I love science. I love reading about new discoveries. Even though it isn't my own field of study, I love physics. So naturally, I'm extremely excited that the Large Hadron Collider has been successfully restarted. Originally planned to start up in September last year, the collider suffered a failure in one of the giant superconducting magnets used to guide the stream of protons around the collider's 27 kilometer loop. An electrical fault caused a large amount of liquid helium, used to cool the magnets to their operating temperature of 1.9 K, to leak into the collider's tunnel. For the past fourteen months, scientists and engineers have been repairing the superconducting magnets, and taking advantage of the time to install upgrades on the instruments and software. CERN's (European Organization for Nuclear Research) director of accelerators , Steve Myers, reports that the project is now more advanced than it was after the first five days of experiments last year. But now, as of Friday, the enormous particle accelerator has been successfully restarted. On Friday, a single beam of protons was directed around the loop of the collider, and is now circulating inside the machine. Following the success of the clockwise beam, a counterclockwise beam was injected and successfully guided around the loop. As long as all continues to go well, scientists will direct the beams together in the next few days, producing low energy collisions. Provided that these experiments go well, the energy of the beams will be increased in early 2010, allowing experiments searching for the elusive Higgs boson to begin. The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle crucial to our current theories of physics. Current theories predict the existence of the Higgs boson, but we have yet to find one. The high energy collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider should, in theory, finally prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson. This may not sound very exciting to those who aren't interested in physics, but to scientists and those who follow their research, this is the biggest news in physics right now. All things considered, these are very exciting times.
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