Mike Lamont grabs the last croissant from a table and eats it as he walks through the control centre at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics just outside Geneva, Switzerland. It is midmorning, and the vast blue room is full of physicists staring into computer screens. Lamont, the operations manager of CERN's beams department, explains that they are running tests to ensure that an unexpected computer outage would not affect the network of electronics, vacuum pipes and superconducting magnets that comprise CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
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