A momentous bang On September 10, at 10.28 am , local time, the first beam of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva was steered around a 27 km long tunnel. This event had intended and unintended consequences. Both are of great importance to us, though in vastly different ways. The intended consequence first. The successful steering of the beam around the full tunnel is a magnificent tribute to years of hard work by hundreds of scientists and engineers. Operationalizing a particle accelerator is not just a matter of flipping a switch. Thousands of elements which went into the machine had to work together in a fail-safe mode and their operations had to be synchronized to nano-seconds. The