Even though the $10-billion machine isn’t working at the moment, physicists and science administrators are throwing an Oktoberfest of sorts for the Large Hadron Collider, the giant factory for subatomic particles that was supposed to start producing data this month.

To mark the start of the project, the European laboratory known as CERN, where the collider is located, will stage a gala on October 21, complete with music by Philip Glass, performed by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. There will also be a meal of “molecular gastronomy,” designed by the renowned chefs Ferran Adria and Ettore Bocchia. Today, CERN inaugurated the worldwide computing grid, involving 33 countries, that will crunch the unprecedented amount of data flowing out of the experiments.

For now, though, the collider sits idle. After engineers circulated proton beams for the first time last month through the 17-mile-long circular collider, a large helium leak developed because of problems with some of the 1,200 supercold magnets used to steer the proton beams. CERN is now fixing the collider and will not start it up again until next spring, following its normal winter hiatus in experiments.

Meanwhile, a judge in Hawaii has dismissed a lawsuit designed to shut down the collider. The suit alleged that the collider could destroy the earth by producing miniature black holes that could gobble up the globe, a contention that most scientists reject. —Richard Monastersky