European Collider Begins Its Subatomic Exploration.

PASADENA, Calif. -- After 16 years and $10 billion -- and a long morning of electrical groaning and sweating -- there was joy in the meadows and tunnels of the Swiss-French countryside Tuesday: the world's biggest physics machine, the Large Hadron Collider, finally began to make subatomic particles collide. After two false starts due to electrical failures, protons that were whipped to more than 99 percent of the speed of light and to record-high energy levels of 3.5 trillion electron volts apiece raced around a 17-mile underground magnetic track outside Geneva a little after 1 p.m. local time. They crashed together inside apartment-building-size detectors designed to capture every evanescent flash and fragment from microscopic fireballs thought to hold insights into the beginning of the universe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]