October 21, 2008

Large Hadron Collider

CERN Officially Inaugurates the Large Hadron Collider

CERN held the inauguration while the machine itself sat broken, warming toward room temperature so engineers could get at the damage.

A ceremony for a stopped collider

On 21 October 2008 at CERN near Geneva, Swiss president Pascal Couchepin, French prime minister François Fillon and science ministers from CERN member states and other countries formally inaugurated the Large Hadron Collider.

The machine was not running. A faulty electrical connection had caused mechanical damage and a major helium release on 19 September, and CERN had announced a minimum of two months' downtime.

The laboratory kept the scheduled date anyway; the ceremony recognized completion of the project after the first successful full-ring proton circulation on 10 September 2008.

Philip Glass, a buffet, and a second painted eye

The invitation-only ceremony featured speeches, exhibitions and “ORIGINS,” an audiovisual concert using Frans Lanting's images and Philip Glass's music, performed by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Carolyn Kuan.

Chef Ettore Bocchia presented a molecular-gastronomy buffet afterwards, and a separate LHCfest followed for 3,000 CERN personnel, where project leader Lyn Evans appeared as a backing dancer during the “LHC rap.”

A Japanese Daruma doll that had received one painted eye at the project's beginning was given its second eye to mark completion.

Nothing changed operationally that night

Director-general Robert Aymar framed the evening as recognition of the member states and the particle-physics community, and Evans declared the construction phase complete after more than two decades of planning, prototyping and construction on a 26,659-metre ring holding 9,593 magnets.

No particles collided. The damaged sector stayed warm and under repair, and the LHC did not record its first proton-proton collisions until 23 November 2009.

“At Geneva” is shorthand as well: the ceremony was held at CERN's site on the Franco-Swiss border near the city.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →