The big bang?

Trying to understand what they're doing at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva isn't easy - especially for someone like me who struggled to pass physics at school. But go underground at CERN and it's clear that something pretty monumental is taking place.

An elevator plummets you down more than 100 meters. When the doors open, cavernous tunnels are revealed, in which enormous machines lurk. This is the cutting edge of particle physics. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) finally gets up to full speed, it will, its fans claim, unlock the secrets of our universe.

To do this, the LHC this week began beaming particles through CERN's 27-kilometer tunnel, faster and faster, until these protons collide. The process is something that happened in the final seconds before the "big bang" which created our universe.

"We're trying to understand what our universe is made of," says James Gillies, spokesman for CERN. How are we organized into atoms and molecules, into tables and chairs, into human beings, into galaxies?

"One thing we can't explain is why gravity is so weak, why you can jump up in the air even though a whole planet is pulling you down, but why the forces holding us together are so strong," Gillies says. "By observing what happens when the particles collide, we hope to be able to see how they really work."

Unpleasant side effects?

But this is an experiment that has never before been tried by mankind, and, not surprisingly, there are fears that there may be some unpleasant side effects.

There is a rumor that the magnetic force created by the collider will be so great that metallic objects - pots, pans, wrist watches together with their wearers - will be sucked to the ground and immobilized there for the duration of the experiment.

Then there's another more plausible suggestion, that you might not have much success using a compass in the Geneva region while the LHC is switched on.

The big vanishing act

But the tale which has been causing most worry, and even a number of court cases, is the one about black holes.

Some scientists have suggested that colliding protons will create black holes, which will eventually swallow the planet. Forget the big bang; this could be the big vanishing act.

Scientists at CERN admit they don't actually know whether black holes will be created or not. But they insist that particle collision happens in nature all the time, when cosmic rays hit our atmosphere. Any black holes created there are clearly harmless, so we needn't worry.

First results do seem to prove the doubters wrong. After a couple of days of particle collision, Geneva is still in place, and no major magnetic forces have been detected. But, it's early days. Those particles haven't reached top speed yet - at the moment they are just bumping gently into each other. High-speed smashing won't begin until next year - and that's when we may start to get answers to all those questions.

Author: Imogen Foulkes
Editor: Sabina Casagrande