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If you're reading this, the Large Hadron Collider hasn't destroyed the world.
The world's largest particle accelerator went online Wednesday morning to much celebration, including in Utah County where BYU professors and high school students looked on.
Payson High School teacher Linda Walter and three students were actually in the 17-mile long facility near Geneva, Switzerland, a few months ago.
"To stand next to those experiments that are so massive and realize they're looking for the smallest thing in existence was amazing," Walter said.
The AP physics and chemistry teacher had a collider party Wednesday at 6 a.m. to watch an online stream of the collider being fired up.
"We only had 15 [students], but 15's better than three," she said.
The LHC is designed to collide two counter-rotating beams of protons, according the official Web site.
On Wednesday, after a few trial runs, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, fired a beam of protons clockwise around the 17-mile tunnel of the collider deep under the rolling fields along the Swiss-French border, the Associated Press reported. Then they succeeded in sending another beam in the opposite, counterclockwise direction.
The beams will gradually be filled with more protons and fired at near the speed of light in opposite directions around the tunnel, making 11,000 circuits a second, the AP reported. They will travel down the middle of two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder than outer space. At four points in the tunnel, the scientist will use giant magnets to cross the beams and cause protons to collide. The collider's two largest detectors -- essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons -- are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.
Scientists say their powerful tool, which has been under planning since 1984, is almost ready to reveal how the tiniest particles were first created after the "big bang," which many theorize was the massive explosion that formed the stars, planets and everything, according to the Associated Press.
The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time, according to the AP. It could also find evidence of a hypothetical particle -- the Higgs boson -- which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.
Practical uses are hard to predict, says BYU physics professor Eric Hirschmann. It's not going to cure cancer or improve on the latest iPod.
"The easy answer, the most direct, most honest answer is, we have no idea," he said.
But it's the unforeseen that drives scientific discovery. Hirschmann cites scientists like James Maxwell, whose work 150 years ago was the precursor for radio, television, radar and more.
Walter says the first colliders ended up producing the idea for microwave ovens. The experiments have to be done before discovery is made, she said.
"How would you have known that that's what it was if you hadn't gone there?"
Discovery, not disaster
Hirschmann, an astrophysicist, is interested in the work the collider will do creating tiny black holes. That's where some scientists and alarmists say things go south. Lawsuits have been filed in multiple countries in the fear that the collider will somehow bring about the end of the world.
Hirschmann says theoretically, there is a chance something could go drastically wrong, but the odds are better that Utah Lake will completely freeze over in the middle of the summer. "It's not one in a hundred, or one in a million."
The black holes will be so small that they'll simply pass through the earth and out into space.
While the collider was powered up Wednesday, the first high-energy collisions won't happen until late October.
Interest
The collider is the biggest news in particle physics in decades. The United States had planned to build one in the early 1990s but killed the project because of cost. The U.S. is an observer country on the project, and contributed $531 million, the AP reported.
Walter is dismayed at the state of physics interest in the country, watching as the group of 20 European member countries of CERN leap into new fields. Walter does have some students who have shown interest, like the 15 who showed up Wednesday morning.
Other students were less enthusiastic.
"Some of them just turn it off and say 'This is dumb.' "
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