Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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MSNBC.com wrote:Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’
Large Hadron Collider likely to shed light on dark matter, dark energy
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By Jeremy Lovell

Updated: 2:29 p.m. CT Sept 7, 2006
NORWICH, England - Deep underground on the Franco-Swiss border, someone will throw a switch next year to start one of the most ambitious experiments in history, probing the secrets of the universe and possibly finding new dimensions.

The Large Hadron Collider — a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) circular particle accelerator — at the CERN experimental facility near Geneva will smash protons into each other at unimaginable speeds, trying to replicate in miniature the events of the Big Bang.

"These beams will have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier slammed into the size of a zero on a 20-pence piece," Brian Cox of Manchester University told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

"We are going to make mini-Big Bangs. There has never been such a jump in particle physics. It will go into an area that we don't really understand," he added.

Dark secrets
The fundamental goal of the massive machine is to answer the basic but crucial question of how matter was created at the birth of the universe.

"We don't know what 95 percent of the universe is made of — which is a bit embarrassing for a subject that claims to be fundamental," Cox said. "There is dark matter. It is all over the place, but we have no idea what it is.

"There is also something called dark energy, and that is an even bigger question. It makes up about 70 percent of the energy in the universe but again we have absolutely no idea what it is.

"It is an incredibly exciting machine. It will be turned on next year and run for at least a decade and probably 20 years, and the first results — if the machine behaves itself — should start coming out within a year," he added.

Tiny black holes
If the theories are correct, the machine will create tiny black holes that evaporate, and possibly even find particles indicating that the three dimensions known to mankind are just a fraction of those that actually exist.

"That would be an even bigger headline than the black holes. It could be that there is a whole new universe a millimeter away from our heads, but at right angles to the three dimensions that are here," Cox said.

"That would be a real paradigm shift — our relegation to a little sheet in a multidimensional universe. That kind of thing is really profound and will capture the imagination that perhaps the origin of mass won't, although it should.

"For the first time in many decades we have built a machine that exceeds our powers of prediction. New processes are bound to be discovered," he added. "We are truly journeying into unknown territory."

Cox dismissed worries that by adventuring into the unknown and creating tiny black holes, the machine could even threaten to destroy the planet.

"The probability is at the level of 10 to the minus 40," he said.
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I'm far from a doomsday theorist, but the last 5-6 sentances give me the creeps just a bit.
Are you propositioning me? I taste like candy and you want the recipe?

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I think this is essentially the backstory of Doom III.
"I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. . . . I'm not a schemer. I just do things."

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Heh. I heard about this earlier today. I think it's great across the board. Either, A) It works exactly like it's supposed to, blah blah, enormous cosmological information, huzzah, hooray! or B) It totally fucks up and destroys the universe, which is a seriously bitchin' cool trick any way you cut it. It's total coolness either way it goes. \m/
Ride me a worm, you're a rider...
Walk without rhythm and you're a strider of deserts...

This Week We Enter The Twilight Zone!!

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Well, not quite but this is fucking awesome anyway! I should've studied to be a theoretical physicist.
Scientists hope for surprises in Big Bang experiment
Mon 8 Sep 2008, 16:47 GMT
[-] Text [+]

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists involved in a historic "Big Bang" experiment to begin this week hope it will turn up many surprises about the universe and its origins -- but reject suggestions it will bring the end of the world.

And Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the CERN research centre, predicted that discoveries to emerge from his organisation's 6.4 billion euro (5.3 billion pounds) project would spark major advances for human society.

"If some of what we expect to find does not turn up, and things we did not foresee do, that will be even more stimulating because it means that we understand less than we thought about nature," said British physicist Brian Cox.

"What I would like to see is the unexpected," said Gerardus t'Hooft of the University of Michigan. Perhaps, he suggested, the Large Hardron Collider (LHC) machine at the heart of the experiment "will show us things we didn't know existed."

Once it starts up on Wednesday, scientists plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside CERN's tightly-sealed Large Hadron Collider to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.

Cosmologists say that that explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets -- and eventually to life on earth.

A key aim of the CERN experiment is to find the "Higgs boson," named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who in 1964 pointed to such a particle as the force that gave mass to matter and made the universe possible.

But other mysteries of physics and cosmology -- supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy among them -- are at the focus of experiments in the 27-km (17-mile) circular tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border.

FEARS OF DISASTER

CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research, says its key researchers -- and many ordinary staff -- have been inundated by e-mails voicing fears about the experiment.

