The dawn of a new era of discovery?

Abstract

On Wednesday September 10th 2008, physicists and engineers at the CERN laboratory which straddles the Swiss-French border near Geneva began the commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) with beam, and the four LHC experiments (ATLAS, CMS, LCHb and ALICE) saw their first interactions, albeit between the contra-rotating beams of protons and the tiny amounts of residual gas in the beam pipe. Remarkably, these first steps in the ambitious physics programme were taken in the full glare of the media spotlight, which was no doubt excited by the speculation that these first collisions might produce a black hole and destroy the Universe as we know it, or at least the part of it that is near and dear to us.