The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project has been put on hold for longer than anticipated, and to the relief of the most pessimistic people on the planet, the “end of the world”will have to wait, at least until next year.

Following a recent investigation from CERN, it will take a long time  before truly understanding the incident that forced them to delay plans. As it appears, a faulty electrical connection caused a leak in the magnets from sector 3-4.

The investigators had to close down the entire sector, bring it to room temperature and open the magnets involved for a detailed analysis. This operation alone is expected to take three or four weeks.

As CERN Director General Robert Aymar pointed out in a statement, this is not just another challenge for the LHC team, but it is a psychological blow that came right after the incredible successful testing they competed earlier in September.

“Nevertheless, the success of LHC's first operation with beam is testimony to years of painstaking preparation and the skill of the teams involved in building and running CERN's accelerator complex,” he said. “I have no doubt that we will overcome this setback with the same degree of rigour and application.”

Taking into consideration the time needed to complete the investigation and make the necessary repairs, the Large Hadron Collider will be on stand-by until early spring 2009, when the accelerator complex will be restarted. At a later date, the LHC beams should be ready to circulate once more.

“The LHC is a very complex instrument, huge in scale and pushing technological limits in many areas,” said Peter Limon, who collaborated on commissioning the world's first large-scale superconducting accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab in the United States.

“Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases,” Limon said.

The Large Hadron Collider will probably take a break not only from the particle beams, but also from the bad words and threats received from people all over the world who despite scientific assurances that nothing bad will happen, make sombre predictions about black holes destroying our planet.

Despite all that, on September 10 CERN reported that it successfully circulated its first beam around the 27 kilometers of the world's largest accelerator.

“It's a fantastic moment,” LHC project leader Lyn Evans said at the time. “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins of the universe.”

The Large Hadron Collider is a scientific instrument of a monumental scale and the world’s largest particle accelerator machine. Inside the accelerator, scientists have recreated the primordial conditions in space: the beams of particles will travel in an ultra-high vacuum resembling the interplanetary space, with internal pressures of 10-13 atm, ten times less the pressure of the moon.

Physicists around the world will conduct several experiments, hoping to understand more about our Universe and the principles of physics. The particle accelerator will be used to recreate the conditions after the Big Bang.