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Particle Collider Fires, No Black Holes Form

Scientists fire up the world's largest particle collider in Switzerland, but fears about the experiment creating black holes that could devour the Earth and other planets are not realized.

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Physicists like balance, elegance and, believe it or not, simplicity, for instance E=mc{+2} -- energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. The problem, theoretical physicist John Ellis says, "is mass. Where does it come from?"

Scientists' current understanding of the universe and all its particles and forces is called the Standard Model, and it is now 35 years old. It does not explain why some particles, such as protons, are relatively heavy, while others, like photons, have no mass at all. In a theory that dates to the early 1960s, a British physicist named Peter Higgs suggested that there was a mechanism -- alternatively described as a field, a boson, a particle, a whaddayacallit--that makes some things heavy and other things light.

Say what? Exactly.

Ellis, who has long white hair, a Gandalf vibe and a specialty in supersymmetry, lectures worldwide in four or five languages, including math. He expects the supercollider to detect the Higgs particle, but he hopes to see much, much more.

"Simply seeing the boring old Higgs? Or nothing at all?" He shuddered at the thought. "But then again, not seeing anything at all might be very interesting." Still, he bets they will uncover the nature of dark matter, and he has a lot riding on the wager.

For two decades, Ellis said, the Large Hadron Collider has been all about the builders. "For the engineers, the job is over," he said. "For the experimentalists, they're happy to find what they find.

"But for the theorists, for me, it is a bit different, because we have spent 40 years on a theory." He raised an eyebrow.

"There have been thousands of theoretical papers," he continued, "and I've written hundreds of them myself. What if it all turns out to be pile of garbage?"

The first beam completed its first slow lap Wednesday morning to applause from the scientists on site and the popping of champagne corks in labs worldwide, where contributing (and competing) scientists watched via satellite. "There it is," was Evans's simple pronouncement.

The Large Hadron Collider will not operate at full intensity for a year, and so many variables could hold up its work. But the physicists at CERN have reached a milestone. Now that the machine has been turned on, Cousins said, "the trick for us is to be as full of wonder as we can be -- and simultaneously as skeptical as you can get."