July 2008 The church bell tolls in Devon, a hamlet in France, near the world’s largest and the most complex accelerator centre in the world, CERN. Within a few months the largest and the most ambitious accelerator is expected to go into operation, reaching out to a world where no man has had the faintest glimpse.

September 10, 2008 The D-day for commissioning the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has come after investing $9 billion and spending fifteen years of hard labour mastering the frontiers of technology with only one grand goal – to unlock the deepest secrets of nature still shrouded in mystery.

The whole world joined in, our Kolkata campus wore a carnival look. The control room of CERN is on our computer screen. I have never seen so many journalists in our campus.

Some doomsayers hinted that black holes would come out of colliding particles at the incredible energy of about 10 tera electron volts. The black holes, they surmised, with their bottomless appetite, because of gravity, would gobble up the world. That day is here.

Nothing of that kind happened and the world rejoiced with a frenzy one has never come across. The rumour of the black demon (hole) acted only as an extra stimulant for our wildest of imagination. Ironically, what man adores most is a massive disaster just when a massive success is about to happen.

Short-circuiting of connecting wires lead to heating, followed by an enormous accident immediately. Liquid helium at minus 271 degree centigrade turned to gas and the LHC lost 60 tonnes of it. The blow up ruined at least two big magnets.

Gloom descended. “Man will never reach there,” some explained, saying “God’s particles (Higgs boson that links all subatomic particles) will always remain invisible.” Stop the colossal waste of money, the world cried. So much has been done by so many, yet!

October 28, 2008 The Indian delegation led by the then chairman of Atomic Energy Commission Anil Kakodkar and some of us join the big party at CERN, the dedication of LHC to the world, without the LHC operating. But the whole world came -- presidents, prime ministers, Nobel laureates, ambassadors, et al.

We all went back to our hotel and wondered, “So, what do we do now?” The whole of 2009 went repairing meticulously the damaged LHC. The only major event came in August 2009 when Kolkata’s superconducting cyclotron went into operation. The LHC remained a distant dream.

January/February 2010 Every day the hope, once dashed, came alive and clear messages started coming in. It is about to happen but at a lower energy -- proton on proton at seven tera electron volts, about half of the total capacity, approximately.

March 30, 2010 Finally, at 8.30 am, the LHC team was ready to inject beam in a colliding bunch pattern. At 10.30 am, at CERN’s Meyrin site, media started arriving. A part of the machine tripped twice, eventually they got over the panic and in the third attempt around 4.30 pm the beam was on. At around 5.30 pm, the detector CMS, specifically designed to look for Higgs, registered events immediately followed by Atlas and our own Alice. By 5.36 pm Alice website announced its first 7 tera electron volt events. Man has reached out to the highest energy ever. It is like reaching the top of Everest, first time.

May 17-20, 2010 We listened to a talk on the incredible results at a conference in Paris. Most results are beyond any reasonable theoretical prediction. The collision of proton on proton amazingly looks similar to two colliding nuclei, completely unexpected.

May 22, 2010 At our counting room, the data from proton scattering are captured in our dimuon spectrometer built mostly at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, and the photon multiplicity detector built by the Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata, and others. Steady stream of data of about 170 million events are going to the grid base for analysis and to become part of the science of tomorrow. Already there are striking results, which we do not quite understand and way beyond standard expectation. That exactly is the kind of science we crave for. Now we look to the future, hoping to discover the unknown.

The writer is former director of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and at present Homi Jehangir Bhabha distinguished chair professor at Department of Atomic Energy