Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Wednesday fired the first protons into the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator in an enormous experiment which, in the days ahead, will recreate the conditions billionths of a second after the Big Bang so as to understand more about the makeup of the universe and how it was created. Cosmologists say the Big Bang occurred some 15 billion years ago when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded in what was then a void, spewing out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth. Scientists hope that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will provide the necessary power to smash sub-atomic protons with cataclysmic force so that it can be seen how they are made. But skeptics – including websites on the Internet, itself created at CERN nearly 20 years ago – fear that the proton collisions could create tiny black holes of intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet. CERN and leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking have dismissed the fears and declared the experiments to be absolutely safe. The LHC uses more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end to fire energy particles through a 27-km circular tunnel straddling the Swiss-French border. The magnets are there to steer the beam – made up of particles called protons – around this tunnel. Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second. At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive “detectors” that will monitor the collisions for interesting events. It took Cern scientists from 40 countries 10 years to build the $9 billion (SR33.75 billion) LHC, the most complex scientific instrument ever built. On Wednesday, the LHC successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of hundreds of millions of protons all the way around the tunnel. “There it is,” project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. “Well done everybody,” said Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room. Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise.
