The Large Hadron Collider Could Uncover Some Amazing Things Such As Higgs Boson, AKA the God Particle

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), also known as the "Big Bang Machine," made history this week when it "smashed" subatomic particles together at half its maximum power beneath Swiss soil in an underground tunnel.

Reaching this point has been "marvelous," said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the UK "I've been involved in [the LHC] personally for over ten years. ...It's like waiting ten years for Christmas to come."

Ian Shipsey, an LHC coordinator in Illinois, was quoted as saying a large part of the excitement at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)--and around the world--was relief that the collider's previous electrical problems have had no lasting effect on the machine's ability to perform as expected.

"When the machine started to do its early testing last fall," he said, "everyone was on a knife's edge. Every time the machine had a little problem, everyone imagined that it might have a disastrous meltdown. Now there's a sense of relief mixed with joy, and everybody's pinching themselves to make sure that it's real."

A March 31 report in The Daily Mail said "Fears were raised after the collider's initial testing in 2008 that it could create micro black holes that would eventually endanger Earth. But scientists at CERN dismissed any threat to the planet and said any such holes would be so weak that they would vanish almost instantly without causing any damage."