http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7604293.stm

Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.

They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash protons together with cataclysmic force.

Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

The first - clockwise - beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 0930 BST. The second - anti-clockwise - beam successfully circled the ring after 1400 BST.

So far, all the beams have been stopped, or "dumped", after just a few circuits.

On Thursday, engineers hoped to inject clockwise and anti-clockwise protons again, but this time they plan to "close the orbit", letting the beams run continuously for a few seconds each.

The BBC understands that low-energy collisions could happen in the next few days. This will allow engineers to calibrate instruments, but will not produce data of scientific interest.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. There were cheers in the control room when engineers heard of the successful test.

He added later: "We had a very smooth start-up."
The LHC is arguably the most complicated and ambitious experiment ever built; the project has been hit by cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems. The switch-on itself is two years late.

The collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern.

The vast circular tunnel - or "ring" - which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end.

The magnets are there to steer the beam around this vast circuit.

Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions for interesting events.

Scientists are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.

Major effort

"We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before," said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool.

"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."

The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass? LHC DETECTORS

"We know the answer will be found at the LHC," said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.

The favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.

The latest astronomical observations suggest ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4% of the Universe.

The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious "stuff".

But Professor Virdee told BBC News: "Nature can surprise us, we have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us."

Full beam ahead

Engineers injected the first low-intensity proton beams into the LHC in August. But they did not go all the way around the ring.

Technicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems.

Steve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, said: "There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets."

If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beams. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit.

Mr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC's predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage.

The culprits - who were drinking a particular brand that advertising once claimed would "refresh the parts other beers cannot reach" - were never found.

In order to get both beams to circulate continuously, engineers will "close the orbit". The beams themselves are made up of several "packets" - each about a metre long - containing billions of protons.

The protons would disperse if left to their own devices, so engineers use electrical forces to "grab" them, keeping the particles tightly huddled in packets.

Once the beams are captured, the same system of electrical forces is used to give the particles an energetic kick, accelerating them to greater and greater speeds.

Long haul

The idea of the Large Hadron Collider emerged in the early 1980s. The project was eventually approved in 1996 at a cost of 2.6bn Swiss Francs, which amounts to about £1.3bn at present exchange rates.

However, Cern underestimated equipment and engineering costs when it set out its original budget, plunging the lab into a cash crisis.

Cern had to borrow hundreds of millions of euros in bank loans to get the LHC completed. The current price is nearly four times that originally envisaged.

During winter, the LHC will be shut down, allowing equipment to be fine-tuned for collisions at full energy.

"What's so exciting is that we haven't had a large new facility starting up for years," explained Dr Shears.

"Our experiments are so huge, so complex and so expensive that they don't come along very often. When they do, we get all the physics out of them that we can."

Engineers celebrated the success with champagne, but a certain brand of beer was not on the menu.

Sure the big bang is a theory but it is at present a cosmological model of the universe that is supported by current scientific evidence and observations. I am not sure that you are being forced to accept it. The important point is not our opinion on the veracity of the big bang theory. Rather, it  is the responsibility of humankind to find answers to the fundamental questions of our existence. Indeed I believe that God, the creator want his creatures to study the working of his creations and unravel the so called mysteries in the universe. We should discover and find out what are the fundamental building blocks of the universe, where they come from, how they form the universe, galaxies, suns, planets, dwarf planents, plants, animal bodies, human bodies etc. Thus any sincere investigation into how our universe works is a step in the right direction. He who truely searches for the Truth will follow the Truth whereever it leads. If the Truth makes both science and religion to revise or totally retract their existing theories, so be it.

Science is not supposed to have an answer and then work towards the answer. I am not a scientist but I believe that is not the ideal way for science to go. Science should be about finding answers through investigations, not investigating in order to arrive at a pre-determined outcome.

