First high-energy collisions carried out in Geneva

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk Wild whooping and cheering broke out as scientists celebrated the “dawn of a new era” of physics yesterday with the first high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. In the moments after the images of collisions were beamed into each of the four LHC control rooms, physicists of all ages and nationalities hugged each other, jumped up and down and popped champagne corks. On the third attempt scientists watching the event live from around the world described it as an “historic moment” marking the first step towards addressing some of the deepest mysteries in physics. “We are going where nobody has been before. We have opened a new territory for physics,” said Oliver Buchmueller, a senior CERN scientist. Betting has already begun on what will be the first discovery at the LHC, with the Irish bookmaker PaddyPower making dark matter the 11-10 favourite, followed by black holes at 8-1 and dark energy at 12-1. God remains the 100-1 outsider.

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Woman tries to shut down Large Hadron Collider over apocalypse fears

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk A German woman has failed in a bid to force her country's government to halt experiments at the world's largest atom smasher which she feared would lead to the Earth's destruction. The country's highest court said that the woman — whom it didn't identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse. The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman's appeal because she was "unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about." "The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers," the court ruled. The scientists' holy grail is to find a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, commonly called the "God Particle", which would explain how particles acquire mass. It was shut down again in December, this time to ready it for collisions

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