LHC

Smooth start for 'Big Bang' machine

Scientists today launched the "Big Bang experiment" - an attempt to recreate the start of the universe using the biggest and most complex machine yet built.
The £5bn Large Hadron Collider was powered up without a hitch at Cern, the European nuclear research organisation in Geneva.
After a tense first hour researchers announced they had achieved "full beam", meaning that a stream of sub-atomic particles was racing round the LHC's 27 kilometre-long circular tunnel at just under the speed of light. The next stage will be to fire a beam in the opposite direction.
The LHC, which took two decades to construct, is the largest particle accelerator the world has seen.
It is designed to smash protons - one of the building blocks of matter - into each other with energies up to seven times greater than any achieved before.
In the flashes from the collisions, scientists expect to reproduce conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the birth of the universe.
No one knows precisely what will come tumbling out of the primordial soup of disintegrating protons.
But the scientists have dismissed suggestions that the experiment could somehow cause the end of the world.
The LHC could help scientists explain mass, gravity, mysterious "dark matter" and why the universe looks the way it does.
It could also produce the first evidence of extra spatial dimensions and even create mini-black holes that blink in and out of existence in a fraction of a second.
The LHC, housed in the 27km (17 mile) tunnel under 100m of rock, straddles the borders of Switzerland and France between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains.
Excitement builds for Cern scientists