[Cowperson]

Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.

Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

The day it turns on will be a moment of truth for Cern, which has spent 13 years building the collider, and for the world’s physicists, who have staked their credibility and their careers, not to mention all those billions of dollars, on the conviction that they are within touching distance of fundamental discoveries about the universe. If they fail to see something new, experts agree, it could be a long time, if ever, before giant particle accelerators are built on Earth again, ringing down the curtain on at least one aspect of the age-old quest to understand what the world is made of and how it works.

“If you see nothing,” said a Cern physicist, John Ellis, “in some sense then, we theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/sc...pc&oref=slogin

Will they see the face of God?

Cowperson