The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is switched on at CERN in Geneva. At 27 km long, it is the largest machine ever built. It is a proton-proton collider built 100 m underground, on the border between Switzerland and France. It has four gigantic experiments along its circumference: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb. It reaches energies of several TeV. Then, just nine days later, the LHC breaks down. Or rather, it explodes. One of the countless superconducting devices short-circuits, releasing so much heat that it almost instantly evaporates six tons of liquid helium, and the explosion destroys thirty electromagnets, each weighing 35 tons. No one is injured, but it will take nine months to understand what happened, design a modification, implement it, and restart the LHC. It will, in fact, restart in 2009 at 7 TeV. The entire LHC undertaking is an absolute triumph of project management, engineering, and collaboration. It accelerates hundreds of billions of protons to 99.999999% of the speed of light.
