You could be forgiven for thinking that a big red button will be pressed on Wednesday, and hey presto, collisions at the Large Hadron Collider will begin. In fact, the particle smasher has been limbering up for weeks. As Â鶹´«Ã½ went to press, physicists were sending protons further round the 27-kilometre ring than ever before, and were on track to perform the first historic laps.
At 5 am on 6 September, after a night spent grappling with glitches in the LHC’s vast safety system, a crew successfully fired a pilot beam 6.6 kilometres around the counter-clockwise beam pipe and…
