BBC Tries To Sell For LHC

"It is claimed that the LIGO and LISA projects will detect Einstein's gravitational waves. The existence of these waves is entirely theoretical. Over the past forty years or so no Einstein gravitational waves have been detected. How long must the search go on, at great expense to the public purse, before the astrophysical scientists admit that their search is fruitless and a waste of vast sums of public money? The fact is, from day one, the search for these elusive waves has been destined to detect nothing." -- Stephen J. Crothers, astrophysicist, August 2009

BBC: Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to run into 2012.

The LHC was previously scheduled to run until the end of 2011 before going into a long technical stop necessary to prepare it for running the machine at its full design energy of seven teraelectronvolts (TeV) per beam.

However, the LHC is now expected to run at its current energy of 3.5 TeV per beam until the end of 2012.

Earlier this month, a plan to extend the lifetime of a US particle collider - the Tevatron - until 2014 were blocked because of budget problems.

The Tevatron is now due to run until September this year. Unless that machine turns up evidence for the Higgs boson, the LHC will be left as the only machine in the world capable of searching for the elusive sub-atomic particle.