7:00 – 10:30 p.m.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is headquartered outside Geneva, and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's most powerful accelerator colliding two beam of protons head to head, each with an energy of seven trillion electron volts.

We celebrated the first day proton beams were circulated around the LHC's 27-kilometer-circumference tunnel, which lies beneath Switzerland and France. On hand were some of the scientists and engineers from local universities and laboratories, including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who have worked on the giant accelerator and its experiments.

The evening's events included a link from the CERN control room, a status report of the first day's attempts to circulate the beam, and a brief introduction to the largest, most ambitious experiment in the history of science.