Still using bicycles instead of levitation
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The “Big Bang” experiment at CERN near Geneva scored a world record…by accelerating beams to the highest energy ever achieved in a particle collider, the research center announced.

Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said the achievement marked a major milestone on the way to tests next year which they hope will unlock secrets of the origins and make-up of the universe.

The energy of the twin beams circulated around 27-km tunnels deep underground went, at 1.18 trillion electric volts (TeV), well past the previous highest — just under 1 TeV — in a collider at the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The achievement in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) came 10 days after the world’s largest scientific experiment was restarted following an accident soon after its launch in September 2008.

“We are still coming to terms with just how smooth the LHC commissioning is going,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer as the record was announced. “It is fantastic.”

The beam energy now achieved in the LHC — a vast complex of huge magnets, electronics and computers costing some $10 billion underground on the Franco-Swiss border — leaves some way to go before the real “Big Bang” experiments can begin.

The timorous fans of junk science still have months and weeks of knee-quaking remaining.