Large Hadron - Time Machine - Big Bang

video From Telegraph.uk
The £5 billion machine has been described as a 17-mile racetrack around which two streams of protons - building blocks of matter - run in opposite directions before smashing into one another.

Reaching 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, each beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 90 mph.

The flashes from the collisions may help scientists reproduce the conditions that existed during the first moments after the Big Bang at the birth of the universe.

Billed as the world's largest science experiment, the switch-on involved the first stream of subatomic particles - known as Hadrons - being fired into the tunnel, eagerly awaited by 10,000 scientists.


Within an hour they had successfully completed a circuit, signified by two white dots flashing on a computer screen.

The first collisions are expected in around 30 days.

Physicists hope to learn more about the origins of mass, gravity and mysterious dark matter - the "glue" thought to hold the universe together.

But concerns have been voiced - in particular by the German chemist Professor Otto Rossler - that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".

These claims have been dismissed by leading scientists, including Prof Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University who said that the LHC is "feeble compared with what goes on in the universe. If a disaster was going to happen, it would have happened already."

Watch: Stephen Hawking on the Large Hadron Collider experiment
Watch: Telegraph TV visits CERN on the trail of the Higgs particle
Watch: Large Hadron Collider workers' rap is YouTube hit
The LHC will produce beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches its design performance, probably by 2010.