Biggest ‘Big Bang Machine’ switched on – LHC- msnbc.com
After 14 years of preparation, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business Wednesday with the official startup of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.

The $10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth, designed to probe mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.
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Scientists, journalists and dignitaries watched from the control room at Europe’s CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, as beams of protons were sent around the collider’s 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring of supercooled pipes for the first time.

“Today is a great day for CERN,” the organization’s director general, Robert Aymar, told the crowd in the control room as the startup process began. The turn-on proceeded slowly, with controllers checking the alignment of the beam at each stage of the route.

Although the actual subatomic collisions aren’t due to begin until next month, CERN designated Wednesday’s “First Beam” as the official occasion for celebration. For the more than 10,000 scientists, engineers and other workers involved in the project, the Large Hadron Collider represents a revolutionary new research opportunity as well as an unprecedented engineering achievement.

“The combination of the size, scale, complexity and technology — well, the comparison I always use is the pyramids,” Peter Limon, a U.S. physicist from Fermilab who played a part in building the device, said during a pre-startup walkthrough. “This is what we do today comparable to the pyramids of 4,000 years ago.”

The LHC is designed to do things the pyramid’s builders never imagined.

Once the machine is in full operation, two streams of invisible protons will be whipped up in opposite directions around an underground racetrack to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. When the two waves of protons slam into each other, scientists expect particles to melt into bits of energy up to 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core — a state that should replicate what the entire universe was like just an instant after it came into being.

How can the Large Hadron Collider possibly perform such feats? That’s where the wonder begins.

Going down …
No one was allowed in the underground tunnel for Wednesday’s maiden run, but a visit during the final phases of the LHC’s construction provided an inside look at the wonder at work.

During the seven-year construction phase, components of the collider and its detectors had to be lowered down piecemeal from CERN’s assembly halls, then put together in underground caverns as big as cathedrals.