Setbacks at Massive Particle Accelerator

The Large Hadron Collider is a 17-mile underground racetrack where atomic particles will be accelerated to energies of seven trillion electron volts and be smashed together. When it was unveiled in Switzerland last September, some critics worried it might generate so much energy that a black hole would swallow the planet. Just weeks later, it suffered a debilitating accident, and now other problems have delayed the $9 billion LHC being turned on. Claudio Campagnari is a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.