Two tiny dots flicker – the great CERN adventure is on

High on the wall above the consoles and computers of the CERN control room, a blank projector screen brightened for an instant. Two small spots of light flickered suddenly in the darkness, so briefly that you could miss them by blinking.

The dozens of people crammed into the room yesterday, however, had been waiting for this moment for their entire careers. They weren’t blinking, and the place erupted into cheers and applause. After two decades of planning and construction, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest and most expensive experiment in the history of science, was up and running.

The twin dots that appeared at 9.28am, British time, were the visual representations of two streams containing billions of protons, one of which had just been bent around a 17-mile ring at close to the speed of light by the world’s most powerful magnets. Similar beams of protons – sub-atomic particles that were forged at the dawn of time — will soon allow science to look back farther into the past than ever before, at the conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang.

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The points of light left by the first protons’ lap of honour provided no scientific insights. This was more of a test run than the marathon that lies ahead. But success was essential if the LHC is shortly to start crashing these proton streams into each other, to reveal new and perhaps surprising physics.

In the central control room, and in those that house the LHC’s four vast detectors, engineers and technicians peered at low screens, some blinking with colour and others filled with rows of monochrome data. Behind them stood many of the thousands of men and women whose brilliance has allowed this remarkable feat of science and engineering to happen, looking up at the key images projected onto the walls.

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