Like a star arriving on stage, impatiently followed by each member of CERN personnel and by millions of eyes around the world, the first beam of protons has circulated in the LHC. After years in the making and months of increasing anticipation, today the work of hundreds of people has borne fruit. WELL DONE to all!

Successfully steered around the 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10:28 this morning, this first beam of protons circulating in the ring marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. "It’s a fantastic moment," said the LHC project leader Lyn Evans, "we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe".

Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision. Today’s success puts a tick next to the first of those steps, and over the next few weeks, as the LHC’s operators gain experience and confidence with the new machine, the machine’s acceleration systems will be introduced, and the beams will be brought into collision to allow the research programme to begin.

"The LHC is a discovery machine," said CERN Director General Robert Aymar, "its research programme has the potential to change our view of the Universe profoundly, continuing a tradition of human curiosity that’s as old as mankind itself."

Experiments at the LHC will allow physicists to complete a journey that started with Newton’s description of gravity. Gravity acts on mass, but so far science is unable to explain the mechanism that generates mass. Experiments at the LHC will provide the answer. LHC experiments will also try to probe the mysterious dark matter of the universe – visible matter seems to account for just 5% of what must exist, while about a quarter is believed to be dark matter. They will investigate the reason for nature’s preference for matter over antimatter, and they will probe matter as it existed at the very beginning of time.

Born in the minds of a few pioneers and dreamt of by a large community of physicists, as of today the LHC is a reality.

Hey guys take a look at this..
http://cdspages.web.cern.ch/cdspages/1125472.htm

Simulated Big Bang..makes us nervous..!!

Isn't there a concern about black hole simulation,where it might devour us all,just assumptive alarm,but if I wanna die,getting sucked into a black hole is a way to go.

please allow me to add on something...since I am not very understand how LHC works, and I looked from wiki:

Quote:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one of several types of hadrons) with very high kinetic energy.

Quote:

More generally, physicists hope that the LHC will enhance their ability to answer the following questions: -Are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force just different manifestations of a single unified force, as predicted by various Grand Unification Theories? -What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy?

Quote:

The total cost of the project is expected to be €3.2–6.4 billion.

Thx to withoutwax for sharing with us.......

Yup~~dat's rite bout LHC

They've ard injected beams of protons into the machine..have to let them circulate for almost a year before banging simulating a Big Bang...

Sit back and watch the show guys~~haha

I wonder why do need to have that spinning thing
Is that going to accelerate it? If that's so, how fast? speed of light I suppose?

lol...well..spinning thing?? u mean that circular tunnel??
Erm..i dunno whether i noe bout the magnetic force and circular motion before..if u can recall..

F magnetic=Bqv
F circular = mv^2 /r
so..combine together..Bqv=mv^2 /r

Which means..they creates powerful magnetic field across the circular loop..to make the protons circulating the ring..not consuming much space..(you dun wan to use up the whole earth to accelerate a small lil single proton.do you?)

The protons can achieve 99.99% speed of light..this is WOW!! i can say!!

Ah physic...lol I don't remember.

Y must it be circular then? y not linear? Space concern?

Anyway when it is going to running at full power? Any chances of broadcasting in M'sia?

THOSE sci people are crazy.... they goin 2 make another
DARK HOLE (not that hole) scarrrrrrrrrrrry

I hope they can find out the smallest being (Higgs)
thx to the world largest phySICK exp

69tribe is seriously the grandmaster. Did we say anything about the 'hole' ? lolz how ironic ~