Collider Delay

After being plagued with technical problems, the partical collider meant to discover the origins of the universe will not run at full power for at least another three years. “The world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment will finally rumble into regular operation later this month, but it is going to operate at only half power for the next two years and then shut down for a yearlong repair session, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said this week. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was built over 15 years and at a cost of $9 billion to bang protons together in a search for primordial forces and new laws of physics. But the project has been plagued with problems. As a result, CERN’s engineers and scientists decided in a meeting in Chamonix, France, this week to play it safe and operate the collider at only 3.5 trillion electron volts, or TeV, the energy unit of choice in particle physics, for the next 18 to 24 months.”