Huge $10 billion collider resumes hunt for 'God particle'

* The LHC will circulate a beam around the tunnel in November, CERN scientists say
    * An electrical failure caused a major shut-down of the collider in September 2008
    * The full scientific program for the LHC wil probably last more than 20 years
    * The LHC will look for the Higgs boson, quarks, gluons and other small particles

(CNN) -- Is the Large Hadron Collider being sabotaged from the future? Or merely by birds?

The LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, has been under repair for more than a year because of an electrical failure in September 2008.

Now, excitement and mysticism are building again around the $10 billion machine as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) gears up to circulate a high-energy proton beam around the collider's 17-mile tunnel. The event should take place this month, said Steve Myers, CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology.

The collider made headlines last week when a bird apparently dropped a "bit of baguette" into the accelerator, making the machine shut down. The incident was similar in effect to a standard power cut, said spokeswoman Katie Yurkewicz. Had the machine been going, there would have been no damage, but beams would have been stopped until the machine could be cooled back down to operating temperatures, she said.
Video: Search for 'God particle'

As it begins to run at full energy, greater than any machine of its kind, the LHC will help scientists explore important questions about the universe. The ambitious project also has attracted its share of doubters.

Some alarmists expressed fear last year that the accelerator could produce a black hole that might swallow the universe -- a theory that LHC physicists, including Myers, dismiss as science fiction.

Another fringe theory holds that the LHC will never function properly because it is under "influence from the future," according to physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya. They suggest in recent papers that no supercolliders that could produce the Higgs boson, an as-yet-unseen particle that would help answer fundamental questions about matter in the universe, will work because something in the future stops them.

This also explains the "negative miracle" of Congress canceling the Superconducting Supercollider project in Texas in 1993, Nielsen wrote in a paper on arXiv.org, a site where math and science scholars post academic papers.

"One could even almost say that we have a model for God," one who "hates the Higgs particles," Nielsen wrote.

But bizarre ideas about the LHC -- and in particular the debunked black hole theory -- have gotten more people interested in the whole project, said Joseph Incandela, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He will be in the position of deputy spokesperson for the CMS experiment, one of the two general-purpose experiments at the LHC, as of January.

Although physicists such as Incandela have been working on the same questions and building accelerator experiments for decades, no one has paid much attention before now, he said. There were people who followed the topic, but not the broad audience that emerged in the past year or two, he said.

"Maybe it's just captured people's imaginations," he said. "It's really a wonder of science and technology to build such a large accelerator, a 27km-long machine that works at the precision of a fraction of the diameter of your hair," he said.

The results of the LHC experiments may help resolve fundamental problems such as the disconnect between Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which describes the world on a large scale, and quantum mechanics, the laws of matter on a scale too small to see.

The LHC, located underground on the border of Switzerland and France, passed a proton beam halfway around the circular tunnel Saturday, undeterred by the bird incident earlier in the week.

The full-circle beam event scheduled to happen this month also took place last year on September 10 amid much celebration.

But just nine days later, the operation was set back when one of the 25,000 joints that connect magnets in the LHC came loose, and the resulting current melted or burned some important components of the machine, Myers said. The faulty joint has a cross-section of a mere two-thirds of an inch by two-thirds of an inch.

"There was certainly frustration and almost sorrow when we had the accident," he said. Now, "people are feeling a lot better because we know we've done so much work in the last year."

Even physicists who are not on the ground at CERN, awaiting for news from the LHC abroad, haven't given up.
When push comes to shove, the name of the game is 'what is nature,' and we're not going to know until our experimental colleagues tell us,"
--Mark Wise, professor of physics at Caltech