LHC discussed

The New York Times has a good article about the Large Hadron Collider. 

Here’s a key part:

But for all the euphoria in Geneva these days, the collider is still operating under the cloud of Sept. 19, 2008. That is when the electrical connection between two of the collider’s powerful superconducting electromagnets exploded, turning one sector of the collider ring into a car wreck and shutting down the newly inaugurated machine for more than a year.

As a result, the machine is operating at only half power, at 3.5 trillion electron volts per proton instead of the 7 trillion electron volts for which it was designed, so as not to blow out the delicate splices. At the end of 2011, all the CERN accelerators will shut down for 15 months, so that the suspect splices — some 10,000 of them — can be strengthened and an unknown number of magnets that have mysteriously lost the ability to handle the high currents and produce the high fields needed to run the collider at close to full strength can be “retrained.” ….

The collider will start up again in 2013 with proton energies of 6.5 trillion electron volts, but it is not likely to reach full power until 2014, if ever.