UPDATE: World Not Destroyed By LHC!

Christmas, it seems, has come early for scientists at European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).  Over the weekend, CERN scientists successfully fired up the Large Hadron Collider, expecting their first particle collisions to occur sometime in December.  The New York Times reports that the LHC's first collisions took place earlier today.

Clearly, this is cause for celebration for some, as the world has not yet ended like some have jokingly predicted.  Then again, there's still time.  Over the next few months, the CERN's crew's main priority is to get the Collider fully operational before serious experiments can begin.  "Today’s collisions were basically a test of the collider systems’ ability to synchronize the beams," Dennis Overbye reports.  In other words, the LHC is still being calibrated.  Of course, being calibrated is still better than being broken, as has been the case in the past.

Still, don't expect any huge developments to come from the Large Hadron Collider any time soon.  As Overbye notes in his article, in a year's time, the LHC will need to be shut down and reconfigured yet again to achieve its maximum power.

I'm sure by that time we'll see some kind of movie about the LHC going haywire and swallowing half of Eurpoe.