Scientists at CERN announced last Saturday that the Large Hadron Collider is experiencing technical difficulties, and will be out of commission for the next two months. Then on Tuesday, more bad news:

“The European nuclear research organization says repairs and the onset of winter will delay the startup of the world’s largest particle collider until spring.”

Well, shit. It looks like particle physics isn’t going to start revolutionizing our understanding of the universe until the flowers start to bloom. But keep in mind, this is one of the greatest machines ever devised by mankind, and there were bound to be hiccups. I mean, this thing is so amazing, you’d think it had been designed by Jonas Venture. So while we’re waiting, let’s take a closer look at this new delay. Spokesman James Gillies explained it this way:

“It’s too early to say precisely what happened, but it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped superconducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out.”

If you’re a builder geek at all, you’re probably thinking, “An electrical connection will take two months to fix? Don’t they have soldering irons in Geneva?” Interestingly enough, it’s not the actual malfunction that’s going to cause the delay, it’s the temperature of the place where the malfunction occurred. The Large Hadron Collider is artificially cooled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin.

Let’s back-track a little here. The Kelvin scale is based on Absolute Zero, the theoretical temperature at which atoms cease to move. Nothing, literally nothing, gets that cold. Deep space, the deepest you can get in space, far away from stars and planets, doesn’t get that cold. The temperature of deep space is actually 2.73K, which is just background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Which means that the LHC ring is the coldest thing in the universe. At least, the coldest thing known to mankind. Presumably there are alien civilizations that know how to make things that cold, too.

So you can’t just go down there. For one thing, repair equipment won’t be able to heat up enough to get anything done, and for another, any repair workers would instantly freeze up, topple over, and shatter like icicles on subway tracks.

To cool helium down to 1.9K requires a very complicated application of compression and liquid nitrogen, in a machine very much like this Cryogenic Superfluid Helium Liquefication System that I’ve just found on eBay, and which has now moved to the top of my Christmas wishlist. Making helium that cold turns it into a bizarre substance known as a superfluid, capable of doing all sorts of crazy shit like passing frictionlessly through almost any material. Which is why the tiniest malfunction can result in its escape, which fucks up the freezing process, which in turn fucks up the magnets that have to guide the protons around the track so that they can smash into each other properly.

So now they have to thaw the whole place out, which will take two months, no matter how many extra space heaters they buy from Home Depot, before a repair crew can even get down there. I don’t know why they can’t just turn the damn thing back on in November, maybe there’s a big Winter Dance at CERN that everyone has to buy dresses and tuxedos for or something, and the LHC researchers are all on the Party Planning Committee. Regardless, there won’t be any turn-on until spring, and you can damn well expect maintenance crews to cover every millimeter of the LHC ring in the meantime, looking for any more cracks or bad wires or whatever. Because waiting two months for every Tech Support visit is a huge pain in the ass.