Keystone / AP
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, right, the Director General of CERN, spoke at a press conference in Switzerland Monday to discuss the restarting of the Large Hadron Collider since its failure and subsequent shutdown over a year ago.
And -- at least at the time of this writing -- the world has not come to an end.
The Large Hadron Collider, a particle beam accelerator located near Geneva, is supposed to help uncover the mysteries of the universe by re-creating the conditions that existed immediately after the big bang. Not unlike other science projects of its ambition and expense, it has been plagued by technical glitches and delays, most recently when a short circuit earlier this month was linked to a bird carrying a piece of baguette that it apparently dropped on the open-air substation that powers the collider's cooling system. But it has also been hounded by the unique problem of doomsday theories. An early claim was that the massive atoms smasher could create a mini-black hole that would end life as we know it.
Defenders of the Large Hadron Collider hit back, with one noting that the chances of that scenario happening were the same as the collider disgorging "man-eating dragons."
One of the wildest theories in circulation is that someone or something from the future is using time travel to purposely sabotage the machine to prevent it from operating. There have also been very real lawsuits filed to try to block work on the accelerator.
As of Monday, the collider's fourth day back in operation, two proton beams in the facility were racing around in opposite directions. Scientists at the Swiss facility expect to ramp up work over the coming months. The plan is finally to start experiments using high-energy beams by the end of January.
A primary goal of the Large Hadron Collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson -- sometimes called the "God particle" -- a theoretical particle that scientists believe may help explain the origin of mass in the universe. Scientists involved in the project, however, often chafe at the use of the term "God particle," pointing out that the label distorts the scientific importance of the Higgs boson and the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider.
Yet it's talk of God particles and fears of apocalypse that have done something no organized PR campaign could have. They've made the Large Hadron Collider one of the few science projects to receive large-scale media coverage. "It's great to be on the front pages of newspapers," says James Gillies, a spokesman for the Large Hadron Collider, "as long as we're there when we've got the right reasons to be there."
To that end, Gillies is dismayed to see the conspiracy theories spread to the mainstream. "I find that annoying."
It also doesn't help that the real science that underlies the project is not so easily explained, notes Tom LeCompte, a physicist from Argonne National Laboratory who is working at the facility.
"A crackpot is not constrained by facts," he says. "They can go on and on, but to shoot [the theory] down takes work. There is no way to kill it."
