Surely somewhere is written a law of nature stating that big projects inevitably take longer than planned.
The latest illustration comes from
Europe's premier particle physics facility CERN, whose planned Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) will be the most powerful machine ever built to probe the laws of nature once it actually turns on – a date now scheduled for May 2008, instead of later this year.
The $8 billion particle accelerator, currently under construction at CERN's facility outside Geneva,
Switzerland, was slated to begin low-energy tests as soon as
December. However, a series of small construction mishaps –
including, most damagingly, the failure of a supercooled magnet component provided by the U.S. in March – has apparently made that impossible.
Managers at the research facility had already said in recent weeks that startup operations would be pushed back to spring, essentially skipping several months of planned low-powered tests. Instead, the facility will begin ramping up from an initial low-power state next May, and ought to be running at full power by next summer, LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans said in a press release.
