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GENEVA: Mighty things are going on at CERN, Europe’s atom-smashing
laboratory.
Below ground, in a vast circular tunnel below
the French-Swiss border near Geneva, the final pieces of a gigantic
machine are being set in place for an extraordinary investigation
into the infinitely small.
If things go according to plan, the greatest
experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a
sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, which is so tantalizing that
it has been called “the God Particle.”
The “Higgs,” named after a British
physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a
gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical
cosmos.
Other work on the so-called Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) could explain dark matter and dark energy—strange
phenomena that, stunned astrophysicists discovered a few years ago,
account for 96 percent of the universe.
It could shed clues on the mystery of how the
universe came to be.
And it may determine whether, as some physicists
believe, space-time holds dimensions other than our own.
“We are standing on the shoulders of giants.
But we want to know better and we want to know more,” said a
leading CERN investigator, Juergen Schukraft.
A gamble costing six billion Swiss francs
(almost $6 billion, or 3.9 billion euros) that has harnessed the
labors of more than 2,000 physicists from nearly three dozen
countries, the LHC is the biggest, most powerful high-energy
particle accelerator ever built.
“It’s fantastic. It’s like a baby, only it
doesn’t take nine months to be born, but 19 years,” enthused
Daniel Denegri, whose Compact Muon Solenoid detector is bidding to
be first to snare the Higgs.
In July or possibly August, the LHC will start
its work, initiating a cautious program of tests before cranking up
to full intensity.
-- AFP
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