The Large Hadron Collider won’t be unlocking some of the mysteries of the Universe for a while. It’s broken. LHC’s operators says they’ll need at least two months to warm the collider up from its near-absolute-zero temperatures and fix a portion of it.  (Update:  CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said late today (9/23) that the collider will not be ready to re-start until spring 2009).

A section of the Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the border between Switzerland and France. (CERN Photo)

It’s been called the biggest science project ever: $8 billion in funds and years in research, some of it from the US Department of Energy. The potential payoff? Unlocking some of the deepest-held secrets of physics, like how matter comes together.

After a week in which we committed, or considered committing, as much as a trillion dollars toward cleaning up the financial industry’s mess (most of it from U.S. taxpayers), we’re looking back at the wide range of opinions that this blog’s readers rolled out about the project. There were four basic groups:

1) Folks who wanted to turn the collider into a religious (or anti-religious) statement. I’m not going there, and I regret that so many commentors took a science blog in that direction.

2) Those who feared that the collider would create a black hole, then suck us all into it. The depth of scientific due diligence on the project says that this is an impossibility.

3) Many who were genuinely stoked about the potential for discovery here. I’m with you.

and 4)  Those who thought that $8 billion is too much to spend on something like this.

It’s this last group that I want to address:  sure, there are lots of things we could spend $8 billion on now — like feeding several billion of our fellow citizens and beginning to help them out of poverty. Or maybe one-tenth of the money the Feds dumped into bailing out AIG last week. But let’s put the collider money into perspective. Here are a few other things we buy with that kind of money:

– A little over four years of domestic sales of Doritos.
– Approximately two-thirds of the annual gambling revenues in the state of Nevada.
– About three days of US oil imports.
– About a month’s worth of US cigarette sales.
– About ten months’ worth of US lung cancer treatment costs. (A worthy effort to be sure, but one that wouldn’t be nearly as costly if it weren’t for the cigarette numbers above.)

What’s my point? The collider’s broken. It may or may not come close to the goals and dreams its many scientists aspired to reach. But the only gamble here is with money, and this is one that’s well worth taking.

Peter Dykstra Executive Producer CNN Science, Tech, and Weather

It’s not every week we power up a machine and wonder about the speculations, however unwarranted, that a black hole will swallow the planet. On Wednesday morning, everyone was either utterly fascinated or fearful as the Large Hadron Collider, a $10 billion machine more expensive and powerful than any of its predecessors, started up for the first time.

The hall for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

No wonder many science enthusiasts have a crush on the LHC, which has become a world-famous celebrity. Obviously, as an object of desire and supreme popularity, the LHC offers the best of both worlds: extreme money and extreme power. It’s also situated in a romantic location between Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains.

More importantly, it will teach us new things about ourselves and our world. It can look deep inside us and find secrets we never knew existed. And it has the potential to generate black holes, though most scientists agree any of those little cosmic vacuum-cleaners would disappear in less than a second without doing any harm. Yet the doomsday rumors somehow make the LHC seem even more attractive and awe-inspiring. We fear what we love, and we love what we fear.

Among the potential perks of staying on top of the LHC’s every move: a better understanding of matter. For instance, scientists think that the matter we know may only be a small percentage of what makes up the universe. Previous cosmological studies have inferred that most of the universe consists of invisible stuff called “dark matter” and “dark energy.” The NASA satellite WMAP has found that atoms make up only about 5 percent of the universe, while dark matter accounts for 23 percent and dark energy 72 percent. So, 95 percent of the stuff of the universe is invisible and completely mysterious. But our hero the LHC may be able to shed some light on that darkness.

Of course, this celebrity icon hasn’t made a commitment to find anything. There is always the chance that, after billions and billions of particle collisions, nothing turns up.

So now that the big start-up is over, we are left wondering, what now? For sure, we have the first attempt at colliding two beams, and the operation of the collider at unbelievable energy levels, to expect in the coming year. But will the LHC come through for us, or will it leave us broken-hearted, lost in a world we barely understand?

With thousands of brilliant scientists from around the world working on this, there’s hope that all of the heartache and waiting is worth it. What do you think?

–Elizabeth Landau, Writer/Producer, CNN.com

The Large Hadron Collider control room, near Geneva, Switzerland

Scientists are about to fire up the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. The 17-mile long circular tunnel runs through Switzerland, and a bit of France. The object of the game (the $8 billion game, by the way) is to smash protons into each other, replicating the conditions an instant after the Big Bang.

The practical applications for this? None.
The prize? Possibly answering a key question about everything. The search for the Higgs boson, a particle that’s not yet discovered, but theorized. Physicists believe that the Higgs — sometimes called the “God Particle” — is what creates mass.

Sadly, there’s been a mild media frenzy (including CNN, which published an AP story on the topic last June) focused not on the potential for discovery, but on concerns that there’s a theoretical chance that smashing these two proton streams together at nearly the speed of light will create tiny black holes that will unite, swallow up the Large Hadron Collider, then swallow up Switzerland, France, Earth, and the rest of the solar system.

As I understand it, there’s a universe of difference between the massive black holes of space that swallow up matter, and the tiny ones that would be generated in the LHC, each with a lifespan of a tiny fraction of a nanosecond.

That hasn’t stopped a wave of online protests, and a lawsuit in US court to stop the project (the US Department of Energy is a participant in the collider experiment).

Okay, it should be clear by now that particle physics is not my strong suit. Botany isn’t either, and Walter Wagner, the guy who filed the lawsuit, is a card-carrying botanist. He also filed a similar suit against the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which has been operating at Brookhaven National Labs since 2000, with no apparent impact to Life As We Know It.

I’d love to hear your take on all this. If you share Mr. Wagner’s concerns, please get your comments in by 3:30AM ET Wednesday. If not, take your time. I’m pretty sure the world will still be here tomorrow, when testing begins, or through the next month as the tests complete and they try out the Real Thing. If I’m wrong, I’ll buy every one of you a nice lunch. But I’m pretty sure we’ll go back to destroying the world the slow, methodical, hard way, and not in a flash while you’re sleeping tonight.

Peter Dykstra Executive Producer CNN Science, Tech, and Weather