Large Hadron Collider - historic moment

Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the tunnel, the coldest place in the universe, at a couple of degrees above absolute zero. CERN used powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles.

Nature does it all the time with cosmic rays (and with higher energy) but this is the first time this is done in Laboratory!

When collisions become routine, the beams will be packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles are so tiny that few will collide at each crossing.

*the images of the first crashed proton beams were beautiful*