Today as the Germanwings flight fell to the earth over the French Alps, other news was silently being reported at the Large Hadron Collider. There was a short circuit.. Now the big firing up has been postponed, it is being reported..
This is how Reuters captured the event for historical record:
CERN scientists expressed disappointment at the last-minute problem, in just one of the underground machine’s eight sectors, which have been rewired and checked thoroughly during the closedown. But the research centre’s director general, Rolf Heuer, played down its significance.
“All the signs are good for a great run 2,” he said in a statement. “In the grand scheme of things, a few weeks delay in humankind’s quest to understand our universe is little more than the blink of an eye.”
Scientists and engineers at CERN, mindful of a serious leakage in 2008 which caused a delay of two years in the start-up for the first LHC run, have long insisted that there can be no rushing into full operations.