The Hindu : International / Globescan : A physics experiment

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 04, 2005

International

International - Globescan

A physics experiment

Geneva: The journey down in the lift lasts barely a minute, but is the closest thing on Earth to travelling into another dimension. At the bottom of the shaft is a well-lit tunnel that stretches as far as the eye can see, until its barely perceptible curve takes it around a distant corner. This is no ordinary tunnel. It carries no trains or gas pipes and is built in a perfect circle, running for 27.2 km about 100 metres below the western suburbs of Geneva, squeezed between the lake on one side and the imposing Jura mountains on the other. The citizens of Geneva have lived with the tunnel for decades and now it is soon to become one of world's biggest and most powerful science experiments. The only traffic passing through this tunnel when it opens for business will be high energy beams of subatomic particles. By smashing the particles together, scientists want to recreate conditions found in the earliest moments of the universe, billionths of a second after the Big Bang. By peering at what emerges, they hope to better understand the 14 billion years that followed. This is the shadowy domain of particle physics and the giant experiment taking shape in the tunnel is called the Large Hadron Collider. —

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