The Large Hadron Collider just achieved the first collisions among protons at 7 tera electronvolts (TeV) at center of mass, smashing together two beams of protons at 3.5 TeV each. The setup has been compared to shooting needles from opposite sides of the Atlantic and have them impact halfway.
What we have today in front of us is a historical achievement. For the very first time, such high-energy impacts are obtained in a controlled experimental setup. Nature performs the same experiment every day since billions of years: at every instant, high energy particles coming from distant sources in the depth of the universe, the cosmic rays, hit the atoms in our high atmosphere. Their energies are even higher than the ones achieved at LHC, but no detector exists up there to see what happens in controlled conditions. The energy of 7 TeV is actually half of the final target: LHC will be able to reach 14 TeV when fully operational, hopefully in a couple of years.
With such powerful and sensitive experimental setup, physicists at CERN will be able to understand more details about our universe, how it started, and the rules it has to obey.
