CERN: LHC celebrates five years of not destroying the world

Universe’s secrets are revealed in a dark corner in Switzerland. Credit: timtom.ch

Five years ago, at breakfast time, the world waited anxiously for news from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The first nervy bunch of protons were due to be fired around the European lab's latest and biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), as it kicked into action.

Some "mercifully deluded people" – as Jeremy Paxman put it – feared the LHC would do no end of mischief.

There was talk of planet-swallowing black holes, the transformation of the Earth into a new state of "strange" matter, and even the prospect of the obliteration of the entire universe.

But for those of more sensible dispositions, the LHC's first beam was an occasion for great excitement.

As the protons sped all the way round the 27km tunnel under the countryside between Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, thousands of physicists and engineers celebrated decades of hard work, incredible ingenuity and sheer ambition.

Lyn Evans

Together they had created the largest-ever scientific experiment. After the LHC was switched on, project leader Lyn Evans said, "We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe."

Operating a massive particle accelerator requires much more than flicking a switch – thousands of individual elements have to all come together, synchronised in time to less than a billionth of a second.

University College London's physicist Jon Butterworth recalls a "particularly bizarre memory" from that day.

Relaxing in a Westminster pub after an exhausting LHC event in London, Butterworth found he could follow live updates from his own ATLAS experiment on the pub's TV.

Particle physics continued to make news. The following fortnight's joy turned to dismay as an accident involving six tonnes of liquid helium erupting violently in the tunnel – euphemistically referred to as "the incident" – damaged around half a mile of the collider, closing the LHC for a year.