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Geneva: Scientists fired the first beam of protons around the world's largest particle collider on Wednesday in science's next great step to understand the makeup of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider - built since 2003 at a cost of $3.8 billion - provides scientists with much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms in a bid to see how they are made.
"The beam is the size of a human hair," Paola Catapano, a spokeswoman for the host European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said after the protons were fired into the accelerator below the Swiss-French border at 9:32 am local time.
The organisation is firing the protons - a type of subatomic particle - around the tunnel in stages, several miles at a time.
Once the beam has successfully been tested in clockwise direction, CERN will send it counterclockwise. Eventually the two beams will be fired in opposite directions with the aim of smashing together protons to see how they are made.
The startup comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.
The skeptics theorise that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.
"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, before Wednesday's start.
CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.
The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle - the Higgs boson - believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.
Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.
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