'Big Bang' machine passes 1st test

September 10, 2008

International scientists celebrated the successful start of a huge particle-smashing machine aiming to recreate the conditions of the "Big Bang". . Scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva, fired two beams of proton particles in opposite directions around Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) 27km-long (17 miles) ring, buried below the Swiss-French border. Experiments using the $9 billion dollar LHC, the biggest and most complex machine ever made, could revamp modern physics and unlock secrets about the universe and its origins.