A technician walks under the core magnet of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva March 22, 2007. International physicists at a vast underground complex near Geneva launched a 20-year project on Wednesday to re-enact the "Big Bang" to try to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbor life.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    BEIJING, Sept. 11 (Xinhuanet)-- Scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest, most powerful particle collider, in an attempt to understand the makeup of the universe. 

    On Wednesday morning, scientists shot the first protons into an about 27-km-long tunnel below the Swiss-French border in the world's most powerful particle accelerator -- the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The magnet core (R) of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), a 1,920 tons element, reaches the bottom of the experimental cavern after being lowered 100 meters at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva, February 28, 2007.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    The 9 billion dollar LHC project operates a tunnel buried 50 meters to 150 meters below the ground. The tunnel, or tube, is designed to facilitate and control a head-on collision between two beams of the same kind of particles -- either protons or ions.

    According to documents from CERN, as the European Organization for Nuclear Research is known, each of the two beams will contain about 3,000 bunches of particles. Each bunch will hold as many as 100 billion particles.

    Despite these huge numbers, the particles are so tiny that a collision between any two is quite small.

Two technicians assemble an element of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) in the French village of Cessy, near Geneva March 22, 2007. CMS is part of five experiments which, from the end of 2007 on, will study what happens when beams of particles collide in the 27 km (16.8 miles) long underground ring LHC (Large Hadron Collider).(Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    The LHC, built since 2003 at a cost of 3.8 billion U.S. dollars, will take scientists to within a split second of a laboratory recreation of the big bang, which they theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe, giving scientists the chance to answer one of humanity's oldest questions: How was the universe created.

    The experiment comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.

    Backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking, CERN dismissed the fears and declared the experiments to be absolutely safe.

    James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, was quoted as saying that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel deep below the Swiss-French border.

(Agencies)

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