Large Hadron Collider doesn't cause the end of the world - yet

The Earth didn't move, or even twitch. And it certainly didn't end - as you can tell by the fact you are reading this. By Neil Tweedie at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider, the greatest atom smasher ever created, the world's biggest machine, was switched on today at CERN, the European nuclear research centre outside Geneva. And the result: rather less than earth shattering.

"Five, four, three, two, one, zero - nothing," joked Lyn Evans, leader of the LHC project, before a fuzzy dot appeared on a monitor.

It was 9.30am local time when a stream of protons was introduced into a short stretch of the circular 17-mile underground racetrack, buried in the Jura Mountains on the Franco-Swiss border.

The fuzzy dot registered their arrival, and then - well, not a lot. But to the scientists who have devoted their working lives to the project it was a moment of consummation.

Protons streams were then introduced into more and more of the machine until less than an hour later - far earlier than predicted - a stream whizzed around the entire circumference of the particle accelerator at a shade under the speed of light. The LHC had passed its first crucial landmark.

A host of Jeremiahs have been predicting that the collider, costing £5bn and a quarter of a century in the making, will destroy the world by spawning mini black holes which will sink to the Earth's core before gobbling it up

The scientists at CERN have dismissed the claim as ill-informed nonsense, and it certainly wasn't going to happen on today's inaugural test run, which did not include the sub-atomic collisions needed to produce an Earth-munching singularity.

Dr Evans, the coal miner's son from Aberdare, south Wales, who grew to lead the LHC project, the biggest thing in so-called Big Science, was so moved by the first completed circuit that he could muster only a few words.

Asked to speak, he said: "I'm too happy to continue." And he left it at that.

Earlier, he said: "This is really the biggest and most complex scientific project ever undertaken, and you cannot do a thing like this without engineers and applied scientists of very top quality."

Around him in the collider's control room, a few miles outside Geneva, scientists burst into applause.

They will now get a proton beam to travel in the opposite direction before beginning the work of smashing sub-atomic particles together in an effort to discover the greatest question in science: why we came to be.

John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist, who like Dr Evans has devoted most of his career to CERN, said: "I've been here 35 years and this is the culmination of that time. I've just completed a paper on what we might discover with the LHC. It's such an exciting time."

Meanwhile, William Hill celebrated Man's continued existence. It had taken £119 from punters willing to bet that September 10 2008 would see the end of the world.

A spokesman said: "Our standard odds are 1,000,000/1, but anyone wanting longer or shorter odds is at liberty to take them. A number of customers took us up; on our offer and have bet that the world will end as a result of the Large Hadron Collider experiment."

As the doom-mongers would say, there's still time. The LHC will not get going in earnest until the end of the year, when hopefully it will begin to produce data shedding light on the origin of the universe, the dark matter and energy that makes up its bulk and the existence or not of the Higgs boson - an as yet theoretical particle believed to impart mass to other particles.