This is like a policeman who has already determined guilt of a culprit and then finding anything that may help to butress his conclusion.

dudu-bobo:

Science is not supposed to have an answer and then work towards the answer. I am not a scientist but I believe that is not the ideal way for science to go. Science should be about finding answers through investigations, not investigating in order to arrive at a pre-determined outcome.

This is like a policeman who has already determined guilt of a culprit and then finding anything that may help to butress his conclusion.

Let me try and relieve you of you ignorance of the way science works.

Amongst the various ways science works, is the paradigm of hypothesis formulation. A hypothesis might simple be a hunch about something. The scientific method generally entails the formulation of a hypothesis and the verifications, validation and acceptance (or rejection) of the claims of the hypothesis.

Take the case of the hypothesis of cosmic expansion. When this was first formulated, there was another rival hypothesis, that of a steady state universe. Some physicists hyposthesised that if the universe sprung into existence from a massis explosion, then there should still exist radiotion from that explosion event. Loo and below, in the 50s or 60s the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from the Big Bang event was detected. Today, even your common TV or radio set can pick up this CMB. They also predicted that the temperature of this radiotion would be about 3K and loo and behold when it was first detected and measured it came to about 2.7K

The expansion of the universe was first measured by Hubble in the early 20th century and since then there has been many independent lines of eveidence that point to an expanding universe.

Further, any good scientific theory should have a great deal of explanatory power and should be capable of making substantiable predictions. Take the case of the discovery of Tiktaalic, one of the first animals to have walked on land from the sea. Using their knowledge of evolution, geology and plate tectonic, scientist were able to predict the existence of such fossiles to with a few kilometers of it home terrain. And they found it exactly there in 2004. Isn't science GREAT?

@huxley,

huxley:

Let me try and relieve you of you ignorance of the way science works.

Lol. . . you often come off as quite a fellow sometimes, you know. You tried to 'relieve' someone of your perceived ignorance without even the patience to carefully weigh his point.

From all you said, you didn't add anything to his point. He said: "Science is not supposed to have an answer and then work towards the answer." That is classic, my dear huxley; and you should've realized that a "hypothesis" is not an "answer". Some scientific enquiries start from the hypothesis, they never start with an answer.

There should be no quarrels between people trying to share views on issues like this. It is when people become too polarized in their own ideologies that we find unnecessary fissures in relating with other people. Anyhow, cheers.

huxley,

I have decided not to read through your write up because I take your first line as one with which you chose to insult me. It could be that that is not your intention but it does read very insulting to me.

dudu-bobo:

Science is not supposed to have an answer and then work towards the answer. I am not a scientist but I believe that is not the ideal way for science to go. Science should be about finding answers through investigations, not investigating in order to arrive at a pre-determined outcome.

This is like a policeman who has already determined guilt of a culprit and then finding anything that may help to butress his conclusion.

I see your point. However science does not work like the policeman. Science is based on emperical data and not on the opinion or view of the scientist. It is however possible that a scientist opinion and personal beliefs may colour the interpretation of the data. However the rigors of peer review of a scientific paper in addition to the reproduciblity of the said data when published ensure that any rogue interpretation or inadequate data will sooner or later be fished out. Several scientific papers even in pre-eminent journals have been retracted once the data or an interpretation of the data is made suspect or invalidated by new findings or scientific misconduct. Science is a working progress. Based on available scientific evidence and observation, the big bang theory is the best scientific model  of our universe. There are still gaps in the theory since some hypothetical assumptions were made. The informed assumtions may turn out to be true or false. Experiments like the one currently going on  in Geneva is geared to validate, invalidate or modify the big bang theory. The LHC project is a bold attempt to address the fundamental questions of our universe. No scientist knows the outcome of these experiments. It may validate Big bang, it may invalidate it or it may indeed raise more questions about the universe and our place in it. We just have to wait and see. Nature must be investigated and understood. And I believe that to understand Gods creations and how it works is our God given mandate. Stay blessed.