There have been claims that it will create "black holes" of intensive gravity sucking in CERN, Europe and perhaps the whole planet, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a "worm hole" in space-time.

But a safety review by scientists at CERN and in the United States and Russia, issued at the weekend, rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

"The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," Aymar, who has led CERN for five years, said in response to that review. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."

Cox, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Britain's Manchester University, was even more trenchant. "I am immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around," he said.

When the experiment begins soon after 9 a.m. (8 a.m. British time) on September 10, disaster scenarists will have little to work on.

In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in just one direction. If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity. Any bangs at this stage, said one CERN researcher, "will be little ones."

(Editing by Laura MacInnis)
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Re: Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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ZDnet wrote:Stephen Hawking: LHC vital, absolutely safe

Since the geniuses at CERN have failed to assuage amped-up (if entirely unfounded) fears that the Large Hadron Collider is actually a doomsday machine, they have reached up to the mountain to get Prof. Stephen Hawking himself to address the issue. He appeared on BBC 4, as the Telegraph reports. Here’s what the man says:
[The LHC is] vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out.

The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on. The LHC is absolutely safe. If the collisions in the LHC produced a micro black hole - and this is unlikely - it would just evaporate away again, producing a correctoristic pattern of particles.

Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth’s atmosphere and nothing terrible happens. The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on.
In wry fashion, Hawking also predicted he will win a Nobel Prize if the LHC does in fact produce black holes.
If the LHC were to produce little black holes, I don’t think there is any doubt I would get a Nobel Prize, if they showed the properties I predict. However I think the the probability that the LHC has enough energy to produce little black holes is less than 1 per cent - so I’m not holding my breath.
Among the discoveries the LHC could produce: an explanation of dark matter and dark energy.
Another discovery that we might make is superpartners, partners for all the particles we know … they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together.
And asked to choose between the space program and the LHC, Hawking said that was a Sophie’s Choice:
That is like asking which of my children I would choose to sacrifice. Both the LHC and the Space program are vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn’t deserve the epithet “human.”

Re: Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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Telegraph wrote:Large Hadron Collider doesn't cause the end of the world - yet

The Earth didn't move, or even twitch. And it certainly didn't end - as you can tell by the fact you are reading this.

The Large Hadron Collider, the greatest atom smasher ever created, the world's biggest machine, was switched on today at CERN, the European nuclear research centre outside Geneva. And the result: rather less than earth shattering.

"Five, four, three, two, one, zero - nothing," joked Lyn Evans, leader of the LHC project, before a fuzzy dot appeared on a monitor.

It was 9.30am local time when a stream of protons was introduced into a short stretch of the circular 17-mile underground racetrack, buried in the Jura Mountains on the Franco-Swiss border.

The fuzzy dot registered their arrival, and then - well, not a lot. But to the scientists who have devoted their working lives to the project it was a moment of consummation.

Protons streams were then introduced into more and more of the machine until less than an hour later - far earlier than predicted - a stream whizzed around the entire circumference of the particle accelerator at a shade under the speed of light. The LHC had passed its first crucial landmark.

A host of Jeremiahs have been predicting that the collider, costing £5bn and a quarter of a century in the making, will destroy the world by spawning mini black holes which will sink to the Earth's core before gobbling it up

The scientists at CERN have dismissed the claim as ill-informed nonsense, and it certainly wasn't going to happen on today's inaugural test run, which did not include the sub-atomic collisions needed to produce an Earth-munching singularity.

Dr Evans, the coal miner's son from Aberdare, south Wales, who grew to lead the LHC project, the biggest thing in so-called Big Science, was so moved by the first completed circuit that he could muster only a few words.

Asked to speak, he said: "I'm too happy to continue." And he left it at that.

Earlier, he said: "This is really the biggest and most complex scientific project ever undertaken, and you cannot do a thing like this without engineers and applied scientists of very top quality."

Around him in the collider's control room, a few miles outside Geneva, scientists burst into applause.

They will now get a proton beam to travel in the opposite direction before beginning the work of smashing sub-atomic particles together in an effort to discover the greatest question in science: why we came to be.

John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist, who like Dr Evans has devoted most of his career to CERN, said: "I've been here 35 years and this is the culmination of that time. I've just completed a paper on what we might discover with the LHC. It's such an exciting time."

Meanwhile, William Hill celebrated Man's continued existence. It had taken £119 from punters willing to bet that September 10 2008 would see the end of the world.

