Scientists turn on biggest ‘Big Bang Machine’
After 14 years of preparation, a new scientific wonder of the world opened for business Wednesday with the official startup of Europe's Large Hadron Collider.
The $10 billion particle accelerator is the biggest, most expensive science machine on earth,
designed to probe mysteries ranging from dark matter and missing antimatter to the existence of extra, unseen dimensions in space.
Scientists, journalists and dignitaries watched from the control room at Europe's CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border, near Geneva, as beams of protons were sent all the way around the collider's 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring of supercooled pipes for the first time.
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