Big Bang experiment gets under way

A controversial experiment to recreate the conditions that existed a tiny fraction of a second after the universe was created has begun. The post-Big Bang simulation is being carried out on the French/Swiss border using a machine which cost almost £5 billion to build. The Large Hadron Collider accelerates matter to almost light speed and then smashes tiny particles together. Scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern) pressed ahead with the experiment despite warnings that it could destroy the universe. Cosmologists think an explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to the formation of all matter. A key aim of the experiment is to find the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle" that some theorists believe gives matter its mass. But the experiment, which is taking place deep underground inside a 17-mile tunnel, could shed light on other mysteries like the existence of supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy. Some critics claim it will create "black holes" of intense gravity that could implode the Earth, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a "worm hole" in space-time. A safety review by scientists at Cern and in the US and Russia rejected the prospect of such outcomes. Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the research centre, said: "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction." Professor Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, said: "Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the Earth's atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens."

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ITN | September 10, 2008

Tags:. .matter. .carried. .warnings. .research. .mysteries