In scale, appearance and function, it can only be compared to a cathedral. The underground chambers that hold the particle detectors, the biggest of them built and maintained by Canadians, are indeed larger than most European cathedrals, buried a hundred metres below the earth, charged with a city's worth of power and filled with an unholy light.
In its function, too, the Large Hadron Collider this morning became something of a secular cathedral for the millions of people watching and the thousands of physicists on the site, which spans the Swiss-French border. Here, inside the largest science experiment ever conducted, is the stuff of meditation and prayer, mysteries of the sort that only religion and Big Science can unveil with such grandeur.
Here, emerging from an underground tunnel at almost the speed of light as protons are brought to impossible speeds around a 27-kilometre underground track, are the answers to the origins of time, the laws of the universe, the history of all things, and the truth about what the empty spaces hold.
After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. local time (4:36 a.m. ET) this morning indicating that the protons had travelled the full length of the tunnel.
"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.
Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Chicago, where contributing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.
"Well done everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room.
Last night, in the computer-packed control room of the ATLAS Project, where hundreds of physicists hope to detect for the first time the basic particles that will answer the most profound questions of physics, the talk alternated between mechanical troubles and high cosmology.
“This is what our entire careers have been building up to: It's the one chance in our generation to answer the biggest questions of science,” said Christopher Potter, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University who helped build the devices that will, he hopes, detect the mysterious Higgs boson – a widely hypothesized but never detected particle – and other sub-sub-atomic elements whose existence would fill in the embarrassingly empty spaces in our knowledge of the nature of matter and the history of the universe.
As he and his colleagues monitored the computer banks, he began to explain his excitement about the possibility of finding a particle – he is betting his reputation on something called the charged Higgs – that will help to explain what it is that fills the universe (we still really don't know), and what happened at the moment time began, 14 billion years ago.
He was interrupted as a siren's wail filled the room, sounding strikingly like the one on the Starship Enterprise (a bit of physicist humour), warning that a subsection of the $9.5-billion project was acting up.
This was not the only alarm the project has set off. A string of lawsuits have been filed, in European and U.S. courts, calling for the collider to be shut down because the plaintiffs, some of them scientists, believe that the high-energy particle collisions will create black holes or other highly destructive forces that could destroy the Earth.
Such lawsuits, not taken seriously by the wider scientific community, have accompanied the launch of almost every major atom-smashing project. When Chicago's Fermilab inaugurated in 1983 what would become the Tevatron – until today the most powerful particle accelerator in the world – it was met with similar warnings. It went on to identify many of the varieties of quarks, the basic particles of matter and energy.
