Imagine a $10 billion underground ring-shaped tunnel, 27 km in circumference, so big that it stretches through both France and Switzerland: One ring to rule them all, the new Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, scheduled to come online around about August 2008. A collider is the basic tool of particle physics. You take a stream of particles, accelerate them to really high kinetic energy levels, and slam them into a target. Depending on the experiment, all sorts of exotic things happen. Most experiments are to create new particles predicted by theory or to examine their behavior. The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has two beams traveling in opposite directions around the 27 km circle, each accelerated to 7 TeV (trillion electron volts) of energy and traveling at 99.999999% of the speed of light, held in place by powerful magnet... (Read the rest at
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