Scientist and the world have been trying for as long as the world has been to try and figure out how the world came to being, and yet no one can, and trust me, no one will ever be able to still.
tell me about a "big bang' and damn, the world just been, what a total ludacris.

$$Rhino:

Scientist and the world have been trying for as long as the world has been to try and figure out how the world came to being, and yet no one can, and trust me, no one will ever be able to still.
tell me about a "big bang' and damn, the world just been, what a total ludacris.

You are probably not a scientist and it is understandable if scientific investigations or discoveries do not interest you. However it is probably not correct to label what you seem not to understand "total ludacris". Science has its limitations but it has given mankind so much that it is unwise to dismiss what it has done and will do in the near future. You may or may not agree with the big bang theory. It is a scientific model and you can accept or reject the model but not to reject experiments aimed at testing this model of the universe.

m_nwankwo:

You are probably not a scientist and it is understandable if scientific investigations or discoveries do not interest you. However it is probably not correct to label what you seem not to understand "total ludacris". Science has its limitations but it has given mankind so much that it is unwise to dismiss what it has done and will do in the near future. You may or may not agree with the big bang theory. It is a scientific model and you can accept or reject the model but not to reject experiments aimed at testing this model of the universe.

Hahahaha, sorry i forgot to mention that i saw your name on the list of scientist around the globe.
There is no doubt about it, that some good things has come out of scientifical findings, and mind you, the brain that they uses in all they doing, has been giving to them by same God that created the universe, so once again, it is ludacris, and lemme say this, be4 i seize to respond on this thread, if yuo evolve from apes and gorillas, i was created by He that knows the End be4 the starts.

$$Rhino:

Hahahaha, sorry i forgot to mention that i saw your name on the list of scientist around the globe.
There is no doubt about it, that some good things has come out of scientifical findings, and mind you, the brain that they uses in all they doing, has been giving to them by same God that created the universe, so once again, it is ludacris, and let me say this, be4 i seize to respond on this thread, if yuo evolve from apes and gorillas, i was created by He that knows the End be4 the starts.

The brian the same god gave the biblical writer to write the tower of bable and noah's ark that have been discredited? or the brian that the writers of mathew use when saying asserting that jesus said that stars will fall down from the sky on the last day? how will stars fall down from the sky? why will jesus make such a statement if he truly knows what stars are? stars are FAR bigger than the earth and will never fall down besides stars are not up in the sky but distant from the earth. . . . . . . Yet again, the Bible fails to improve upon a field of science when it moves into the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all believed that the inabilities to speak and hear were the result of possessions by evil spirits (9:32, 9:17, and 11:14, respectively). This is an interesting and quiet creative hypothesis, but one we currently know is not true. The inability to speak is usually due to a physical abnormality in the region of the brain known as Broca’s area, while the inability to hear is typically due to physical trauma of the inner ear. If these regions don’t operate properly, the affected individual lacks the auditory and phonetic capacities made possible by a normal physiology.

Matthew also believes that blindness is a result of the devil’s inhabitance (12:22). Again, you don’t need the unverifiable nature of this wild claim explained to you. Damage to the optic nerve or detachment of the retina usually causes blindness. No devils or demons have ever demonstrated their involvement in this impairment. Luke purports that a woman’s crippled nature is also due to possession by a devil (13:11). While there are multitudes of unfortunate factors that can cripple a person, spiritual possession has never proven to be one of them. Luke and Matthew commit an additional medical error when they claim that devils cause seizures (9:39 and 17:15, respectively). Suffice to say, devils, demons, evil spirits, or any other fiendish creatures have never been known to cause seizures. These violent neurological events are the result of some physiological abnormality, such as a brain tumor, or an imbalance in electrical activity. When radical epilepsy manifestations are observed, however, it’s certainly understandable how a person with limited knowledge of human physiology could leap to the erroneous and fantastic conclusion that a demon might have possessed the individual in question. The Hebrew god once again fails to distinguish himself from the countless other ancient gods because his writers weren’t the least bit scientifically believable.

$$Rhino:

Hahahaha, sorry i forgot to mention that i saw your name on the list of scientist around the globe.
There is no doubt about it, that some good things has come out of scientifical findings, and mind you, the brain that they uses in all they doing, has been giving to them by same God that created the universe, so once again, it is ludacris, and let me say this, be4 i seize to respond on this thread, if yuo evolve from apes and gorillas, i was created by He that knows the End be4 the starts.

