Well, today is to be the day where collisions are tried at 3.5 TeV on 3.5 TeV for the first time. Obviously, Yours Truly cannot miss this so I had Sylvia & Manni drive me to the control room (so they could keep the car). The scene was surprisingly tranquil, given the amount of publicity that had been done inside and outside of CERN.
Anyway, after the 8:30 meeting they have every morning (which was very short given the anticipation) we all trundle downstairs into the control room. Things go well until at 0.83 TeV the beams dump and the magnets ramp down again. Diligent hunting for the cause reveals that an electrical disturbance (seen site-wide and not just in the LHC) has apparently caused the trip. Unfortunately, with a machine like this it takes a couple of hours to get things going again so I decide to go and get some work done. Here is a video stream from CERN.
what? no Higg’s bosons or mini-black holes?