The Guardian view on the Large Hadron Collider: back to the future

Cern's pathbreaking accelerator remains a breathtaking piece of engineering and science, as well as an example of European cooperation at its best

Later this month an engineer will throw a switch and one of Europe's most successful cooperations will be back in business. The Large Hadron Collider has already identified a mysterious entity from the first trillionth of a second of creation called Higgs Boson and won two physicists a Nobel prize - and that was at half power. The big machine at Cern in Geneva has now been overhauled, enhanced and retuned. It will cautiously accelerate to full energy in the summer.

In engineering terms alone, the partnership of thousands of scientists and engineers has been breathtaking. To function, the accelerator's superconductors must be kept at just a degree or so lower than intergalactic space: that makes the instrument the coldest place in the universe. The piping around which the beams of protons whizz must be maintained at a vacuum as tenuous as interplanetary space. The matter accelerated in the collider is designed to reach 99.9999991% the speed of light in a vacuum.

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