Derailed particle collider feted with lavish gala

By SHARON GAUDIN, New York Times

While an orchestra played and dignitaries from around the world gathered, the Large Hadron Collider this week was formally inaugurated amid much fanfare, despite that the fact particle smasher has been broken down for the past month.
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Swiss President Pascal Couchepin and French Prime Minister Francois Fillon were flanked by international science ministers at Tuesday's gala, which was held on the Franco-Swiss border at the world's largest particle collider. Speeches and exhibitions were followed by a performance from the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

"Today is a day for CERN to thank its member states for their continued support for basic science, and for providing the stable framework that makes science of this kind possible," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar. "It is also a day for CERN and the global particle physics community to take a sense of pride in the achievement of bringing this unique facility from dream to reality, a process that has taken over two decades of careful planning, prototyping and construction, culminating with the successful circulation of the machine's first protons in front of a global audience on September 10."

But the pageantry and talk of dreams turning into reality come while the collider sits idle, sidelined last month by a faulty electrical connection. Scientists at CERN, the group that oversees the collider, initially predicted that the problem would only keep the collider offline for two months, but the estimate quickly was extended so the downtime now is expected to stretch throughout the whole winter.

The organization reported in September that it will need to investigate the issue further and do repairs. The repairs are unlikely to be completed before the project enters its "winter maintenance" period. That means particle beams won't be shot through the 17-mile long vacuum-sealed tube again until spring.

The wiring trouble surfaced less than two weeks after scientists conducted their first experiment. The collider shot two separate particle beams - one at a time - in different directions around the tube at speeds of more than 99% the speed of light. The initial experiment came 20 years after development of the collider began.

When the collider eventually smashes the beams together, it will create showers of new particles that should re-create conditions in the universe just moments after its conception.? Scientists predicted that the Large Hadron Collider will run particle-collision experiments for the next 10 to 15 years.

With the Big Bang theory, scientists largely believe that more than 13 billion years ago an amazingly dense object the size of a coin expanded into the universe that we know now -- with planets, stars, black holes and life.

A main goal of the collider experiments is to find the elusive Higgs particle, which is believed to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. Though its existence hasn't been proven, it's believed that Higgs particles are what give electrons their weight, for instance.

Scientists are also hoping that the particle collider will give them information about so-called dark energy and dark matter.

At the Tuesday inauguration, the collider's project leader, Lyndon Evans, said, "The LHC is the largest and most sophisticated scientific instrument ever built. There have been many challenges along the way, which have all been overcome one after the other. We are now looking forward to the start of the experimental program. The adventure of building the [collider] will end and a new adventure of discovery will begin."