No Universe-Collapsing Black Holes Yet

Scientists at CERN, the European nuclear research agency, announced Friday morning that they had accelerated beams of protons at the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, to energies of 3.5 trillion electron volts. That is a new record, three times the energy of any other machine on earth, and means that the collider, after 15 years and $10 billion, is on the verge of beginning to do physics experiments. Physicists hope to begin colliding the beams by the end of the month.