The world’s largest particle collider, an 18-mile long behemoth machine called the Large Hadron Collider that lies 300 feet beneath the French / Swiss border, will be fired up on Wednesday.  Supporters say it will provide an almost endless stream of vital physics information, none of which I will ever understand.  There are a few who think that it will create a black hole under the earth that will travel to the planet’s core and implode it from within.

This doesn’t sound promising.

“We have had some last-minute problems,” said Dr Bailey, who has spent 30 years at Cern [the location of the LHC].

The LHC is a giant racetrack around which two streams of protons will run in opposite directions before smashing into each other. The debris is the important stuff, hopefully providing insights into the nature of mass, alternative dimensions and the dark matter and energy that is thought to make up most of the universe.

But to achieve the collisions you need lots of electromagnets to hem the protons in and keep them on target. And to get really powerful electromagnets you need to keep them cold – very, very cold. To within a few degrees of absolute zero, in fact.

This was the problem on Monday. The LHC’s enormous cooling system failed partially, raising the temperature to the intolerably high temperature of minus 269 degrees C or so.

There are going to be about 300 journalists present when the machine is powered up at 3:30 AM Eastern Time, so we’ll be sure to find out quickly that it’s all Bush’s fault when the thing explodes.

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