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The world was less than an hour away from potentially learning more about life on Wednesday evening, as an enactment of the "big bang" designed to try to explain the origins of the universe was powered up.
International physicists at a vast underground complex near
Geneva are launching a 20-year projectto re-enact the "Big Bang" to
try to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to
harbour life.
In a giant machine called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, at the
CERN research centre straddling the Franco-Swiss border, they plan
to smash particles together to create, on a small-scale,
re-enactments of the event that started up the cosmos.
The LHC will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to
fire beams of energy particles around a 27-km (17-mile) tunnel
where they will collide at close to the speed of light.
Computers will record what happens each time in these mini versions
of the primeval fireball and the vast store of material gathered
will be analysed by some 10,000 scientists around the globe for
clues on what came next.
Scientists at CERN, the 54-year-old European Organisation for
Nuclear Research, close to the foothills of the French Jura
mountains, will pursue concepts such as "dark matter," "dark
energy", extra dimensions and, most of all, the "Higgs Boson"
believed to have made it all possible.
"The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision of the
universe," said CERN's French Director-General Robert Aymar.
"Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind's understanding of our
world's origins will be greatly enriched."
CERN scientists have been at pains to deny suggestions by some
critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes of
intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.
Unimaginably hot
Cosmologists say the Big Bang occurred some 15 billion years ago
when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin
exploded in what was then a void, spewing out matter that expanded
rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on
Earth.
But the 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) CERN project, begins
with a relatively simple procedure: pumping a particle beam around
the underground tunnel.
Technicians will first attempt to push the beam in one direction
round the tightly-sealed collider, some 100 metres (yards)
underground.
Once they have done that - and CERN officials say there is no
guarantee that success will come immediately or even in the first
days - they will project a beam in the other direction.
And then, perhaps in the coming weeks, they will pump beams in both
directions and smash the particles together -- but initially at low
intensity.
Later, probably near the end of the year, they will move on to
produce tiny collisions that will recreate the heat and energy of
the Big Bang, a concept of the origin of the universe that now
dominates scientific thinking.
The detectors will monitor the billions of particles that will
emerge from the collisions, capturing on computer the way they come
together, fly apart or just simply dissolve.
It is in these conditions that scientists hope to find fairly
quickly the Higgs Boson, named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs
who first proposed it in 1964 as the answer to the mystery of how
matter gains mass.
Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe could never
have taken shape in the aeons after the Big Bang, and life could
never have begun - on Earth or, if it exists as many cosmologists
believe, on other worlds either.
The experiment is not without detractors.
Websites on the Internet, itself created at CERN nearly 20 years
ago as a means of passing particle research results to scientists
around the globe, have promoted claims that the LHC will create
black holes sucking in the planet.
"Nonsense," say the CERN - and other leading scientists. "The LHC
is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure
fiction," declared Aymar.
