“The collider first ramped its beams to 3.5 trillion electron volts two weeks ago, but the engineers took pains to prevent them from colliding so as not to steal the thunder from what was billed as “First Physics Day” on Tuesday. ¶ Because of the defective joints and some mysteriously underperforming magnets, it will still be three years at least before CERN’s collider runs at or near full strength. According to theoretical models, that would stretch out the time it should take to achieve the collider’s main goals, including producing a particle known as the Higgs boson, which is thought to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.” - × × ×