Hi Rhino,

I am sorry if you misunderstood my well meant statement. It was not meant to disparage you as a non scientist. I am not involved in the atom smasher project. I am not a physist for that matter. I am a molecular biologist and a very competent one. Irrespective of speciality, the methods of scientific enquiry are the same. Sure the greatness of the work of man is a reflection of the the greatness of God who gave man the brain. That is why it is in order in my view to investigate the workings of the creations of God, of which the observable universe is one such creation. I did not mention evolution in my submissions to this thread and I do not know why you brought it up. I accept the principle of evolution of matter including our biological bodies but I do not accept that my body evolved from apes and gorillas or any primate for that matter.My view is that the pathway and the speciation leading to the development of the human body is a different tree from that which all known apes belong to. I also believe that the evolutionary pathway leading to the the human body was designed and actualized by the will of God. My spirit which animates my biological body is a breath of God. Best wishes.

i'm proud this is happening in my lifetime. God is giving us understanding through these things. Particle physics is about to change forever.

I think the first tests will be on the 21st of Oct , i'm not sure.

dudu-bobo:

huxley,

I have decided not to read through your write up because I take your first line as one with which you chose to insult me. It could be that that is not your intention but it does read very insulting to me.

Am sorry you felt insulted. Honestly, it was not meant as an insult. On second thoughts, I should have worded it slightly differently.

Most people find the word "ignorance" particularly hurtful when directed to their persons. To be ignorant of a subject is not something to be ashamed of. No one is up to speed with everything there is to know. I am ignorant of many many things, but given the opportunity I like to learn about new things. What is most detestful is wilful ignorance, particularly on subjects about one is capable of developing appreciable knowledge, or that is relevant to one's direct circumstance.

So pardon me.

pilgrim.1:

@huxley,

Lol. . . you often come off as quite a fellow sometimes, you know. You tried to 'relieve' someone of your perceived ignorance without even the patience to carefully weigh his point.

From all you said, you didn't add anything to his point. He said: "Science is not supposed to have an answer and then work towards the answer." That is classic, my dear huxley; and you should've realized that a "hypothesis" is not an "answer". Some scientific enquiries start from the hypothesis, they never start with an answer.

There should be no quarrels between people trying to share views on issues like this. It is when people become too polarized in their own ideologies that we find unnecessary fissures in relating with other people. Anyhow, cheers.

lol

Hypothesis is no answer. In layman's term it is no different than an educated guess. A guess that can be easily tested.

Anyways, to the topic

My problem with this experiment is time. Assuming that the big bang theory is right, then time must have played a big part in evolution. Within that time there is also the issue of selective pressure , equilibrum and just pure dumb luck. All of these are parameters that are embodied in the big bang theory. The idea is that after the big bang , U would assume that there were thousands of reactions going on. The factors that favored the reactions that  led to the synthesis of the precursors to organic  molecule (presumably RNA) amidst a myriad of all other "nonsense reactions" are all unknown. Was it luck, the conditions at that time or something else ? Why would one reaction be chosen among all others ?   That brings me back to the question of time? How much time can we afford to give this experiment before the collection of data and at what time point is the data actually correlating to what happened before and after the big bang (assuming thats what happened). My guess is that they would try and speed things up and in that case r u introducing a bias in the system?  

The only sensible conclusion I can make for this experiment is that it might prove that U can actually make organic materials from inorganic materials and that has been proved a long time ago. So what gives?