A spokesman said: "Our standard odds are 1,000,000/1, but anyone wanting longer or shorter odds is at liberty to take them. A number of customers took us up; on our offer and have bet that the world will end as a result of the Large Hadron Collider experiment."

As the doom-mongers would say, there's still time. The LHC will not get going in earnest until the end of the year, when hopefully it will begin to produce data shedding light on the origin of the universe, the dark matter and energy that makes up its bulk and the existence or not of the Higgs boson - an as yet theoretical particle believed to impart mass to other particles.
video link - http://link.brightcove.com/services/lin ... 1466839008

Re: Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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oopsies....
BBC wrote:Collider halted until next year

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be shut off until spring 2009 while engineers probe a magnet failure.

The incident on 19 September caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak out into the experiment's 27km-long tunnel.

Officials said the time required to fully investigate the problem precluded a re-start before the lab's winter maintenance period.

The collider is built to smash protons together at huge speeds, recreating conditions moments after the Big Bang.

Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

"Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation on 10 September, this is undoubtedly a psychological blow," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), in a statement.

But he praised the skill and preparation of the teams involved in building the particle accelerator.

High priority

A spokesman for Cern told BBC News it was unclear at this stage when the collider could re-start operations after the lab's regular winter shut-down - which is partly done to save money on electricity during this period of peak demand.

A number of factors could affect when the lab re-opened, including prolonged cold weather.

"It's usually around late March or early April that we start re-commissioning the whole accelerator chain. The LHC being at the end of that chain," said James Gillies, Cern's director of communications.

"It will take us a while to get beams injected into the LHC, but I think it's fair to say this will be the priority for next year's start-up."

The accelerator chain prepares the beams of protons to be fired through the machine to make possible the collisions that physicists will use to study the make-up of our Universe.

The problem occurred last weekend, when a failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees.

The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel, which straddles the French-Swiss border.

Helium spill

The machine has more than 1,200 "dipole" magnets arranged end-to-end in the 27km-long, ring-shaped tunnel that houses the LHC.

These magnets carry and steer beams of protons which will whizz around the machine at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the "ring", these beams cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events.

Cern said the most likely cause of the equipment failure was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets.

This connection melted during testing of the machine and caused a huge leak of super-cool helium.

This helium is used to chill the magnets to a temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - which is colder than deep space.

This makes the magnets "superconducting", allowing them to generate the large magnetic fields required to steer the beams while at the same time consuming relatively little power.

A quench occurs when part of a superconducting magnet heats up and causes superconducting properties to be lost.

Hot spot

Cern has procedures in place to deal with quenches before they damage equipment, but in this instance a hot spot in the machine got out of control.

"It does seem that all the systems that are supposed to protect the machine in cases like this worked as far as we can tell. But obviously something went wrong," said Mr Gillies.

"The engineers have decided that in order to find out what really happened, they are going to have to go into the machine."

One of the LHC's eight sectors will now have to be warmed up so an inspection can be carried out.

Mr Gillies told BBC News that this was likely to take a week, and that engineers would then have a much better idea of how to fix the fault.

Each particle accelerator is a unique machine, so Cern says that teething troubles were to be expected with such a complex machine at the cutting edge of technology.

"Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases," said Cern physicist Peter Limon.

Re: Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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ZDnet wrote:Large Hadron Collider restart pushed back again

The flagship particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) is to be restarted in October as opposed to September.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been offline since an incident on September 19 last year, when an equipment failure caused extensive damage. James Gillies, Cern's head of communications, said on Monday that an internal schedule set in February to restart the experiment has been pushed back by two or three weeks, but that the restart would still commence in the autumn.

"The situation is a retreat from February," Gillies told ZDNet UK. "We had aimed for the end of September, but we're now looking at somewhere in October."

Cern has revised its LHC restart date a number of times. An original October 2008 estimate of an April 2009 restart was pushed back to the end of the summer, and was then revised to September.

The experiment, which is designed to improve scientific understanding of the nature of matter, had to be halted nine days after it was fully powered up, after an electrical malfunction caused a leak of liquid helium.

In May, details emerged that the malfunction had been caused by a faulty splice between two of the busbars that carry the superconducting cable in the LHC. Gillies said that the problem had not been in the design, but in the implementation of the electrical circuits for the quench system.

"It was a quality-control flaw," said Gillies. "Most of the splices were done well, but a few of the solder joints were not perfectly carried out. We know there were a number of faulty splices in the machine. We've repaired a few, and we'll be repairing more."

