Scientists fire up Big Bang machine

The world's biggest physics experiment got underway this morning, as scientists attempt to recreate the Universe's first moments after the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 27km-long circular tunnel which runs under the French-Swiss border. After 14 years of work by 10,000 scientists, at around 8am engineers fired up the £5bn machine, circulating a beam of particles through the tunnel's 1,000 cylindrical magnets. The particles, or protons, are designed to smash together with such cataclysmic force that they will create new sub-atomic particles which, it is hoped, reveal the fundamental nature of the cosmos.

Within an hour of flicking the switch scientists confirmed they had successfully completed a circuit, signified by two white dots flashing on a computer screen. During the afternoon the team started to send a second beam around the Large Hadron Collider in the anticlockwise direction.

The initial laps are to make sure the device works; the first collisions are not expected for another 30 days.

"We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before," said Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool. "We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."

The project, run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research - better known by its French acronym Cern - has run two years late after it was beset by problems such as cost overruns, equipment trouble and construction problems.

There have also been several legal bids to halt the project, amid concerns that the LHC could cause the end of the world by creating a black hole to swallow the earth. Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University dismissed such fears: "The world will not come to an end... The LHC is feeble compared with what goes on in the universe. If a disaster was going to happen, it would have happened already."