All too soon after a beautiful beginning, during which all of its proton beams fired true, super-cooled substances have brought about our downfall once more, and it will be spring before the Large Hadron Collider gets turned on again. After a blown transformer caused a leak of liquid helium inside the world’s largest particle accelerator, it became clear that the problem, inside a part of the collider that runs so cold it will take weeks to return to room temperature, would not be fixed by the time the CERN staff leaves on it’s winter vacation in November. Stupid helium.
This means that dark matter, Higgs bosons or tiny black holes will be created by the LHC until the spring of 2009, leaving us all wondering, for at least a few months more, just what IS the nature of the universe?
But on the other hand, the thing didn’t implode the universe on activation, so for right now, it’s probably safe to call the situation a wash.
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