Celebrating official start of LHC (collisions at 7 TeV)

[Marshall]

Here's the New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/scien ... lider.html

Here is the official birthday video: live webcast. I watched it starting 16:20 Geneva time with the first 15 minutes of collisions. Bigwig interviews, in real time:

http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/

Wonderful moment. they did a fine PR job with it too.
Around 16:30 they could move in the collimators and take hands off the wheel.
Just let it run. Stable beams. That is when they can start accumulating statistics.

Each of the four detectors, i.e. experiments, was registering some 40-100 collisions per second.

[Lincoln]

The NYT article is correct in essentially all particulars, except, ironically, the correction at the end. Fabiola is indeed a woman. But she isn't a spokesman for CERN. She's the spokesman for the ATLAS experiment. In this context, spokesman doesn't mean "mouthpiece" as in "White House Spokesman". It means "supreme leader." Fabiola is the chief poobah of the ATLAS experiment, a collaboration comprising some 3,000 scientists. To get the top of an organization like that requires smarts and considerable political skills. This makes her one of the most powerful physicists currently at CERN. She can certainly make or break careers.