Champagne pours as Big Bang re-creation project launched

"People went crazy," says TAU physicist on site under the Swiss-French border.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
CERN collider 224.88 ap (photo credit: )
CERN collider 224.88 ap
(photo credit: )
Applause, tears and the tinkling of champagne glasses were the first reaction by 50 scientists - including Israelis - in the control room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) site under the Swiss-French border on Wednesday. The world's largest particle collider passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 27-kilometer underground ring Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe. After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:26 a.m. indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider - described as the biggest physics experiment in history. "There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap. Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise. Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure. "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 at the Swiss-French border. "Everything works as it should have. When our ATLAS detector began to record the first proton beam, we got all excited," said Tel Aviv University Physics and Astronomy School Prof. Erez Etzion, who was one of the elite group at CERN. "We could see the data on the detector. People went crazy. Now we have so much hard word ahead of us to understand all the data." Etzion, who is due to return to Israel after his present shift, munched on a sandwich and cola from the CERN cafeteria and said: "We are glad that this momentous project is making the headlines and arousing so much interest in Israel." As for fears by some laymen that the launch of the project might wipe out Geneva or cause the world to be swallowed up by a black hole, Etzion said: "Don't worry. We're still here." Three of the 30 Israeli professors, students and technicians who have taken part in preparations for the historic launch of the gargantuan particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project were at the CERN site on the historic day. They are Etzion, Prof. Giora Mikenberg of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and Shlomit Tarem of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. On the first day, only two beams were emitted. What the massive instrument will do in the coming days, weeks and months is to bash together the tiny particles that make up the universe at mind-boggling speeds, so scientists can observe the extreme energies, mini-black holes, and other phenomena that occurred during the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the mother of all explosions, in which all we know was created. Science, Culture and Sport Minister Ghaleb Majadle, who visited the CERN site a few months ago and attached the last Israeli-made sensor in the device, said in Jerusalem that the project is one of the scientific experiments "most important to man. By involving Israelis and Arabs, among others, it also represented additional importance - not only to benefit mankind but also to bridge the gaps among various peoples." AP contributed to this report.