Large Hadron Collider starts up, produces first collisions

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Boy, you go away for a weekend, and all sorts of stuff starts happeningat the biggest science fair the world has ever seen. The CERN collaboration's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sent beams ofprotonsflying around its 27 km length in each direction over the weekend, and Monday saw them run two beams simultaneously and slamthem into one another, producing the collider's first everparticle collisions. It would appear that any time-traveling quantum bird sentby the Higgs boson was unable to disrupt yesterday's run.

Last fall, the LHC team came close to reaching this same milestone, butfell short when a massivequench failure damaged a number of the superconductingmagnets that are used to help guide, accelerate, and squeeze the beams of particles as they move around the tunnel. This failure occurred onlynine days after the first particles were circulated, but was only one in a seriesofsetbacksthat the collider wouldexperience. Broken support structures, helium leaks, and frayedwiring all required that the equipment be warmed up from the frosty operating conditions of1.8 Kelvin. The most recent mishap involved a bird dropping bread into an electricaltransformer. All of this has caused some to speculate that the Higgs boson—theelusive particle that is the basis of mass—is actually causingthese failures to occur from the future. Presumably from its fortressof doom and solitude.

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