Cern throws switch on largest machine ever built

Scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, have begun their first attempt to send a beam of protons around the Large Hadron Collider, the largest, most complex machine in the world.

The beam of protons has been injected at close to the speed of light, but there are blocks inside the machine that stop it periodically as it works its way around. Each time the beam stops, the engineers can use magnetic fields to make sure the beam is travelling down the centre of the ring. If it's off to one side, it could crash into the ring wall and stop.

We've just seen the first flash of the beam in the machine. And it looks to be well in the centre of the pipe it circulates in. The beam has now made it around the first sector, which is an eighth of the ring

Lots of applause from Cern's control room. The last time they opened a particle collider, in the 1980s, it took 12 hours to get a beam to circulate. This is moving fast so far.

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