Thanks for posting the link that I posted before. I started to suspect that the subject of vacuum fingers and resulting LHC delay is some kind of tabu and information is being censored.

Also, as I understand CERN council did not shift the schedule so I can surmise they either still evaluating the impact on the schedule or impact is negligible. The latter I doubt as beam on May 2008 is goal w/o any contingencies. So not to mention helium production.

I do not want to seem nasty, but what I hear from experts of all sort – first beam in the machine in September 2008. Now, in CDF it took 2 years to get physics quality data and that is with “old” detector and experienced personnel. Here we have humangous detectors and crowded collaborations so I do not see how the schedule of getting physics data can be more optimistic than at the Tevatron experiments.
So, this puts us in the beginning of 2011 when CMS&ATLAS are producing quality data.

Just to note: I am clearly and most certainly _not_ any sort of official spokes-blog-commenter or anything of the sort. I comment only because no one else did and because there really is no public relations official or any specific person responsible for answering people’s questions on blogs. So please take what I say with a grain of salt just as you’d take any other anon/pseudonymous commenter (or named one). (The main reason why I am pseudonymous is that if/when I say something stupid, I don’t want to end up pilloried for it!) Cheers.

Anyone else confirm or deny?

Even cooler is this rotatable view. The grid of white lines on black you see before the view comes into being reminds me of the holodeck on Star Trek.

http://atlasexperiment.org/atlas_photos/selected-photos/full_detector/fde_gen_1006_003.jpg