The Six Billion Dollar Experiment

It just might be the most complicated thing that humans have ever built. What is it? The Large Hadron Collider.



The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe. At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider could recreate conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.



Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: "It is what makes stuff stuff..."



Here are some stats for you trivia fans:

• 20-year work-in-progress
• A team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations
• 27 kilometers in circumference,
• 175 meters underground
• facilitating head-on collision of protons, traveling very near the speed-of-light
• each tunnel is big enough to run a train through it.
• temperatures generated: more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun's core
• superconducting magnets are cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space

If you want to find out more about how it works, nytimes.com has a nifty explanation complete with graphics that move. It's pretty cool. Check it out here.

Still want to see more?
Here's a slide show.

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