If it were any other piece of scientific equipment, turning it on and starting initial testing would hardly rate a mention by the world’s media, if that. But this is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most expensive piece of scientific equipment – ever. (It has cost about 10 billion dollars so far.) Also, the CERN LHC has had its ignominious high profile pratfalls: emergency shut-down, bird droppings (as in dropping a piece of bread into it). So now it is starting to whiz 11 million protons a second around its 27 kilometer ring; according to schedule and a little good luck (for a change) it should begin smashing atoms – colliding – in a week to ten days (around the end of November). Meanwhile some 8,000 participating physicists exhaled, cheered, and now wait to get on to the good stuff