Although the launch of the Big Bang machine, or Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was successful problems set in soon afterwards.

More than one week ago the machine, which took 20 years to build, was switched on. All appeared to go well. Beams were fired around the accelerator’s 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring. Then the idea was to collide those beams head on.
But before being able to collide anything, scientists working on the gigantic machine have to find solutions to problems that could in theory endanger the project or at least delay the next steps for weeks, possibly months.

The first test collision was scheduled before the official inauguration, October 21. It has now become clear that this is not doable. Scientists fear this second step may to be delayed until the end of the year, or even until well into 2009.

What caused the problem? Well, scientists describe it as a “massive” magnate quench. Those of us who are not science freaks will have to do with the results of this ‘quench’: temperatures in about 100 of the LHC’s super-cooled magnets soared by as much as 100 degrees Celsius.

As if that was not enough, fire brigades had to be called in because a tonne of liquid helium leaked out into the LHC tunnel.

One of the eight parts of the LHC now has to be cooled down to 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) so that scientists can repair it. 1.9 Kevlin is colder than deep space.

Luckily for those of us who feared that this would be the end for this massive project, the European Organization for Nuclear Research maintains that the recent problems should be considered minor bugs, and nothing more.

“If you keep an eye on the big picture, we’ve been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process,” James Gillies, Cern’s director of communications said.

“A year or two down the line, this moment will be a distant memory, and we’ll be running smoothly.”

Sadly, however, this is not the first problem the LHC faced, and it won’t be the last. Then again, the scientists working on it are the best in Europe, the best in the world even. It seems unlikely that they will allow themselves to be stopped by anything.

Some of the problems encountered – flood threats for instance – and overcome were documented by the BBC.

Correction: reader Randal L. Schwartz explains that we made an error in our reporting:

“One of the eight parts of the LHC now has to be cooled down to 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) so that scientists can repair it. 1.9 Kevlin is colder than deep space.”You got that backwards. That’s the temp it normally operates at. They have to warm it up (takes weeks) before they can send people in to work on it. Then they have to cool it down again (takes weeks) to get it operating. Hence, a couple of months offline. Ooops. And, although some parts of the press are reporting this as a “quench”, where the beams hit the containment facility, there was no beam at the time. This was a mechanical failure that lead to a permanent electrical failure that requires physical access to fix.