Initial test of atom smasher has world scientists beaming

Moving fast enough to circle a 17-mile-long underground tunnel nearly 11,000 times a second, streams of atomic particles signaled the start of a new era of research that scientists believe could unravel the universe's deepest mysteries.

At 2:28 a.m. MDT Wednesday, some 14 years and $10 billion after it was first designed, the Large Hadron Collider laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, was activated, officially becoming the world's largest atom smasher and the tool necessary to peer into the natural forces and matter that were the tiniest particles from the "big bang," the massive explosion scientists believe formed the earth, the planets, the stars and everything.

Physicists in Utah, which made a bid in 1987 to be the site of a supercollider program the U.S. Congress chose to locate in Texas but ultimately scrapped in 1993 because of its projected $12 billion price tag, said the LHC literally brings into the laboratory the fundamental nature of matter and why particles interact with each other the way they do.

"For the first time, we will be probing energy and densities similar to those the universe experienced in the moments immediately after the big bang," said Utah State University physicist Shane Larson. "We have no other way of probing this regime, but the LHC will tell us a lot about how the underlying model of particle physics works."

Near Geneva, the white dots that flashed in the five control room computer screens at CERN, the French acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are being hailed by scientists as blips of cosmic proportions.

"The first technical challenge has been met," said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN. "What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it's for the physicists to show us what they can do ....

"Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we're looking at essential questions for mankind," Aymar said.

Accelerator technology, like most experiments, is simply a way to replicate what nature does already but in a controlled environment where interactions can be watched closely, USU's Larson said.

"We build particle accelerators to break things down," he said. "Just like throwing a piggy bank against the wall to find out what is inside, when you throw subatomic particles at each other, you can discover what is inside them."