Just about a year ago, a faulty weld in the nearly $10 billion Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border sparked an electrical surge that melted a connection between two magnets and shut down experimentation weeks earlier than expected. Wesley Smith, a UW-Madison physics professor who has invested much of his career in historyâ??s most ambitious science project, was as disappointed as everyone else involved in the effort. But a year later, Smith and several other UW-Madison scientists and engineers are preparing to leave for France and the home to the collider, the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, once again.
Office of Strategic Communication