On 10 September there was much celebrating at CERN and throughout the worldwide particle-physics community when a beam of protons successfully made its way around the full 27-km circumference of the laboratory’s new Large Hadron Collider on the first try. The hope was that by the end of September the LHC would be bringing countercirculating beams of 0.5-TeV protons into collision and that a month later experimenters could start doing physics with colliding beams of 5-TeV protons. Then next April, after the obligatory winter shutdown during the months of highest energy cost, the collider would finally be operating at its design beam energy of 7 TeV (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 9 2007 90 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2784701 September 2007, page 90 ).
Just a week later all that optimism got what LHC project leader Lyn Evans described as “a kick in the teeth.” On 19 September a breach in...
