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The LHC is part of a process that tries to deliver us an understanding of the basic building blocks and forces of the universe. On one level, it’s about the very idea of discovery. One might wonder why all this cost and effort has been expended on such a device. The machine ended up being down until November of 2009, after which it has generally run as expected, briefly pausing to be upgraded in 2013 with a resumption of operations in 2015. Unfortunately, the LHC had its first major mishap just nine days later when what was most likely a faulty electric connection damaged 53 superconducting magnets in the array. The first successful test ran on September 10, 2008, as a beam of protons was fired around the length of the collider. The overall budget for the project came in at $9 billion.Įven with all the great minds and money involved, the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t been problem-free. The computer network required to run the whole thing is so massive that it has 170 stations stretched over 42 countries. It’s actually big enough that the tunnel crosses the border at four separate points. It’s the biggest machine on the planet, placed in a tunnel with a 17 mile circumference below the ground at the border of France and Switzerland. Built over the course of ten years between 19, the project required input from over 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries. The very existence of the Large Hadron Collider owes itself to a massive effort involving a cast of thousands. ( Brücke-Osteuropa Wikimedia Commons via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.) The CERN complex as seen from the Switzerland side. This is not the playground of the inexperienced amateur.
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The collisions allow observers to learn things about natural laws and forces, to address certain questions and theories about space and time, and even probe some of the deeper mysteries of the universe. Simply put, the collider allows scientists to make particles smash into one another so that they can study the effects. That’s the extremely simplified mission of the Larger Hadron Collider, which fired up its first test at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, ten years ago. And sometimes, we slam subatomic particles together just to see what happens. We crush minerals to examine their composition. We dissect organisms to see how they work. We take apart plants to see how they grow. Humankind breaks a lot of things in the name of science.