Tinfoil Hat Crowd Grumbling as LHC Set To Fire Up: Biggest Science Instrument Ever.

The world’s largest atom smasher will likely be fired up again in October after scientists have carried out tests and put in place further safety measures to prevent a repeat of the faults that sidelined the $10 billion machine shortly after startup last year.

The Large Hadron Collider was meant to restart in late September, but that will probably be pushed back two to three weeks, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research said.

“We’re pretty confident about the dates,” James Gillies told The Associated Press, adding that scientists believe they understand the error that happened last year and how to prevent it occurring again.

An electrical fault caused by a faulty splice in the wiring shut down the giant machine on Sept. 19, nine days after it was started up with great fanfare.

The 20-nation operator, known as CERN, expects repairs and additional safety systems to cost about 40 million Swiss francs ($37 million) over the course of several years, Gillies said.

Once it is running, scientists will use the machine to smash together protons from hydrogen atoms inside a 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border near Geneva. By recording what particles are produced by the collisions they hope to better understand the makeup of the universe and everything in it.

The anti-science Armagedon crowd that had predicted when LHC was turned on it would create a black hole that would consume the earth have pretty much pulled their tinfoil hats down over the eyes because nobody listens to them.

Theoretical physicists are excitedly awaiting their turn at experimenting with what is said to be the largest manmade scientific gadget ever built. Many hope to observe the Higgs boson a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. At present there are no known fundamental scalar particles in nature but it could have been created at the so-called Big Bang when, in theory, all matter came into being.

One thing for certain you wouldn’t want to receive the LHC’s electric bill running it takes more electricity than the nearby City of Geneva, Switzerland with a population of over half a million people.