By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) - International physicists at a vastunderground complex near Geneva launch a 20-year project onWednesday to re-enact the "Big Bang" to try to explain theorigins of the universe and how it came to harbour life.
In a giant machine called the Large Hadron Collider, orLHC, at the CERN research centre straddling the Franco-Swissborder, they plan to smash particles together to create, on asmall-scale, re-enactments of the event that started up thecosmos.
The LHC will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-sizecaverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 27-km(17-mile) tunnel where they will collide at close to the speedof light.
Computers will record what happens each time in these miniversions of the primeval fireball and the vast store ofmaterial gathered will be analysed by some 10,000 scientistsaround the globe for clues on what came next.
Scientists at CERN, the 54-year-old European Organisationfor Nuclear Research, close to the foothills of the French Juramountains, will pursue concepts such as "dark matter," "darkenergy", extra dimensions and, most of all, the "Higgs Boson"believed to have made it all possible.
"The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision ofthe universe," said CERN's French Director-General RobertAymar. "Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind's understandingof our world's origins will be greatly enriched."
CERN scientists have been at pains to deny suggestions bysome critics that the experiment could create tiny black holesof intense gravity that could suck in the whole planet.
UNIMAGINABLY HOT
Cosmologists say the Big Bang occurred some 15 billionyears ago when an unimaginably dense and hot object the size ofa small coin exploded in what was then a void, spewing outmatter that expanded rapidly to create stars, planets andeventually life on Earth.
But the 10 billion Swiss franc (5 billion pounds) CERNproject, begins with a relatively simple procedure: pumping aparticle beam around the underground tunnel.
Technicians will first attempt to push the beam in onedirection round the tightly-sealed collider, some 100 metres(yards) underground.
Once they have done that -- and CERN officials say there isno guarantee that success will come immediately or even in thefirst days -- they will project a beam in the other direction.
And then, perhaps in the coming weeks, they will pump beamsin both directions and smash the particles together -- butinitially at low intensity.
Later, probably near the end of the year, they will move onto produce tiny collisions that will recreate the heat andenergy of the Big Bang, a concept of the origin of the universethat now dominates scientific thinking.
The detectors will monitor the billions of particles thatwill emerge from the collisions, capturing on computer the waythey come together, fly apart or just simply dissolve.
It is in these conditions that scientists hope to findfairly quickly the Higgs Boson, named after Scottish scientistPeter Higgs who first proposed it in 1964 as the answer to themystery of how matter gains mass.
Without mass, the stars and planets in the universe couldnever have taken shape in the aeons after the Big Bang, andlife could never have begun -- on Earth or, if it exists asmany cosmologists believe, on other worlds either.
The experiment is not without detractors.
Websites on the Internet, itself created at CERN nearly 20years ago as a means of passing particle research results toscientists around the globe, have promoted claims that the LHCwill create black holes sucking in the planet.
"Nonsense," say the CERN -- and other leading scientists."The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present arisk is pure fiction," declared Aymar.
