Nine days after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) turned on its proton beam for the first time, the LHC needed to be turned off. Over the weekend the agency running the Collider announced that an accident damaged the magnets that guide the beam, putting the LHC out of commission for at least two months as scientists work to repair the equipment.

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The purpose of the LHC is to get lots of protons moving very, very fast. The magnet system is the core piece of technology that makes this happen. More than 1,200 magnet sections, each weighing 10 tons, bend proton beams through vacuum pipes around the 17-mile-long underground tunnel near Geneva. Since these protons are going so fast—99.9999991 percent of the speed of light—superconducting coils of niobium and titanium must produce a magnetic field that’s about 200,000 times as strong as Earth’s to bend them.

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Today’s most ambitious scientific instruments are modern-day cathedrals in their size and complexity, if not in their purpose—these are, after all, structures built to shatter worldviews, not to reinforce them. And the grandest of all, pictured on these pages and fired into action today, will take us on a journey to one of the least-accessible places imaginable: the realm of quantum particles, less than a billionth the size of a single atom.

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The proton is a persistent thing. The first one crystallized out of the universe's chaotic froth just 0.00001 of a second after the big bang, when existence was squeezed into a space about the size of the solar system. The rest quickly followed. Protons for the most part have survived unchanged through the intervening 13.8 billion years—joining with electrons to make hydrogen gas, fusing in stars to form the heavier elements, but all the while remaining protons. And they will continue to remain protons for billions of years to come.

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If you’re one of the few people who still believes the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could accidentally destroy the world, I’d recommend you get your affairs in order before September 10th. CERN, the European physics agency that oversees the LHC, has announced that the proton beam in the world’s most powerful collider will be turned on for the first time this September.

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