www.theblisspages.com - maasdam

about the Large Hadron Collider:

The 4.4 billion pound project aims to discover new particles and discover more about the Big Bang.

The 27 kilometre ring uses about 1,600 super-cooled electromagnets - or collimators - to guide protons round and eventually smash them together at 99.9998% of the speed of light, possibly creating mini black holes (or singularities).

They have managed to circulate proton beams both clockwise and anti-clockwise. It was to have been 21 October when they first accelerated two proton beams travelling in opposite directions to their full energy of 7 teraelectronvolts, and smashed them head on.

Nobody really knows what will happen then, with some scientists thinking it heralds the end of the world by quasar or black hole eating the planet from the inside, and others postulating the possibility of time-travel.

However, on 19 September, a failure, known as a quench, caused one hundred magnets to heat up by around 100 degrees and a tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel. That section of the LHC will have to be warmed to room temperature before repair can be effected, then cooled back to 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F). This will take about two months, but the collider is not used during the high-tariff winter months - it uses 120 megawatts - so Christmas is back on!