Bottling the big bang

The air of anticipation around CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva, is palpable. In a matter of weeks, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will start operating, hurling subatomic particles around its 27km circumference at almost the speed of light. Two months later, the two contra-rotating beams will be squeezed, focused and aimed at each other to collide with colossal force, creating conditions that existed millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

The physics goals of the LHC are mind-boggling. Discovering the Higgs boson, the particle that explains the origins of mass; explaining why the universe is made of matter not anti-matter; freeing the constituent parts of the particles that make up the nuclei of atoms; possibly making minute black holes which, in passing, would indicate that alternate dimensions exist. But in order to answer these questions, equally mind-blowing engineering has been brought into play, 100m below the ground in the tunnels and caverns that make up the LHC complex.