Last September, the world was abuzz with news and views on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN headquarters in Switzerland. Unfortunately, the experiments to try and find the so called God particle had to be temporarily put on hold. But not for long.

In early September 2008 CERN began to run its experiments to try and recreate the Big Bang and in the process find and prove the existence of the Higgs Boson. This God particle was conceived of by Peter Higgs in 1964 and has since become part of the Standard Model, the framework of modern theoretical physics.

The main thrust of the experiments was to collide particle running at very high speeds around the inside of the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator in the world. The LHC is located 100m (328 feet) underground, is 26,259m (16 miles) long, and contains over 9300 magnets.

There was plenty of scaremongering at the time about the experiments possibly leading to the end of the world as we know it due to a black hole being created which would suck Earth in. Rather than that cataclysmic event, all that happened was an electrical problem which stalled the whole project after only 10 days of it being operational.

Scientists and engineers have been repairing and improving the LHC since then. Now, according to a CNN progress report, CERN is close to being able to make a second attempt at recreating the Big Bang. Electricity will be restored again in July with the first proton beam being circulated by September.

In the end it will have taken a whole year to get the Large Hadron Collider fully operational again, which just shows what a delicate and inordinately complicated piece of equipment it is. In that time, the detectors on the LHC have been recalibrated using cosmic rays, with Bob Cousins, deputy to the scientific leader of one of the main experiments, claiming “they’ll be even more perfect than before.”

I wonder how long it’ll be before the positive and negative press reports begin once again in the build-up to the big switch-on. The release of the movie, Angles and Demons, based on Dan Brown’s bestselling novel will surely help as CERN, the LHC, and antimatter feature heavily in the plot.

It now looks as though if swine flu doesn’t get you, the LHC will in a few months time. We’re all doomed.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 3:25 am under Opinion, Science and technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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