Big bang machine to run in 2012

A worker stands beneath the ATLAS detector's calorimeter during this month's maintenance break at the Large Hadron Collider.

The world's most powerful particle collider will be kept running through 2012 rather than taking next year off for an overhaul, Europe's CERN particle physics lab announced today. The change in plans means scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will have more time to track down the Higgs boson and other mysteries of the universe before the extended break — and it also means the machine should be shut down just in time for the Maya apocalypse.

Not that there's anything to the doomsday date. There's no reason why the world should end on Dec. 21, 2012, with or without the LHC. Some folks think dramatic, world-shattering changes will occur on that day because it marks the end of the Maya "long-count" calendar, but that myth has no basis in historical or cosmological reality. (And experts say the date may have been miscalculated, anyway.) Some folks also think the LHC could bring on doomsday by creating catastrophe-causing black holes or strangelets — but there's no evidence for that, either.

The real significance of the LHC's operation in 2012 is that scientists are so pleased with the way the machine has been running that they want to keep up the scientific momentum.

"With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there's a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year," Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director, said in today's news release. "For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC's current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp."

More