Cern has developed non-invasive ways of testing the electrical circuits in some of the systems, which have remained cooled to 80 Kelvin, said Gillies. In circuits where faults have been found, Gillies said that the surrounding sectors will be warmed to room temperature, and then the circuits will be repaired and tested again.

Gillies said that Cern won't be able to give an exact restart date until August, when testing is completed. Cern has not decided whether to run the experiment at 4 TeV or at 5 TeV. The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, runs at 1 TeV.

Re: Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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NYtimes wrote:The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he can repair his spaceship and go home.

Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I feel I know something about jinxes.
wow.

Re: Machine readied to create ‘mini-Big Bangs’

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Ars wrote:LHC reaches operational temps, collisions start in 5 weeks
With new safety measures in place, the staff at CERN has brought the Large Hadron Collider down to a temperature that's cooler than outer space, and is preparing to make a second try at producing the machine's first collisions. Some of those collisions may produce elusive Higgs Bosons—or something completely unexpected.

The Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, is gearing up for another attempt at actually colliding said particles, with the entire 27km ring having been brought down to an operating temperature of 1.9K—colder than outer space itself. This isn't the first time a startup of the massive device has been attempted; a bit over a year ago, particles had circulated within the LHC for over a week before it suffered a catastrophic failure. That failure has led to a series of new safety measures that should avoid similar problems, but other issues may crop up, simply due to the fact that we've never built anything quite like this before.

Of course, that may end up being a good thing. If the LHC can work its way up to its full potential, we may see things that are nothing like anything we've observed before.

The engineering
The LHC is built to accelerate particles to a speed that's so close to that of light that, for most of us, the difference could be considered a rounding error. That's fast enough that particles will run over 11,000 laps around the 27km circumference each second. Obviously, that creates a number of engineering challenges.

For one, you can't afford to have much else in the path of the particle beam, so the entire thing has to be run in a vacuum—the LHC will have an vacuum that's 10 times less dense than the atmosphere of the moon. The other challenge is that these particles will have a very strong tendency to travel in a straight line. To get them to actually run in a curved path, the LHC relies on an enormous collection of exceptionally powerful magnets to curve and focus the beam.

That's where the low temperatures come in, as the magnets require superconductive wiring to generate an appropriately strong magnetic field. That also requires prodigious amounts of electric current, which can only be delivered by wires that are also superconducting. (So much current is involved, in fact, that the LHC's operational schedule is built around the European energy supply.)

All of this means that when something goes wrong—even something small—there's a very real chance that it will go wrong in a big way. That seems to have been what happened in last year's failure, which was triggered by a major leak in the liquid helium coolant.

This is a serious danger because these, in turn, can lead to failures in the superconducting wiring and the magnets it feeds. Since the failure wouldn't spread evenly through the magnet, the carefully-balanced forces between the poles could became unbalanced, and the off-axis force can tear things apart.

Fortunately, there was plenty of opportunity to learn from this problem, and the newly revamped LHC has better monitoring equipment in its superconducting wiring, and a new system for dumping some of the energy out of the magnets once failures are detected. It remains possible that something new might pop up, but a repeat of the same issues seems far less likely.

The science
Once beams start running through the collider again, the idea is to run the LHC over the winter at half its rated power before bringing the collision energy up to its full 14 tera electron volts (TeV) sometime next spring. At that point, we should see... well, we're not entirely sure what. That's not to say that we have no idea what will happen; rather, there are a range of possibilities, some of which may be out of reach of the energies created by the LHC.

That point is worth elaborating on. Based on what we already know about the Universe, it's possible to create models that include things like the Higgs Boson (which conveys mass) and exotic dark matter particles. However, it's possible to have a number of models—in some cases, several entire classes of models—that are consistent with the data we have in hand. Some of these predict that it will take less than 14TeV to produce a Higgs Boson, others don't; a similar thing applies to dark matter.

So it's entirely possible that the Higgs will continue to elude us even after the LHC reaches its full potential. But that will also mean that, by failing to find it at 14TeV, we've eliminated a significant number of potential models, allowing physicists to focus in on the remainder. The flipside to not really knowing what we'll see is that reality may always surprise us with something either considered low probability—quantum black holes, anyone?—or something entirely unexpected.

Of course, all of this assumes that reality won't keep ensuring that the LHC breaks down, a prospect recently considered in The New York Times. Continued failures of the LHC may also constrain various models of reality, but only if we can accurately calculate the probability at which 27 kilometers worth of one-of-a-kind hardware will fail.