Congratulations to Cern. The switch-on of its $8bn atom smasher near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider, successfully concludes the engineering phase of the biggest global collaboration in physics. Now the real science – discovering the fundamental infrastructure of the universe – can begin.

On Wednesday Cern engineers sent protons one way round the LHC’s 27km underground ring at the speed of light. Later in the autumn, after fine-tuning the machine, they will send a second proton beam round in the opposite direction and smash the two together, re-creating in miniature the intense energies of the newborn universe a nanosecond after the Big Bang.