SUPER COLLIDER COUNTDOWN

[Easy Ed]

Press release about CERN's test today.

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/Press.../PR08.08E.html

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today?s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC?s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine?s acceleration systems will be brought into play, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.