GENEVA: The world’s largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons all the way around a 27-km tunnel yesterday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.
After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. (0836 GMT) indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.
“There it is,” project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.
Physicists around the world now have much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to see how they are made. “Well done everybody,” said Robert Aymar, director general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in the collider’s control room at the Swiss-French border. The organization, known by its French acronym CERN, began firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier.
Now that the beam has been successfully tested in clockwise direction, CERN plans to send it counterclockwise. Eventually two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.
The start of the collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth. The skeptics theorized that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
“It’s nonsense,” said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before yesterday’s start. CERN is backed by leading scientists in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.
