Scientists Start Biggest Physics Experiment

GENEVA (Reuters) -International scientists celebrated the successful start of a hugeparticle-smashing machine on Wednesday aiming to recreate theconditions of the "Big Bang" that created the universe.

Experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest andmost complex machine ever made, could revamp modern physics and unlocksecrets about the universe and its origins.

The project has had to work hard to deny suggestions by some criticsthat the experiment could create tiny black holes of intense gravitythat could suck in the whole planet.

Such fears, fanned by doomsday writers, have spurred huge interestin particle physics before the machine’s start-up. Leading scientistshave dismissed such concerns as "nonsense."

The debut of the machine that cost 10 billion Swiss francs ($9billion) registered as a blip on a control room screen at CERN, theEuropean Organization for Nuclear Research, at about 9:30 a.m. (3:30a.m. EDT).

"We’ve got a beam on the LHC," project leader Lyn Evans told his colleagues, who burst into applause at the news.

The physicists and technicians huddled in the control room cheeredloudly again an hour later when the particle beam completed a clockwisetrajectory of the accelerator, successfully completing the machine’sfirst major task.

Eventually, the scientists want to send beams in both directions tocreate tiny collisions at nearly the speed of light, an attempt torecreate on a miniature scale the heat and energy of the Big Bang, aconcept of the origin of the universe that dominates scientificthinking.

The Big Bang is thought to have occurred 15 billion years ago whenan unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin explodedin a void, spewing out matter that expanded rapidly to create stars,planets and eventually life on Earth.

SLIGHT HICCUP

Problems with the LHC’s magnets caused its temperature — which iskept at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius (minus 456.3 degrees Fahrenheit) –to fluctuate slightly, delaying efforts to send a particle beam in thecounter-clockwise direction. The beam started its progression and thenwas halted.

"This is a hiccup, not a major thing," Rudiger Schmidt, CERN’s headof hardware commissioning, told reporters, adding the second rotationshould be completed on Wednesday afternoon.

Evans, who wore jeans and running shoes to the start-up, declined to say when those high-energy clashes would begin.

"I don’t know how long it will take," he said. "I think what hashappened this morning bodes very well that it will go quickly … Thisis a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time.But this morning we had a great start."

Once the particle-smashing experiment gets to full speed, datameasuring the location of particles to a few millionths of a meter, andthe passage of time to billionths of a second, will show how theparticles come together, fly apart, or dissolve.

It is in these conditions that scientists hope to find fairlyquickly a theoretical particle known as the Higgs Boson, named afterScottish scientist Peter Higgs who first proposed it in 1964, as theanswer to the mystery of how matter gains mass.

Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe could never havetaken shape in the eons after the Big Bang, and life could never havebegun — on Earth or, if it exists as many cosmologists believe, onother worlds either.