The scientists involved in the Large Hadron Collider project managed to complete the first major test, in order to make sure that everything will go according to plan. The test involved the switch-on of the machine as it fired a beam of protons all the way across its 27-km-long tunnel. "We've got a beam on the LHC," project leader Lyn Evans told his colleagues, who received the news with great enthusiasm and many applauses.

Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was very pleased with the results and expressed his firm opinion that all operations will run smoothly, just as scheduled.

There were many concerns about the project and also about this test, especially the theories about the formation of black holes, but James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, addressed the issue, explaining that the only thing that could indeed go wrong and be considered dangerous is if a beam would go out of control while the machine is at full power. He explained that the damage would only be experienced by the accelerator itself, with no complications for the people of Geneva. "On Wednesday we start small," said Gillies. "A really good result would be to have the other beam going around, too, because once you've got a beam around once in both directions you know that there is no show-stopper."

The massive project involves the work of researchers from more than 80 countries, including the United States and Japan. The LHC, as the collider is called, has been designed to recreate on a much smaller scale the big bang phenomenon, the huge explosion responsable for the formation of the universe. So far, the total costs of the project come to more than $9 billion, but the scientists involved claim that the money could not have been spent in a better way.

The truth is that whatever these tests might turn out, the findings can only be labeled ’interesting’ as they will surely not have any sort of application to better our lives. This part of science only deals with people’s curiosities, without any connection to the practical side of things. The project was received with huge enthusiasm from day one, as more than 8,000 scientists from all over the world have been involved in different aspects of the work for the past 20 years.

It has been designed to accelerate particles to energies of 7 trillion electron volts, about 7 times more energetic than any accelerator in use today. However, until reaching this performance, the LHC has a lot more steps to take. The energy that the protons are expected to gain after traveling through the LHC will be increased up to the value of 5 trillion electron volts and with their continuous procedures scientists hope that this value will be reached sometime in the spring of 2009.

The European accelerator has been built in a 17 miles long underground tunnel which is located at the French and Swiss border near Geneva, with most of it running underneath France and a little underneath Switzerland. Both countries consider it an honor to be involved in the research.