Wednesday, 10 September 2008
It worked!
At 0815BST Felix flicked the 'on' switch and 23 seconds later the little green light came on. Success! A momentous day indeed.
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Almost Ready!
It is a very exciting time in the lab at the moment. We are almost ready to switch on the the SHC (Small Hadron Collider). We have been building it for the last 48 weeks now (for our regular readers we apologise for the paucity of blog posts during that period) and have been anticipating this day for a very long time. The safety systems have been checked, the batteries have been charged and the acetate has been removed from the perspex safety shield. We are all set for switch on at o815BST tomorrow morning. The original plan was to switch on at 0830BST but it turns out that a similar project in France that we were, until now, unaware of is also being switched on at 0830BST. We decided to move our project forward by 15 minutes to hopefully give us an advantage regarding press coverage (we have already secured an article in the Deeside Piper - thanks Theo) .
It is admittedly frustrating to discover a similar project at exactly the same stage of completion across the channel. Science is not an exclusive domain and having the oppurtunity to share the results with scientists who are exploring the same avenues of discovery as ourselves is a bonus, but the timing is unfortunate.
The projects are not exactly the same; the Hadron Collider in France is, I believe, somewaht bigger then ours. Somewhere in the region of 27 kilometres. Our accelorator is a more modest 37 inches. I don't see this as a disadvantage however. We can fit ours in the back of the Bedford Rascal with ease and plan to run various particle accelleration experiments with it at various locations during the coming weeks. I think the results from our SHC and France's LHC will be very exciting.
We will provide further informaton and coverage of our SHC in coming weeks. In the meantime, don't forget to check out tomorrows edition of the Deeside Piper for a breakdown of our initial results.
It is admittedly frustrating to discover a similar project at exactly the same stage of completion across the channel. Science is not an exclusive domain and having the oppurtunity to share the results with scientists who are exploring the same avenues of discovery as ourselves is a bonus, but the timing is unfortunate.
The projects are not exactly the same; the Hadron Collider in France is, I believe, somewaht bigger then ours. Somewhere in the region of 27 kilometres. Our accelorator is a more modest 37 inches. I don't see this as a disadvantage however. We can fit ours in the back of the Bedford Rascal with ease and plan to run various particle accelleration experiments with it at various locations during the coming weeks. I think the results from our SHC and France's LHC will be very exciting.
We will provide further informaton and coverage of our SHC in coming weeks. In the meantime, don't forget to check out tomorrows edition of the Deeside Piper for a breakdown of our initial results.
Sunday, 13 January 2008
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