CERN today announced that the LHC will run through to 21 December 2012 after a short technical stop at the end of 2011. The beam energy for 2012 will be 8.5 TeV, the maximum possible and this maximum output will be reached on the 21 December 2012, before the machine is switched off for maintenance.
This decision, taken by CERN management following the annual planning workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the laboratory's machine advisory committee, gives the LHC's experiments a good chance (50/50) of either discovering the elusive God particle, which will create a wormhole, which may or not be a portal from which aliens/supernatural beings/religous figures/time-travellers may re-enter Earth's dimension....or it could basically create a black hole within a blackhole, which would suck the earth into a vacumn, thus destroying the planet.
Either way, on 22 December the place will be closed for the Christmas break and any mess can be cleared up on 11 January 2013, when CERN staff return to work.
