Baby steps toward armageddon...

occurred early today as the Large Hadron Collider initiated collisions between protons at 900 billion electron volts of energy (900 GeV; 0.9 TeV), a level that is merely 1/15 of its full potential.

"CERN hopes to boost the energy to 1.2 TeV per beam – exceeding the world's current top collision energies of 1 TeV per beam at the Tevatron accelerator in Batavia, Illinois.

In early 2010, physicists will attempt to ramp up the energy to 3.5 TeV per beam, collect data for a few months at that energy, then push towards 5 TeV per beam in the second half of the year."

Note that:

"The LHC is designed to allow collisions at much higher energies – all the way up to 14,000 GeV (14 TeV), or 7 TeV per beam."

Clearly we're in for some astounding science, that is, if the world survives.