International physicists will launch a 20-year-old project on Wednesday in a vast underground complex near Geneva to simulate the “Big Bang” in an attempt to explain the origin of the universe and how it became a refuge for life.
At the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), scientists intend to collide and smash particles in a massive machine called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to simulate the event that marked the beginning of the universe. The LHC will use large magnets located in cathedral-sized tunnels to fire a series of beams of energy particles in a 27-kilometer-long tunnel that will collide at nearly the speed of light.
Computers will register everything that happens in these miniature versions of primordial fireballs, and around 10,000 scientists worldwide will analyze the collected material. Special detectors will monitor billions of particles created after the collisions and record how they merge, move apart, or simply disappear.
Scientists at CERN, located at the foot of the Jura Mountains in France, will particularly focus on the concepts that started it all, such as “dark matter,” “dark energy,” and the “Higgs boson,” a hypothetical elementary particle believed to be key to the mystery of how matter acquired mass. This particle is the only yet-to-be-discovered component of the so-called Standard Model of elementary particles. Without mass, stars and planets could never have formed in the eons following the Big Bang, and life would not have begun on Earth or, as cosmologists believe, on some other worlds. The CERN project is valued at 10 billion Swiss francs. (H)
