You’re looking into the maw of Atlas (click thumbnail, left, to see photo) - part of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and one of the largest, most expensive scientific apparatuses ever built. When completed this summer in a vast subterranean chamber near CERN, the high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, the 82-foot-high detector will be ready to analyze what happens whenésubéatomic particles collide at nearly the speed of light. Researchers expect it to produce energy comparable with what was unleashed less than a billionth of a second after the big bang. The goal: to detect the fabled Higgs boson, aka the God Particle, the most elusive speck of matter envisioned by quanétum theory. If Atlas works, it will provide the capstone of modern physics. If it doesn’t, well, it makes a helluva conversation piece. - Richard Martin
credit CERN
You’re looking into the maw of Atlas - part of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
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Little Big Bang
