Global smash hit

Echoes drift up from the huge white cavern far below the surface, and a flurry of activity can be seen 100m down at the bottom of the wide circular shaft.

Beneath tonnes of glacial deposits and then solid rock, a narrow tunnel stretches away from the cavern as far as the eye can see, looping for tens of kilometres under the Geneva suburbs and Jura Mountains. Back at ground level is the overbearing red bulk of a machine the
size of a five-storey building. It is one of a series of giant detectors to spot the tiniest of particles and will soon be lowered into the cave where it will connect to a chain of thousands of superconducting magnets.

This is the Large Hadron Collider — a massive £1.3bn experiment at particle physics hub CERN in Geneva that will help us better understand our universe by accelerating sub-atomic particles around a 27km tube and smashing them together at energies not seen since the
Big Bang. Among other weird effects like creating mini-black holes, it should prove the existence of the elusive Higgs Boson, the so-called ‘God particle’ that physicists think interacts with all matter to give it mass. It is no hyperbole to suggest that we will see some of the century’s biggest scientific discoveries when the experiments begin in 2007.