Seems like the re-start of the LHC will be celebrated with a little press conference in our new remote control room at DESY in Zeuthen next Tuesday … which I will join, of course ;)
Let’s see what’s going to happen …
[Update Mar 28th] CERN has set up a Live Webcast from 8h30 to 18h15 on Tuesday! [Update]
It’s Sunday and it’s five in the morning. The alarm goes off.
Yeah right, that was the start of my day … and got better. I had a guy sitting next to me o the plane, that seemed to be of pure garlic!? Dunno … I kinda like garlic, but this guy was pushing it. To round off the two hour flight experience I had a group of young(ish) school kids/teens sitting behind me, talking sh** during the whole flight … hmm perfect.
Arriving in Rome I was allowed to witness the most inefficient airport shuttle ever, finally bringing me from Ciampino to the central station, where I had to walk my heels off to get to the station toilet.
Anyways … after this I actually managed to have a short walk around the city, see the Colosseum and some other parts of the Roman Forum. Unfortunately it was raining a bit and I had only three hours time before I had to catch my train.
Arriving in Perugia I was drawn back into the rhythm the day started by the absence of the shuttle bus that was supposed to pick me up and the fact that I had to find and try four public payphones to finally have one that would not say that I am not allowed to pay with coins in the moment …
Just on time for the LHC start-up the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in collaboration with the German institutes working on the LHC and it’s experiments launched a new website called Weltmaschine.de (only German though).
It is another piece of an outreach campaign that started with the very successful LHC-Train that was cruising the S-Train ring in Berlin for the Long Night of Science in June.
The Grand Finale is an exhibition in the so far unused subway station Bundestag in the period from October 15th to November 16th.
The LHC start-up is approaching … to be precise, it’s tomorrow!
This morning at 6:07 am a local radio station was broadcasting an interview with my boss Klaus about this. The according article along with the recording can be found here (German only though).
In addition the FAZ (a German newspaper) featured ATLAS in a nice article today.
You can access it online here (again German only).
Also the news site Heise.de as well as Technology Review featured the LHC in articles today : Heise’ article, TR’s article (again German only).
Yesterday (June 14th 2008) I was guide in the LHC Express at the Science Night in Berlin.
The LHC Express was a pimped city train (S-Bahn) that was circling the city ring from about 16h00 till 1h00. After my three hours shift, explaining the LHC and it’s connected experiments as well as the physics behind all this to the visitors/public, I had problems speaking …
With some minor issues/problems/difficulties I still think it was a big success.
Links in German: Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften, S-Bahn
