Watch Big Bang Experiment results Information & Videos
Well, it works, and not a black hole to be seen.
No explosions, no end of the world, just a lot of very happy scientists.
The £5bn Large Hadron Collider, aka The God Machine, the biggest and most expensive scientific instrument ever built, was turned on today and everything worked like a dream.
Countdown: One of the giant magnets used to accelerate nuclear particles around the Large Hadron Collider which will hopefully produce mini 'big bangs'
Relief: Anxious scientists at the CERN control centre applaud today after the huge machine was powered up without a hitch
The £5bn machine has been built by CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organisation, and sits in a roughly circular tunnel 300ft under the rolling pastureland on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.
This morning, as the world looked on, project leader Dr Lyndon Evans, from Aberdare in south Wales, started the launch at 8.30am British time.
Looking relaxed in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, the coalminer's son counted down the last few seconds before the first beam of protons was put into the LHC.
'Five, four, three, two, one, zero - nothing,' he joked before a blip appeared on a computer monitor signalling that the long years of hard work had paid off and the machine was working.
Then, in a series of steps, a beam of sub-atomic particles - protons - was fed into the 18-mile ring for the first time.
After a tense first hour, researchers announced they had achieved 'full beam', meaning they were now racing round the LHC's 27 kilometre-long circular tunnel at just under the speed of light.
Charting progress: Dr Lyndon Evans from Wales (far right) takes charge as scientists monitor the giant collider in the first few minutes after launch
Momentous: The LHC has been built on the border of France and Switzerland (enlarge for more detailed graphic)
The news was greeted with cheers all round, much applause and the cracking open of champagne.
A delighted Verena Kain, one of the senior scientists ‘steering’ the beam at nearly the speed of light (600million mph), said she was ‘floating'.
Getting the protons to circulate all the way round the 100 metre-deep tunnel was originally expected to take most of the day. The next stage will be to fire one in the opposite direction.
Dr Evans said: 'This is really the biggest and most complex scientific project ever undertaken, and you cannot do a thing like this without engineers and applied scientists of very top quality.'
Asked how it felt to start up probably the most significant machine ever built, he replied: 'Of course, the first thought was one of relief. I think we are too preoccupied for the moment to have emotion. We are extremely relieved that it went so well.
'It is a machine of enormous complexity and things can go wrong at any time. Fortunately this morning, we had a very smooth start-up.'
Intricate: The ATLAS detector part of the LHC dwarfs an employee checking it over after the launch this morning
Work begins: Experts use computer screens to monitor traces of the first protons injected into the LHC
A few mavericks had claimed that by smashing sub-atomic particles together at energies not seen since the birth of the Universe during the Big Bang, there was a small risk the LHC could inadvertently create a planet-eating black hole or, even worse, rip apart the fabric of the Universe and destroy all of Creation.
Happily, these fears were unfounded and what the LCH scientists hope is that now some of the greatest mysteries of all can be solved.
By recreating the conditions of the Big Bang, the LHC may in fact tell us exactly how the Universe was created and how the laws that govern it came into being.
It might be able to explain the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious ‘substances’ that are invisible yet appear to form the great bulk of the Universe.
The huge machine may also find the elusive Higg’s Particle, thought to endow matter with its mass.
Weeks of fine-tuning will now be necessary before the LHC is used in anger, when its two counter-rotating beams are deliberately smashed together.
Scientists aim to study the resulting debris and detritus and hopefully find a whole new menagerie of exotic forces and particles.
Hooked on: A superconducting magnet is lowered into the LHC tunnel via a specially constructed pit
Today's launch was two decades in the making. It took those 20 years to construct the LHC, which is the largest particle accelerator the world has ever seen.
It will smash the protons together at energies up to seven times greater than scientists have ever managed to achieve 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 experts are clearly delighted with its early progress.
Dr Tara Shears, a physicist at Liverpool University who will be working on some of the data produced, said: 'It's just fantastic. The first beam has been injected and it's going all the way round. Everything is ready. Now we are going headlong into this journey into the unknown.
