron?"
• Scientists access another dimension (2 drinks if that dimension is occupied entirely by Donna Summer impersonators; 3 drinks if denizens of said dimension eat the scientists; note that these two conditions are not mutually exclusive).
• Someone on TV questions the amount of money spent to build the LHC.
• Someone on TV worries that the LHC will destroy the world.
• The world ends (drink whatever you have left).
• Scientists prove string theory (3 drinks because we'll all pretty much have to take their word for it).
• Someone uses the term "beam pipe" in a pickup line.

Numerous studies have found that the LHC poses no risk of creating reality-devouring exotic matter or world-shredding mini black holes, but still the messages of anger and concern pour into CERN headquarters. Mixed in with the hand-wringing have been a few actual death threats, notably directed at physicist Frank Wilczek of MIT. Scientists have noted that cosmic particles bombard the Earth constantly, yet they haven't caused an apocalypse yet, so there's really nothing to worry about. I guess "the potential end of the world" sticks in people's minds better than "the search for the Higgs Boson."

Of course, when the Telegraph quoted Professor Cox's vitriolic paroxysm, they used asterisks to disguise the word he actually used. So what's a t***? Some obscure physics term, no doubt. Image by: xkcd.

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider. [Telegraph]

The lyrics, plus an mp3 version, can be found here. Next time you're rollin' in your Escalade, crank up the bass and let the people know:

The protons and the lead will rock you in the head.

Image by: CERN

We love a good science fiction story, but sometimes reality is just as strange. While we may have seen 2001 come and go without an actual space odyssey, the last eight years have been full of events that - had they not actually happened - could easily pass for science fiction. Here are five real life events that still seem like they've come straight from the set-up of a big budget summer blockbuster.

Estonian Cyberwar: It may not have been the biggest cyber attack ever, but it's probably the strangest. Last year, Russian hackers got so ticked off when the tiny nation of Estonia digs up the remains of Soviet war heroes that they shut down Estonian newspapers, banks, and practically the entire government by using denial of service attacks on a huge scale. It's still unknown whether the culprits had help from the Kremlin as some have suggested, but given Russia's staggeringly large population of hackers it's not impossible that the crippling shutdown of an entire country was perpetrated by independent citizens. And you thought Live Free Or Die Hard was far-fetched.

CERN: You need only look at pictures from inside the Large Hadron Collider to realize the incredible, science fictional scale of the apparatus. The story of this machine has all the makings of a hard SF story: particles accelerating to truly dangerous energies as they swoop under the border of France and Switzerland, scientists eager to confirm their various theories and discover new, ever more ephemeral particles, and of course the ever present worries that the European research organization’s experiments will blow up the world! All we need to complete the set-up is some rogue scientist who plans to use the invention to hold the world to ransom and a sexy spy out to stop them.

Space Tourism: Movies and television have long promised that space travel will eventually be available to private citizens, but the real-life development of space tourism had been agonizingly slow until recently. Now, however, aspiring astronauts can book a weeklong stay at the International Space Station for around $20 million, or take advantage of offers to shoot you around the moon for a mere $100 million. Plus, it always helps to have an eccentric billionaire like Sir Richard Branson in the mix. Maybe he can work on bringing the price down for those of us who don't have a few million lying around.

SARS, bird flu, and the other near-pandemics: Outbreaks of crazy viruses have long been an SF favorite, and even though this century has conspicuously zombie-free - so far - we have had some pretty worrying scares. It isn’t hard to imagine race-the-clock medical thrillers hidden amongst the investigations, all those mysterious men in yellow hazmat suits, the mass slaughtering of potentially infected poultry, et al. We just see the headlines, of course; there could be dozens of extraordinarily science fictional stories hidden in the 21st century, and we might never know. Who's to say that A&E's The Andromeda Strain wasn't just a particularly well-lit documentary?

9/11: Yes, I know, but hear me out: Though the reality of it is all to apparent now, before 2001 the idea of nineteen guys armed with little more than box cutters and a plan causing so much destruction and changing the world so easily would have seemed a bit unbelievable even as the stuff of Hollywood. Science fiction tends to imagine and speculate about things that have never happened before, changes the world has never seen. 9/11 was, for most of us, precisely that sort of unexpected in the most horrific way possible.

