'Big Bang' collider restart delayed to beef up safeguards

Computerworld - A plan to add more safety features to the Large Hadron Collider will have the world's largest particle collider offline until next fall -- months later than the previously planned springtime relaunch.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, announced on Monday that physicists are slated to shoot particle beams around the collider's 17-mile underground, vacuum-sealed tube this coming September, with particle collisions expected to begin in October.

Late last September, CERN disclosed that a faulty electrical connection had knocked the Large Hadron Collider offline for two months. Then, just a few days later, the organization noted that the LHC would be down until this spring.

Before the collider's downtime was extended, James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN, told Computerworld that it would cost $21 million or more to get the LHC operational again. It's not clear what that figure is, now that work will continue on the machine through the summer.

The problem with the electrical connection occurred about two weeks after a faulty transformer was replaced in the collider. The transformer went down the day after the LHC's first test run, which Harvey Newman, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, called "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind."

In an online report issued Monday, CERN noted that the collider's downtime is being extended so engineers can add a safety system for the machine's magnet splices, install new pressure-relief valves, and apply tighter safety and scheduling constraints.

"The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for the physicists waiting for data," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "It is cautious, ensuring that all the necessary work is done on the LHC before we start up, yet it allows physics research to begin this year."

The LHC was built to shoot two particle beams around the tube in opposite directions on a collision course. Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles that should re-create conditions in the universe just moments after its conception, giving scientists the chance to answer one of humanity's oldest questions: How was the universe created?

Controversy has swirled around the collider and the experiments being done there. Rumors have been circulating around the Internet that the experiments might destroy the universe by accidentally creating a black hole that would suck everything and everyone into it.

Under the Big Bang theory, many scientists believe that more than 13 billion years ago, an amazingly dense object the size of a coin expanded into the universe that we know now. Some people fear that by smashing the particle beams together in the collider, a similar cataclysmic reaction might occur, vaporizing our planet or sucking it into a black hole that would shoot it out into an alternate universe.

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