Cern's Large Hadron Collider is out of action until next year. What will physics junkies and apocalyptic prophets talk about until then?

Legal challenges, electrical faults, hackers, death threats, and even suicides weren't enough to bring down Cern's Large Hadron Collider – but a simple technical fault and the cold Swiss winter seems to have succeeded where they failed.



CERN confirmed on Saturday that a mechanical fault is forcing it to shut down the experiment. You can read more about it in Ian Sample's breakdown of the breakdown, but the fallout is that physicists will now have to wait until spring for any signs of the Higgs boson.

Reaction to the technical glitch has been mixed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given fears about the experiment's potential to destroy the entire world, some have wondered if 'science' itself has come to the planet's rescue.

One explanation relies on invoking the anthropic principle and 'quantum suicide' theory. If an LHC run at full-throttle actually did destroy everything, then the only outcome of the experiment that we could ever observe would be a technical failure (like a helium leak, perhaps). Anything else would be logically impossible.

Not quite far-fetched enough? Try Cern physicist Kevin Black's eerily prescient commentary on time-travelling quantum particles that are probably weird enough to confuse Doctor Who.

The suggestion is that if the LHC did/does/will (tenses fail me) produce the Higgs boson, the particle might behave strangely enough to come back to the point in time where it was born and prevent its own creation. It's even claimed that you could test this.

Long wait

But assuming nature herself isn't saving us from our own folly, the few months between now and when the collider is scheduled to start again will give the Citizens Against the LHC more time to present their case. Look out for more protests and lawsuits from Walter Wagner in the new year.

For the researchers themselves, the news is a big setback – Cern's director general admitted it was a "psychological blow" – but maybe not entirely unexpected. The machine has "many, many elements, and some of them had never been used," as MIT's Bolek Wyslouch points out. "It's impossible not to have things break". Judith Jackson, based at Fermilab, concurs, reflecting that "these things happen" .

So while we're waiting, where can particle physicists get their particular fix? Well, try Fermilab. Until Cern's LHC comes back online, its Tevatron is still the world's most powerful collider, and is still turning up strange particles.

Or you can watch as researchers play with and fine-tune ATLAS and the CMS (they're two of a kind, apparently) in readiness for switch-on 2.0, as well as ogling some of ALICE's early photos. Plus there's the build up to the official launch of the LHC Grid supercomputer – look out for more from our science blog on that next week.

And if that's a bit heavy, there's always time for some idle speculation on how long it would take the LHC to cook a pizza (or doom-mongers).

In any case, while some will be rejoicing that the world isn't ending just yet, genuine physics junkies will just need to develop the patience of a physicist and wait for the LHC to come out of hibernation. If you want an idea of exactly how exciting that's going to be, you can follow the action (almost) live on the ATLAS experiment webcam …