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Shekhar Bhatia in The Asian Age:

In the next five days, in a tunnel between France and Switzerland, scientists will seek to unravel some of the remaining secrets of the universe – primarily, the eternal question of how it was created.

In theory, we know how the universe began: it was formed when a tiny ball of gas, a million times hotter than the sun, exploded some 14 billion years ago in what is known as the Big Bang. In the debris of the explosion was a unique particle that scientists believe gives matter its mass – or, in a manner of speaking, weight. Thanks to this particle there are planets and galaxies, the earth and the moon. Scientists will now attempt to find this wonder particle they call the Higgs boson, popularly known as the “God particle”.

On September 10, thousands of physicists and engineers working at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) near Geneva will switch on a cutting-edge machine located in a tunnel a hundred metres below the surface of the earth. Called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine took 14 years to build and cost US$ 6 billion – or nearly 27,000 crore rupees. This will be the world’s largest scientific project, both in size and significance.

In a sense, the LHC is a giant time machine that will re-create the conditions prevalent at the birth of the universe. It’s a ring shaped, 27-km tube lined with magnets that can spin particles at a mind-boggling speed.

To put it simply, this is how the LHC works: First the super-conducting magnets in the tunnel will be cooled to temperatures colder than deep space. Then clusters of tiny subatomic particles will be impelled in opposite directions of the tunnel and accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light (about 300,000 km per second). As they collide head-on in this accelerator, they will produce temperatures that are 100,000 times hotter than the core of the sun — effectively simulating the conditions that were present during the Big Bang. There will be millions of collisions per second, producing terabytes of data that will be stored and analysed over many years.

Somewhere in this mountain of data physicists hope to spot the “God particle”. For obvious reasons they prefer to call it the Higgs — after British physicist Peter Higgs who formulated the theory some 40 years ago. Higgs told the Guardian newspaper, “I find it embarrassing because, though I’m not a believer myself, I think it is the kind of misuse of terminology which I think might offend some people.” He said the Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman wanted to refer to the particle as that ‘goddamn particle’ in his book but “his editor wouldn’t let him.”

Once they find this elusive particle, scientists will have the answers to some fundamental questions about the universe: What was there in space before the creation of matter? How did matter come into being? Can there be one single theory that explains what makes the universe tick? These questions can only be answered by going back in time to the point when it all began.

But LHC is not just about the Higgs. If all physicists found was just the Higgs and nothing else, they would be thoroughly disappointed. They wouldn’t have learnt something new. The aim of the LHC is to go beyond what is called the ’standard model’ of particle physics which gives us an understanding of the forces and particles that make up our universe. They want to know about this thing called “dark matter” that they believe is out there in the emptiness of space but just cannot see it. As Caltech physicists Sean Carroll says, in science “surprises are how we learn things.”

Not surprising, therefore, that the LHC has been called “the world’s biggest science project” and the “most ambitious scientific experiment”. Dr Anil Kakodkar, Chairman of Indian Atomic Energy Commission, has been quoted as saying it is the “most challenging project ever undertaken by mankind.” India has contributed some $70 million worth of sophisticated equipment.

CERN has created a special website called “The Heart of the Matter” to explain the intricacies of the project. It’s a fascinating site, not very technical, but it still does not give you a good visual idea of the size. I wouldn’t have imagined how big and complex it is if I hadn’t seen the YouTube video, “The Search for the Higgs.”

Some people, however, believe this will be the beginning of the end. The collider, they say, will produce black holes and some totally unknown particles that might gobble up the earth and annihilate all life form. They have even taken the matter to a US court. But the predominant view is there is “no basis for any conceivable threat” as the black holes created will be far too small and collapse as soon as they are born.

Now, you might ask, what if the scientists can’t find this Holy Grail of particle physics. And what do we do once we know how the universe was formed? Why spend 6 billion dollars on a machine which will answer a few questions that may not be very relevant to most people’s existence?

To answer the first question, not finding the Higgs would no doubt be a huge disappointment but it will also throw up many new challenges: it will send scientists back to the drawing board.

Will it lead to a better household appliance (given that microwave oven was an accidental invention)? Richard Dawkins has the answer: “People used to justify the space-race because you got non-stick frying pans as a spin-off, which I think is a bit like justifying music by saying that it’s good exercise for the violinist’s right arm.”

Higgs has been quoted as saying he is “90 percent sure” that the LHC will find the particle. But every experiment has an element of suspense: the bigger the experiment the more the suspense. “In some sense, the LHC is just a pure leap into the dark,” says Dr Dave Clark of Imperial College. You never know, it might even throw up something totally unexpected, something even bigger in significance. As CERN physicist Alvaro de Rujula says: “Science is what we do when we don’t know what we are doing.”

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