'We're going to look into the universe more deeply than ever before, essentially seeing what the universe looked like a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.
'These experiments don't come round that often. It really is a bit like a moon landing for us.'
Professor Jordan Nash from Imperial College London, who is working on one of the experiments, says the machine could clinch Nobel Prizes for British scientists Stephen Hawking and Peter Higgs.
However, he said: 'It's not about prizes. All of us do it out of fundamental curiosity about how the universe works. We have done all the easy stuff over the last 2,000 years. To push further takes a hugely complex apparatus.'
He added: 'What we are going to learn is what nature consists of, not what we think it consists of - we may be barking up totally the wrong tree.
'Today is the start. It means that we have successfully completed the preparations. Now we actually get to start harvesting the data.'
'Remind me. How much did we spend on this machine?'
'Turning on' the machine was a lot more complex than flicking a switch. Atoms of hydrogen housed in a bottle no bigger than a fire extinguisher were first stripped of their electrons to reveal naked protons.
These particles then had to be fired through a succession of smaller accelerators before they were travelling at sufficient speed to be injected into the LHC.
It was a process that required unimaginable levels of precision with timing accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond.
The particles travel through a ring-shaped tunnel supercooled to just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (minus 271C), the lowest temperature allowed by nature.
Reaching velocities of 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, each beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 100mph
The protons will be brought together in four huge 'detectors' placed along the ring. Each detector is like a giant microscope, designed to probe deeper into the heart of matter than has been possible before.
Concerns have been voiced, in particular by German chemist Professor Otto Rossler, that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and 'eat the planet from the inside'.
But those involved in the project insist they have reviewed all the evidence and concluded that it poses no risk to the universe.
Particle physicist Dr James Gillies, a spokesman for the LHC, said: 'We have received a lot of worried calls from people about it.
'There's nothing to worry about, the LHC is absolutely safe because we have observed nature doing the same things the LHC will do.
'Protons regularly collide in the earth's upper atmosphere without creating black holes.'
The first particle collisions are likely to take place within a few weeks.
In some cases, teams of more than 2,000 collaborating scientists will be sifting and analysing data from the machine. Most will not be at the LHC's operating base at CERN.
A revolutionary computer network called the 'Grid' - the next step beyond the World Wide Web - will make it possible for scientists all over the world to share huge amounts of processing power and carry out much of the work on their PCs.
The huge cost of the LHC is mainly shared by CERN's 20 European member states, which include Britain.
Six 'observer' nations, including the US, Russia and Japan, make significant contributions.
CERN estimates the total cost of the project to be 10 billion Swiss francs, or £5 billion. The material cost alone is put at £2.6 billion.
Britain's direct contribution to the LHC each year is £34 million.
The Big Bong: Britain unmoved by 'end of world' risk
Time bomb: passers-by watch Big Ben as it strikes 8.30... and nothing happens, as the CERN scientists predicted
The possibility of being sucked into a black hole of oblivion at 8.30am this morning appeared to leave most Britons cold.
Despite claims the Large Hadron Collider could cause an apocalypse, the country was still deep in its usual rush-hour chaos when it came to the launch in Geneva.
In London's Parliament Square, one of the busiest roundabouts in the country, Big Ben counted down the final minutes without any sign of nervousness among the passing hordes.
They just carried on going about their normal business. Traffic roared, pedestrians jostled and buses and taxis fought with each other for space.
There was no weeping or lamenting or people clutching each other in case they were about to meet their doom.
Lithuanian building worker Silvester Sutas, 30, when asked if he was waiting for the end of the world, replied: 'Actually I've been waiting to go to work on a building site but nobody's turned up.'
Anti-war protester Brian Haw, who has camped in Parliament Square since 2001, was equally unmoved. 'I'm confident I'm going to be here for a long time to come,' he said.
Fortunately, rather than the universe being ripped open like a balloon when Welsh scientist Dr Lyndon Evans lit the blue touchpaper for the gargantuan machine, nothing changed.
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