Click on any phrase to play the video at that point.Close Last
year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC. And I promised to
come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. So
this is it. And for those of you that weren't there, the LHC is
the largest scientific experiment ever attempted -- 27
kilometers in circumference. Its job is to recreate the
conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second
after the universe began, up to 600 million times a second. It's
nothing if not ambitious. This is the machine below Geneva. We
take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors. This
is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector -- 44
meters wide, 22 meters in diameter. Spectacular picture here of
ATLAS under construction so you can see the scale. On the 10th
of September last year we turned the machine on for the first
time. And this picture was taken by ATLAS. It caused immense
celebration in the control room. It's a picture of the first
beam particle going all the way