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 history'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 European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, once again. The center is home to the collider. And, like most scientists who stake reputations on such big science, they are optimistic.

"Science takes time," said Smith. He should know. As an assistant professor of physics at Columbia University, Smith was among the scientists who made the initial recommendation to build the giant, 17-mile underground collider. That was in 1982.

Smith said that on November 7, beams of protons will again be circulated in the collider, though at only a fraction of the speeds they are expected to eventually achieve. The idea is to collide particles moving at nearly the speed of light and study what happens. Scientists hope, for example, that one of those collisions will produce a theorized particle called the Higgs boson, which is thought to be responsible for giving matter its mass. But its existence has yet to be confirmed, leaving a gaping hole in our theories about mass.

In the coming weeks, Smith will be calibrating one of the large particle detectors that records information from the collisions. It's his job to make sure measurements are accurate. "I have to make sure we miss nothing," said Smith.

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