IEET readers have weighed in with their opinions about why the LHC project kept running into seemingly endless delays on its way to running protons into each other. Now that it’s back up and operating, perhaps some of our more far-fetched conjectures will be proved wrong.

But then again, maybe not. Until the machine is able to work at full capacity, which won’t be for another several years, we won’t know for sure whether it can achieve what it was designed to do: smash protons together in tiny fireballs to replicate the conditions of the Big Bang.

When the collider begins to do real physics next year, it will run at half its original design energy, with protons of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The energy will be increased gradually during the year, but it could be years, physicists say, before the machine reaches its full potential.

Thousands of the troublesome junctions will have to be rebuilt during a year-long shutdown in 2011, and engineers have to figure out why several dozen of the superconducting magnets seem to have lost their ability to operate at high intensities.

In a recently concluded poll, IEET readers were asked, Why has the Large Hadron Collider repeatedly failed to begin operating?

Other answers given included:

• Future generations are protecting us
• Divine Intervention
• Wait a minute! The universe hasn’t ended yet?
• Some amateur ramblings involving the anthropic principle, doomsday arguments
• Extraterrestrials are preventing us from destroying life
• Nobody’s said the magic word: PLEASE

IEET Board Member George Dvorsky has offered some related thoughts on what the LHC’s troubles might mean, and how our ongoing existence could appear increasingly absurd.

Feel free to speculate in comments.