Atom Smasher Out 2 Months

It turns out that the glitch with the Large Hadron Collider is worse than originally thought and will keep the massive atom smasher out of commission for at least 2 months, the Telegraph reports. The collider, which seeks to replicate the Big Bang and solve mysteries of creation, began to malfunction the day after its first test last week.

"A delay like this in a 20-year project isn’t an utter disaster and I’m sure the team at CERN will fix it, and make it more robust as they go," said one physicist. Most of the repair time is spent heating up supercooled elements so they can be worked on, and then cooling them again. “These kind of teething problems happen with particle colliders,” a CERN spokesman said. (More CERN stories.)