"We've got a beam on the LHC." That’s what Lyn Evans, the project leader for the Large Hadron Collider experiment managed to tell his colleagues before they burst into a round of applause at hearing the big news. One hour after this, scientists were celebrating the particle beam’s completion of a clockwise trajectory of the accelerator. Collider’s first mission successfully accomplished. Not without running into some small bumps in the road, though.

Due to some problems with the machine’s magnets, the Collider’s temperature, which has to be kept at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, registered some fluctuation, delaying sending the beam in the counter-clockwise direction.

European Organization for Nuclear Research’s head of hardware commissioning Rudiger Schmidt stated that the issue had been merely a hiccup, having no notable impact whatsoever.

The Large Hadron Collider experiment aims at recreating the effect of the “Big Bang,” thus solving many a mystery about matter and elementary particles. The “Big Bang” is a theory about the origins of the Universe revolving around the main idea that it [the Universe] was created due to the explosion of a very hot and dense primordial object the size of a coin 15 billion years ago. The theory was first proposed by Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre, although the phrase “Big Bang” is said to have been coined by Sir Fred Hoyle, an English astronomer best known for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.

The Collider will also look into concepts such as “dark matter,” which is hypothetical matter whose existence can be drawn from the gravitational effects it has on visible matter, “dark energy,” a hypothetical form of energy that increases the Universe’s expansion rate and a theoretical particle dubbed the “God Particle,” which could explain how particles gain mass.

The LHC will eventually create small collisions between atoms at nearly the speed of light, in an attempt to re-enact the “Big Bang,” although scientists have not yet revealed when this would happen. To create such an effect, they have to pump beams in both directions through a vacuum that is both colder and emptier than outer space. The beams are kept on their circular trajectory by 1,232 dipole magnets, while other 392 quadrupole magnets keep them focused in order to maximize the chances of interaction. A proton will take less than a minute and a half to travel once around the main ring, which means 11,000 revolutions per second.

The project, which was organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN and involved scientists from 80 different nations( of which 1,200 researchers come from the United States), cost 10 billion Swiss franc to start up, the entire cost of the experiment being expected to rise to a maximum of approximately €6.4 billion.