The machine that found the 'God Particle' is being shut down: Here's why

The Large Hadron Collider, the 27-kilometre ring buried beneath the French-Swiss border that a stubborn corner of the internet still insists will swallow the planet into a black hole, has been switched off. No black hole. No portal. No end of days. Just a very long, very expensive maintenance window. After nearly two decades of smashing protons together and rewriting physics textbooks, the world's most powerful particle accelerator has gone quiet so CERN can take it apart and build something bigger.That something is the High-Luminosity LHC, and the teardown that gets us there is called Long Shutdown 3, or LS3, a sprawling upgrade programme running until the end of the decade. The goal is to crank up the collision rate by a factor of up to ten.