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Much beset by magnet quenches, birds, bread, black holes, evil time travelers, and fools, the Large Hadron Collider successfully came online and orbited a proton beam today!

Photographs of the triumphant moment are within.

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A bird dropping a baguette temporarily shut down the $5 billion Large Hadron Collider earlier this month. But scientists have a good feeling about the restart, which is slated for Friday, the The Guardian reports.

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Before scientists can put the Large Hadron Collider back to work this month solving the mysteries of particle physics, the LHC’s engineers face critical repairs to the $5-billion device. First up: Fix the 53 superconducting magnets trashed in September 2008 when a power cable broke, causing the magnets to warm above their –458˚F operating temperature and lose conductivity, or “quench.” Then pipes for helium coolant melted, further damaging the magnets.

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Over the weekend, Cern ran particle beams through the Large Hadron Collider for the first time since it was shut down last September. After a helium leak caused magnets to overheat, operations at the LHC were suspended for cleanup and repairs. After tests on October 23 and 25, scientists hope to have the LHC running again in full by November.

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The troubled Large Hadron Collider, switched on last fall and then off again when its magnets broke, has a bright future.

Tom Hanks, star of Big and The Polar Express, has been invited to turn on the system when its repairs are complete, in what may be history's first celebrity restarting of a particle accelerator.

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All those planning for the end of the world in July, rest easy and enjoy the summer.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is delaying the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) startup another two months. According to CERN, the LHC will go live in September and collisions will begin in October.

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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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