I predict that God will withdraw significant interferance this time around.
GENEVA " Scientists circulated beams of protons in the world's largest atom smasher Friday night for the first time after a year of repairs caused by a spectacular failure after the $10 billion machine was heavily damaged by a simple electrical fault.
Progress on restarting the machine went faster than expected Friday evening and the first beam started circulating in a clockwise direction around the machine about 10 p.m., said James Gillies, spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
"Some of the scientists had gone home and had to be called back in," Gillies told The Associated Press.
The exact time of the start of the Large Hadron Collider was difficult to predict because it was based on how long it took to perform steps along the way, and in the end it happened about nine hours earlier than expected, Gillies said.
"This is an important milestone on the road towards" scientific experiments physics at the LHC, which are expected in 2010, he said.
The scientists have started to prepare to circulate another beam in the opposite, counterclockwise direction within the coming hours, Gillies said.
@edgarblythe,
Good news! It's about time!
Very interesting. Thanks Edgar!
Sounds like they are well on their way to creating the black hole that will swallow us into a wormhole and pop the planet out into an alternate universe.
@rosborne979,
Yippee! ee cummings was right.
@rosborne979,
"Fringe" has been covering that alternate Universe messin' with our world -- I think it's a matter of time before they bring the Cern Hadron Collider into an episode.
" The world's largest atom smasher made another leap forward Monday by circulating beams of protons in opposite directions at the same time and causing the first particle collisions in the $10 billion machine after more than a year of repairs, organizers said.
The true test of the Large Hadron Collider will come in the first two months of 2010, when scientists plan to start deliberately crashing protons into each other to see what they can discover about the makeup of the universe and its tiniest particles.
The collisions " seen by massive detectors " were a side effect of the quick advances being made by the LHC during its startup phase, which began Friday night, said Rolf Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN.
"It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said Heuer. "But we need to keep a sense of perspective " there's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics program."
Collisions were recorded in all four of the main detectors at "experiments" in rooms the size of cathedrals about 100 meters (300 feet) underground around the collider.
"This is great news, the start of a fantastic era of physics and hopefully discoveries after 20 years' work by the international community to build a machine and detectors of unprecedented complexity and performance," said Fabiola Gianotti, who represents the Atlas partical physics experiment for about 2,000 other scientists.
"It was standing room only in the ALICE control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions," said Juergen Schukraft, spokesman for that experiment, which involves heavy ion physics. "This is simply tremendous."
A CERN statement said the simultaneous beams and collisions demonstrate the excellent performance of the control system.
While the initial collisions were a side effect, intentional hits could begin within the next 10 days, mainly to check how the machine is working, said CERN spokesman James Gillies.
Ultimately, the collider aims to create conditions like they were 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang " which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago. Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.
The collider was started with great fanfare Sept. 10, 2008, only to be heavily damaged by an electrical fault nine days later. It took 14 months to repair and add protection systems to the machine before it was restarted.
The protons were traveling Monday at almost the speed of light " 11,000 times a second in each direction around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.
Initial signs are very good, physicists told a news conference. The beam is of superb quality, with the protons tightly packed into hairlike lines and guided by some 1,600 superconducting magnets " 15 meters (50 feet) long " operating at temperatures colder than outer space for maximum electrical efficiency.
So far the machine is operating at 450 billion electron volts of energy, which is relatively low compared with its design capability of more than 14 times that. It soon will overtake the world's current most powerful accelerator, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago, which operates at 1 trillion electron volts, or TeV.
Myers said the CERN collider should be ramped up to 1.2 TeV by Christmas. CERN might decide to make the first collisions at the current low energy or at 1.2 TeV, but that will be more for calibration purposes than for making scientific discoveries, he said.
@edgarblythe,
Oh, good -- we have until after the Holidays!
@Lightwizard,
But we don't need to worry about 2012?
Early Monday morning, the problem-plagued Large Hadron Collider (LHC) set a world record in Switzerland when it accelerated twin proton beams to an energy of 1.18 TeV (teraelectronvolts), surpassing the record of 0.98 TeV set in 2001 by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Tevatron collider in the U.S.
@edgarblythe,
Is that going in the Guinness world records? Maybe they should be congratulated for bearing twins?
@edgarblythe,
Right -- please, humanoids, stop upstaging me. My miracles have been been pretty short on anything dramatic ever since the Bible, so pathetic they seem to come-and-go without any headlines. My disasters, however, are often monstrous, killing hundreds to thousands of people at one time and they are always front page. Please blow the world up with that thing so I can get some respect!
Especially after you name all those man-made cures miracle drugs. How do you get off doing what I'm suppose to do?
When are they going to collide something again? Where's that boson?
