![]() Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile 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.Ĭrashing 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. They are getting ready to see the universe born again.Īgain and again and again - 30 million times a second, in fact. The physicists, wearing hardhats, kneepads and safety harnesses, are scrambling like Spiderman over this assembly, appropriately named Atlas, ducking under waterfalls of cables and tubes and crawling into hidden room-size cavities stuffed with electronics. 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 miles of wire and fat ductlike 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. Physics, after all, is supposed to be a cerebral pursuit. 300 FEET BELOW MEYRIN, Switzerland - The first thing that gets you is the noise.
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