First physics with CMS

The year 2008 mark ed the completion of the Lar ge Hadron Collider (LHC) and the LHC detec- tors. The construction and commissioning of these scientic instruments, unprecedented in scale, comple xity and precision, in v olv ed a number of challenging ph ysics measurements and analyses, e v en before the rst proton-proton collisions. This report highlights a selection of such ph ysics measurements for and by the Cosmic Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector . These rst ph ysics analy- ses at CMS illustrate the depth of our understanding of the detector and demonstrate its readiness for data taking.