The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World

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LEP was scheduled to be turned off in September 2000 and dismantled to make way for the LHC. Knowing that their machine had only a few months of operation left, the technicians went for broke, using every trick they could think of to boost it to 209 GeV, a higher energy than its design specifications had ever contemplated. If it broke, it was a lame duck accelerator anyway.