Next stop: The fourth dimension

The Atlas experiment under construction at the LHC site, deep beneath the Alps. The large tubes that surround the empty space are magnets used to control the direction of subatomic... Click here for more information.

How did the universe come to be? What is it made of? What is mass? Can science prove that there are other dimensions?

We may have answers soon. On September 10, 2008, Tel Aviv University's Prof. Erez Etzion from the School of Physics and Astronomy will be in the control room of the new CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the border of France and Switzerland when the LHC is first turned on. Scientists are calling it the largest experiment in the world. It's taken about 6,000 researchers, $8 billion and ten years to build.

Of the 50 countries that have participated in the project, Israel is among those which have made the greatest contributions. Tel Aviv University in particular has played an essential role in constructing equipment for the collider tunnel, dug deep inside the Swiss-French Alps. And when the switch is thrown in September, science may be changed forever.

Prof. Etzion, an experimental physicist in high-energy research, expects the impact of the LHC to be greater than that of the first moon landing. "It is hard to grasp the dimensions of the practical benefits from this project," he says, "but we're expecting to explore the basic forces that hold the world together."

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Professor Erez Etzion Click here for more information.

If all goes according to plan, the superconducting magnets in the collider will zap atomic particles around the 17-mile tunnel at roughly the speed of light. Then the scientists will smash the particles together, replicating what happened mere nanoseconds after the first big bang.