On 10 September, at 10.28 CEST, a beam of protons is successfully steered around the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider for the first time. This is the culmination of an extraordinary technological and industrial effort to build the world’s largest superconducting machine, cooled to -271°C, only two degrees above absolute zero. A few days after the start-up, an incident damages 53 magnets, halting the machine for several months. The LHC starts up again in 2009, producing its first collisions in December of that year.