Regarding 'doomsday merchants' the way I heard this sad story reported was in a tone which imparted 'Told you so. bloody expensive machine like that and what's the first thing it does? it breaksdown! Out for two months they say. What was the point?

I await with a modicum of dread the first clarion calls to be shouted over the parapet: "What else could we have spent the money on?" ( As happened on Newsnight the day it was activated)

The approach from the start in reporting this story in the news has struck me as peddling the nonsense and not carrying the inspiration of the scientific inquiry underway and now it is under repair the same crushing indifference just played to the cynicism about science.

The Cern spokesman who talks about warming it up to get in there, fix it, and then cooling it down again makes the sense of the delay if you know anything about super-conductivity and not that I expect the news to do much of this, but they didn't stop to make that point about low temperatures, it was just left unexplained.

The article above is slightly better - but the spoken news report was to my ears lacklustre.

I remember after it was switched on the news reader commented " it's not like launching a shuttle is it? when all the scientists looked rather pleased with themselves crammed into the LHC control room staring at banks of monitors.
That level of misunderstanding and disinterest typified for me the absence of enthusiasm which seems to infect the news when discussing the LHC.

And that makes me sad.

I hope the LHC is fixed soon and up and working again.