First Beam
Congratulations to CERN for achieving first beam on the LHC.
I was present at first beam for HERA and LEP. It takes a great deal to make these things work.
Update: Contrary to the claims being made in the popular press, no this is not an atom smasher, it is a proton-proton smasher. No atoms are harmed during this experiment (unless you count ionizing hydrogen atoms in the proton beam generator). No this is not recreating the big bang. Nor was there the slightest chance that this test would have created a mini-black hole that would eat up the earth, the beams never collided. That comes later in the year.
Folk need not worry however as equally energetic collisions are taking place in the upper atmosphere all the time. If 80 GeV electron-proton collision were sufficient to create a stable black hole we would have been eaten up years ago.
Update II: Yes, LEP was an electron-proton smasher, the Large Hadron Collider is just protons. It is actually the same tunnel. My point was that you can accelerate leptons or hadrons with a synchrotron like the ones at DESY or CERN. An atom has no charge, so it is going to be difficult to accelerate. There are still a few atom smashers around, but most of the physics of atoms is known. The LHC is designed to study particles at much smaller scale.
