The LHC is a huge machine bearing huge magnets, with coils that are 14 meters or more in length. The superconducting magnets, operating in excess of eight tesla, will propel the protons around the 17-mile ring before they smash into one another and create a cascade of subatomic particles.

All this it will do... we hope. The LHC barely got going last September before bad electrical connections in the magnet's cooling systems shut the experiments down. Now, nearly a year later, everyone's favorite supercollider is still offline and will be until at least November, if not longer.