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The big bang experiment (biggest experiment for human race) started at 9.30 am local time. Scientists have switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the device they hope will unravel some of the remaining mysteries of the universe.

The £5 billion machine has been described as a 17-mile racetrack around which two streams of protons - building blocks of matter - run in opposite directions before smashing into one another. Reaching 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, each beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 90 mph.

The flashes from the collisions may help scientists reproduce the conditions that existed during the first moments after the Big Bang at the birth of the universe.

Some of the useful link about the experiment-

• Full coverage of the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher
• Watch: How the great machine will work
• Watch: Large Hadron Collider workers’ rap is YouTube hit

Physicists hope to learn more about the origins of mass, gravity, universe and mysterious dark matter.

German chemist Professor Otto Rossler claims that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and “eat the planet from the inside”. These claims have been dismissed by leading scientists, including Prof Stephen Hawking who said that the LHC is “feeble compared with what goes on in the universe. If a disaster was going to happen, it would have happened already.”

After the switch-on first stream of subatomic particles (Hadrons) circulating in the tunnel. First collisions are expected in 30 days. The LHC will produce beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more when it reaches its design performance, by 2010.

Today at 12:30 pm (IST) scientists will launch an experiment that will recreate the birt of universe (The Big Bang). They are hoping to find evidence of extra dimensions, invisible ”dark matter,” and an elusive particle called the ”Higgs boson”.

They are planning to send a beam of particles racing around the 27-kilometer ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the first time. The LHC, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Beams of subatomic protons and other particles will zip around the ring, accelerated up to nearly the speed of light by some 1,800 superconducting magnet systems. Protons will reach an energy level of 7 trillion electron volts, seven times more powerful than in any existing accelerator. There will be 600 million collisions every second and every collision will emit two-lakh small signals. They will study these signals, clean the data and analyse them. Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD), which has been fitted in the LHC, in which small particles (protons) will be accelerated and made to collide at the highest-ever man-made speed. The project has cost an estimated $5.8 billion.

Some critics have wondered whether attempts to reproduce conditions at the beginning of the universe may create a black hole that could destroy the Earth. A CERN team that studied the matter concluded there was no danger of that happening. European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) physicist John Ellis says simply, the skeptics are wrong. “LHC is only going to reproduce what nature does every second, it has been doing for billions of years, and all of these astronomical bodies including the earth and the sun, they are still here. So there really is no problem.”

There are 30-odd physicists from India, who are part of this experiment. The Photon Multiplicity Detector (PMD) will play a key role in this experiment. The PMD was developed at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Kolkata, which is a body of the Department of Atomic Energy, and the machines were transported to Geneva from February this year.

Watch the live webcast of the Big Bang Experiment

News on the experiment