Collider halted until next year...

The incident was probably caused by a faulty connection between magnets

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be shut off until spring 2009 while engineers probe a magnet failure.

The incident on 19 September caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak out into the experiment's 27km-long tunnel.

Officials said the time required to fully investigate the problem precluded a re-start before the lab's winter maintenance period.

The collider is built to smash protons together at huge speeds, recreating conditions moments after the Big Bang.

Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

"Coming immediately after the very successful start of LHC operation on 10 September, this is undoubtedly a psychological blow," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), in a statement.

But he praised the skill and preparation of the teams involved in building the particle accelerator.

High priority

A spokesman for Cern told BBC News it was unclear at this stage when the collider could re-start operations after the lab's regular winter shut-down - which is partly done to save money on electricity during this period of peak demand.

A number of factors could affect when the lab re-opened, including prolonged cold weather.

The LHC has been in construction for some 13 years

"It's usually around late March or early April that we start re-commissioning the whole accelerator chain. The LHC being at the end of that chain," said James Gillies, Cern's director of communications.

"It will take us a while to get beams injected into the LHC, but I think it's fair to say this will be the priority for next year's start-up."

The accelerator chain prepares the beams of protons to be fired through the machine to make possible the collisions that physicists will use to study the make-up of our Universe.

The problem occurred last weekend, when a failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees.

The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel, which straddles the French-Swiss border.

Helium spill

The machine has more than 1,200 "dipole" magnets arranged end-to-end in the 27km-long, ring-shaped tunnel that houses the LHC.

These magnets carry and steer beams of protons which will whizz around the machine at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the "ring", these beams cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events.

Cern said the most likely cause of the equipment failure was a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets.

This connection melted during testing of the machine and caused a huge leak of super-cool helium.

This helium is used to chill the magnets to a temperature of 1.9 kelvin (-271C; -456F) - which is colder than deep space.

This makes the magnets "superconducting", allowing them to generate the large magnetic fields required to steer the beams while at the same time consuming relatively little power.

A quench occurs when part of a superconducting magnet heats up and causes superconducting properties to be lost.

Hot spot

Cern has procedures in place to deal with quenches before they damage equipment, but in this instance a hot spot in the machine got out of control.

"It does seem that all the systems that are supposed to protect the machine in cases like this worked as far as we can tell. But obviously something went wrong," said Mr Gillies.

"The engineers have decided that in order to find out what really happened, they are going to have to go into the machine."

One of the LHC's eight sectors will now have to be warmed up so an inspection can be carried out.

Mr Gillies told BBC News that this was likely to take a week, and that engineers would then have a much better idea of how to fix the fault.

Each particle accelerator is a unique machine, so Cern says that teething troubles were to be expected with such a complex machine at the cutting edge of technology.

"Events occur from time to time that temporarily stop operations, for shorter or longer periods, especially during the early phases," said Cern physicist Peter Limon.

Source: BBC News

Long-lost Einstein telescope restored...

In this undated photo made available by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on Monday, Sept. 22, 2008, an unidentified man adjust a telescope that once belonged to Albert Einstein, at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Students and visitors at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem will be able to look at the stars through Albert Einstein's long lost telescope starting Thursday university officials said, after it was retrieved from a storage shed and renovated. (AP Photo/Hebrew University in Jerusalem, HO)

Albert Einstein's long-lost telescope, forgotten for decades in a Jerusalem storage shed, goes on display this week after three years and $10,000 spent restoring the relic.

The old reflecting telescope is cumbersome by modern standards, but a demonstration for The Associated Press showed it still works well enough to see five of Jupiter's moons and stripes on the surface of the huge planet.

The legendary physicist who famously theorized relations among energy, speed and mass received the telescope in 1954, the year before he died. It was a gift from a friend named Zvi Gizeri, who probably made it himself, said officials at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where the public will be able to view the telescope starting Thursday.

Einstein, who was a co-founder of the Hebrew University, willed his records to the school. There were rumors through the years that he also left a telescope, but it took modern sleuthing and some luck to find it.

The long black tube about eight inches in diameter and 6 feet long stands on a base experts say may have been taken from the German army. It was this unique base, recognizable in a picture of Einstein with the telescope, and a signature from Gizeri on one of its mirrors, that confirmed its authenticity in 2004, when a biologist named Eshel Ophir made the connection.

The forgotten telescope was first discovered in a storage shed in the late 1990s by a computer specialist at the Hebrew University. But he did not recognize it as Einstein's, and left it in the shed.

Ophir made the connection by accident, initially mistaking another forgotten telescope for the famous physicist's. After searching through the archives and photos, Ophir realized the real Einstein telescope was actually the one his colleague had found unceremoniously years earlier.

Ophir said he immediately took the telescope to the university's Meyerhoff Youth Center, where he was serving as director, to protect and clean it.

With the exception of a new eyepiece, the rest of the device, from lenses to optics, is original.

It is unlikely, though, that a theoretician like Einstein, who won a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his theory of relativity, would have had much use for a telescope in his work.

"I don't think anybody investigated Einstein's star-gazing habits," said Dvora Lang, the current director of the Meyerhoff Youth Center. "But it was for his pleasure, not for his work."

The telescope goes on display Thursday at the Meyerhoff center in conjunction with Researchers Day, when schools across Europe and Israel will open their laboratory doors to the public.

The newly unveiled telescope will not be housed with the rest of Einstein's documents at the Jewish National and University Library but will remain in the Meyerhoff center for use by students.

Lang said she hoped by looking into the telescope of one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, a new generation of Israeli children would be inspired to learn more about science.

"This is setting them on fire," she said.