The first thing that gets you is the noise. Physics, after all, is supposed to be a cerebral pursuit. But this cavern almost measureless to the eye, stuffed as it is with an Eiffel Tower's worth of metal, eight-story wheels of gold fan-shape boxes, thousands of kilometers of wire and fat duct-like coils, echoes with the shriek of power tools, the whine of pumps and cranes, beeps and clanks from wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers and the occasional falling bolt. It seems no place for the studious.
The physicists, wearing hard hats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spider-Man over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics.
They are getting ready to see the universe born again.
Again and again and again — 30 million times a second, in fact.
Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 27km underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.
Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.
Whatever forms of matter and whatever laws and forces held sway Back Then — relics not seen in this part of space since the universe cooled 14 billion years ago — will spring fleetingly to life, over and over again in all their possible variations, as if the universe were enacting its own version of the Groundhog Day movie. If all goes well, they will leave their footprints in mountains of hardware and computer memory.
"We are now on the endgame," said Lyn Evans, of Cern, who has been in charge of the Large Hadron Collider, as it is called, since its inception. Call it the Hubble Telescope of Inner Space. Everything about the collider sounds, well, large — from the 14 trillion electron volts of energy with which it will smash together protons, its cast of thousands and the US$8 billion it cost to build, to the 116 tonnes of liquid helium needed to cool the superconducting magnets that keep the particles whizzing around their track and the 3 million DVDs worth of data it will spew forth every year.
The day it turns on will be a moment of truth for Cern, which has spent 13 years building the collider, and for the world's physicists, who have staked their credibility and their careers, not to mention all those billions of dollars, on the conviction that they are within touching distance of fundamental discoveries about the universe. If they fail to see something new, experts agree, it could be a long time, if ever, before giant particle accelerators are built on Earth again, ringing down the curtain on at least one aspect of the age-old quest to understand what the world is made of and how it works.
"If you see nothing," said a Cern physicist, John Ellis, "in some sense then, we theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years."
Fabiola Gianotti, a Cern physicist and the deputy spokeswoman for the team that built the Atlas, said, "Something must happen."
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