Lords of the Ring

Deep beneath the ground in Geneva, scientists and engineers are building the world's most complicated machine. The Large Hadron Collider promises to reveal the secrets of the Big Bang…

Thousands of scientists from around the world are betting their bottom dollar, scientifically speaking, on a giant machine now being constructed beneath the borders of Switzerland and France. This is the home of the European Organization for Nuclear Physics, commonly known by its French initials CERN.

The new device is called the Large Hadron Collider, and it will run the biggest scientific experiment of all time. The machine will smash together atoms and other particles at the highest speeds ever achieved on Earth, recreating the conditions of the Big Bang. The Large Hadron Collider will open new frontiers of physics, and promises to unlock some of the secrets of the birth of the Universe.

Recently, I was privileged to be taken behind the scenes at CERN, and get a glimpse into the incredible engineering and construction work that will make the experiment possible. The sheer scale of the Large Hadron Collider is overwhelming: an underground machine the size of a vast building is being built to detect particles far too small to be seen!

CERN A giant detector to seek out the smallest particles

I came away inspired, rather wishing that I had stayed on in physics after my degree so that I could now be working on this amazing project. My guides were two leading young British physicists, Jon Butterworth from University College London and Brian Cox of Manchester University, who are helping with the UK's contribution to the Large Hadron Collider.

The Large Hadron Collider will produce beams of subatomic particles, and accelerate them to speeds close to the speed of light. These particles, known as "hadrons", are relatively heavy on the atomic scale of things, and include protons and the nuclei of atoms.

The particles are injected into a ring-shaped evacuated tube that runs around inside a 27-kilometre long circular tunnel. They will whiz around several times before colliding - with energies that match the raw power of the Big Bang. The collisions will produce new particles that have never existed on Earth, and may not exist anywhere else in the Universe. The scientists at CERN - the "lords of the ring" - expect that the properties of these new particles will help them understand why the Universe is the way that it is, and to answer one of the biggest remaining questions in physics: why do things have mass?