With construction spanning three decades, the world’s largest, highest energy and most controversial particle accelerator made its first beam circulation on Sept. 20. Since 1983 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located under a football fields’ length of concrete and earth, has employed over 8,000 physicists from 85 different countries in its construction and operation.

Over 27 kilometers long, the tunnel-like apparatus is housed between France and Switzerland, crossing the border four times. Every day, protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 7 TeV, reaching speeds 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. A proton circles around its 17 mile path 11,000 times every second! Employing a series of six detectors, scientists hope to detect anti-matter, quark-gluon plasma, extra-dimensions and the mysterious and controversial Higgs Boson, often referred to as “the god particle”.

Particle physicist Stephen Weinberg created the Standard Model of an atom in 1967, predicting particles such as quarks, gluons and photons. The Higgs Boson is the only particle of the Standard Model unobserved, and particle theorists speculate that the Large Hadron Collider will be able to elicit the mechanism that governs this mysterious particle.

Built by the European Union for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC has caused much frenzy amongst the scientific community and the general public concerning safety. Nuclear physicists Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho filed lawsuit against LHC, predicting that it could create micro black holes and dark matter which could tear at the fabric of the universe, giving rise to what physicists coin as “Doomsday Phenomena,” the ultimate cosmic catastrophe.

“[These] black holes might somehow persist and coalesce into a compact gravitational mass that would draw in other matter and grow bigger,” said Wagner and Sancho.

Opposing particle physicists suggest that such a cataclysmic event is physically impossible because the micro black holes dissipate too quickly to combine and that any “Doomsday Particles” would be captured by neutron stars or cosmic gas clouds.

Regardless of the controversy surrounding the particle accelerator, physicists are considering the initial run a success as well as one of the most massive achievements that science has ever seen.