The long-awaited start-up of the world's largest science experiment will begin tomorrow underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.
The Large Hadron Collider will smash protons at nearly the speed of light inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel.
"It was first proposed more than 20 years ago," said Django Manglunki, an accelerator physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). "We've been preparing that beam for more than ten years."
"It's difficult to realize that the machine, at last, is starting now," he added. (See photos of the collider.)
By creating hundreds of thousands of head-on collisions each second, physicists hope to understand the fiery conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after the big bang.
The findings could also help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as the existence of one long-hypothesized particle called the Higgs boson—or the "God particle"—thought to be responsible for giving all other particles their mass.
(Read about the God particle in National Geographic magazine.)
Another enigma that could be at least partially explained is dark matter, the invisible material thought to be the most common in the universe.
But first, researchers have to get the machine's beams of protons running.
Very Big Staircase
In several months CERN's physicists plan to use two beams, each with 2,808 bunches of protons, each of which contains a hundred billion protons—positively charged particles found in the nuclei of atoms.
Out of each collision, a spray of energy and other assorted particles will form. Scientists will study which particles show up, how often, and exactly how they fly out of the collisions. (Learn more about atom smashers.)
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