The Large Hadron Collider, once operational, will fire beams of protons into each other at energy levels never seen on Earth. We don't really know what will happen when experiments begin (or we wouldn't bother running the experiments), and there are fears that all kinds of weird, hypothetical particles could be created that will devour the planet, or that a small but stable black hole will begin consuming all nearby matter. Steve Giddings, Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara, studied the risks. His conclusions:

• The chances of a microscopic black hole forming are impossibly small.
• Cosmic rays smash into particles all the time at very high energies. We probably would have noticed if the universe was being chewed up by an endless torrent of ravenous mini black holes.
• In the incredibly unlikely event that a microscopic black hole forms, it would exist for "a nano-nano-nanosecond." Not long enough to do any damage, in other words.
• Giddings even studied what would happen if a long chain if bizarre events occurred, and a stable micro black hole formed. The result would be...nothing much. Even a stable microscopic black hole would be harmless.

If The Large Hadron Collider Produced A Microscopic Black Hole, It Probably Wouldn't Matter. [Science Daily]

• 
  
• The Large Hadron Collider was conceived in the 1980s, and eventually approved by CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), in 1994.
• 
  
• Some of the questions the LHC hopes to answer are: What is mass? What is 96% of the universe made of? Why is there no more antimatter? What was matter like within the first second of the Universe's life? Do extra dimensions of space really exist? Are stars just pinholes in the curtain of night? Okay, we stole that last one from Highlander. Sorry.
• 
  
• The LHC uses the tunnel originally built for the Large Electron-Positron Collider between 1983 and 1988, although it has required massive changes, including the construction of giant underground caverns to hold the large detectors for the system. Construction on those began in 1998.
• 
  
• The total cost of the LHC is not known yet, but it is estimated to be somewhere between five and ten billion dollars, which is quite a range. They've suffered many overages and setbacks since the project became active, CERN had its operating budget scaled back, and there were inaccuracies during construction.
• 
  
• In 2005 a technician was killed inside the tunnel when a crane load was accidentally dropped on him. If there's a movie waiting to be written about a ghost in the machine, this is it.
• 
  
• In March 2007 a pressure test involving several magnets failed, and as a result they had to push the planned startup date from November 2007 to May 2008.
• 
  
• The circumference of the LHC is 26,659 meters, making it the largest machine in the world. It also qualifies as the largest refrigerator in the world, with over 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen being used to pre-cool the 9300 magnets to 80 degrees Kelvin. Then they get pumped full of 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them all the way down to 1.9 Kelvin. Just remember to write your name on your lunch.
• 
  
• When it's operating at full power, protons will zoom around the track at 11,245 times per second at 99.99% of the speed of light. It boggles the mind! Screw collisions, why don't they just shoot for some time traveling?
• 
  
• Speaking of time travel, the devices inside the LHC can measure the passage time of a particle to accuracies in the region of a few billionths of a second.
• 
  
• The tunnel has to be kept at a near-complete vacuum so the protons don't run into random gas molecules. As a result, the interior atmosphere of the LHC will be 10 times less pressure than on the surface of the moon.
• 
  
• While the interior of the tunnels are kept chillier than the vast reaches of deep space, whenever the protons collide they will generate heat up to 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun.
• 
  
• Each experiment conducted in the LHC will generate enough data to fill 100,000 dual layer DVDs every year, which is a heck of a lot of info. They've built a distributed computing network around the world called the Grid which will process all of this data.
• 
  
• The LHC could receive an upgrade after ten years, turning it into the Super LHC. This basically involves an extremely expensive upgrade to their Super Proton Synchrotron to increase the luminosity.
• 
  
• Some of the things that people think might go wrong with the LHC are: Miniature Black Holes - these exist for only fractions of a second and then decay, but naysayers worry that they'll form up into a massive black hole that will start chewing up France. Strangelets - these are hypothetical forms of strange matter that could possibly turn everything they touch into more strangelets, meaning the Earth would become entirely made up of strange matter. We think that's already happened. Magnetic Monopoles - another theoretical particle that only has one magnetic pole, and could cause atoms to change into different types of matter, causing another chain reaction that would overtake the Earth.
• 
  
• With any luck, everything will be switched on in May, and protons will start slamming into each other this summer. Of course, look for the movie version where Shia LaBeouf runs into the control room, mere milliseconds before startup, fights off the guards, and powers everything down and saves the planet. It'll be out sometime soon.

Holy crap. Seriously, I am in awe. This is the world's largest superconducting solenoid magnet. I want one for the outside of my apartment building. Photos by Martial Terzzini/AP.