Welsh engineer leads the way | 30 days when the world didn't end

A story that began 13.7 billion years ago is starting a new chapter this morning. Since the big bang threw space and time into being, no living creature of which we know has been able to discern just what happened in the moments at which existence began.

The human race has now constructed a machine — a time machine, if you like — that will open a window on scenes that have hitherto been limited to our imagination. And today, at 8am, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began its quest.

In a tunnel buried 100 metres below ground, on the shores of Lake Geneva, scientists are attempting to thread a stream of sub-atomic particles around a 27km (17 mile) ring without touching the sides. When the protons snake all the way around the circle, and begin to orbit it more than 11,000 times a second, a new eye will have been cast on the nature of everything.

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• Hadron Collider

When new telescopes are constructed, scientists speak of “first light”, the point at which they start to function. No science may yet have been performed, but the instrument can see. Today marks the LHC’s first light, the moment we will know whether this extraordinary feat of ingenuity and engineering is fit for purpose.

Within a few months, the particle accelerator will start to condense its protons into beams a quarter of the diameter of a human hair, and to fling them together at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. The resulting collisions will generate energy so intense that such conditions have not existed since a trillionth of a second after the big bang, throwing sub-atomic debris into vast detectors.

These detectors will track and see new particles, and perhaps even new dimensions — structural components of the cosmos about which we have been able to guess, but not to know. It is fitting that they are housed in caverns so large they could hold the naves of great churches like Westminster Abbey. These are cathedrals of a different kind, which celebrate the glory of knowledge and discovery.

The Universe is an astonishing place. Were the laws of physics otherwise framed, the contents of space would not be as they are today. By understanding what happened at the dawn of time, we will come closer to grasping how we and all our surroundings came to be here, and how life became a possibility.

Brilliant men and women, of course, have developed ingenious hypotheses about how things might be so. We have, for instance, Peter Higgs’s famous boson, which is proposed to give matter its mass. It fits in well with what we do know, and most physicists believe it probably exists. But without experiments, it is impossible to know whether such insights are correct.

Science is about putting hypotheses to the test, to determine whether they stand or fall in the light of evidence. It is often enabled by new technology. The telescope made it possible for Galileo to observe the moons of Jupiter, providing new evidence that celestial objects do not all orbit the Earth. Several centuries later more powerful versions allowed Edwin Hubble and others to see galaxies accelerating away from one another, and thus to confirm the big bang theory.

The LHC is another triumph of technology: its superconducting magnets and sophisticated detectors, which took 14 years of design and construction, mean science can now gather evidence that could not be obtained before. Just as bigger telescopes allow us to look farther, but not to predict what we will see, so we know that the LHC will make great discoveries, but not what they will be. It may uphold standard theories or it may find them wanting, and suggest something new in their place. Either way, it will transform our understanding.

The LHC will allow humanity to embark on one of the greatest adventures of this or any age, to explore some of the deepest secrets of the cosmos. That adventure is just beginning.

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