Earlier this week, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, which is the world’s most massive particle accelerator project – both physically and in the scope of its purpose – has been taken offline due to an electrical fault in one of its systems. The fault had been fixed by Thursday, and today the LHC has been put back online.

The Large Hadron Collider accelerates streams of protons and other particles through a collider ring, because it would be impractical to accelerate them linearly – you’d need too much space. Therefore, there must be a way to keep the particles spinning in circles, because they would otherwise tend to move in a straight line as per Newton’s first law of motion.

While the actual acceleration is achieved by way of an electric field which pushes the electrically charged proton beams ahead, steering and focusing them is done with a magnetic field created by over 1,600 massive dipole magnets, most weighing over 27 tons. These magnets are pumped with 12,000 amps of electrical energy, and thus must be made superconductive.

To make a superconductive magnet, you have to keep it cold, very cold. Minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, or 1.2 degrees Kelvin; that’s close to absolute zero, and colder than the temperature of outer space. To achieve this, the largest cryogenic facility on the planet has been built around the LHC; it uses 96 tons of liquid helium to keep the magnets frosty.

Thursday last week however, there was a glitch. One of the transformers powering the massive cryogenic plant failed. It took about a week to replace the specialized equipment, and on Thursday they started cooling the magnets back down. The system will be back up and running soon.

The Large Hadron Collider was designed to study forces and particles which existed only one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, which was the event that originated the universe, according to established scientific theory. The findings of the LHC experiments, the confirmation of the Higgs Boson in particular, will help scientists determine if current scientific theories need revising, and help with the better understanding of the universe presently around us, and perhaps its future.

The failure comes only a few days before the first collision is scheduled to happen inside the LHC’s collider rings, where measuring stations will analyze the particle debris resulted, and although in the early stages of such highly complex machinery, some technical glitches are almost unavoidable, it is curious that CERN have waited this long to reveal the malfunction (they did so only after it was fixed, a week after the event actually occurred). Perhaps they believed that by coupling news of the incident with news of its repair, that it would lessen the feeling of apprehension among the general public.

Nevertheless, much like said technical glitches, fear of the unknown is unavoidable; it is a part of human nature, whether you’re the average Joe, or the world’s top particle physicist.