Carnegie Mellon University physicist Tom Ferguson has devoted nearly 15 years to the construction of a vast underground Swiss laboratory.
Today, that $9 billion international laboratory plans to conduct its first experiment: a small-scale re-enactment of the "Big Bang" to explain the origins of the universe and how it came to harbor life.
"What we're hoping is that new particles that have never been discovered will be produced," said Ferguson, part of an 11-member team of Carnegie Mellon scientists contributing to the project. "Because if we knew what we were discovering, we wouldn't have built it."
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, will use giant magnets housed in cathedral-size caverns to fire beams of energy particles around a 17-mile tunnel where they will smash together at nearly the speed of light. Computers will analyze particles created by the collision for clues to what happened during the Big Bang.
Scientists at the CERN laboratory, near the foothills of the Jura Mountains, will pursue long elusive concepts such as dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions and, most of all, the "Higgs boson" -- the theoretical "God particle" that scientists believe made the Big Bang possible.
"The LHC was conceived to radically change our vision of the universe," said CERN's French Director-General Robert Aymar. "Whatever discoveries it brings, mankind's understanding of our world's origins will be greatly enriched."
CERN scientists have countered suggestions by critics that the experiment could create tiny black holes that could swallow Earth.
Two scientific studies done to explore the possibility of such a scenario showed it couldn't happen. Ferguson said he has no concern, especially because cosmic rays regularly bombard the planet with much higher energy than those in the collider.
"If something bad was going to happen, it would have happened a long time ago," Ferguson said.
"It's nonsense," said CERN chief spokesman James Gillies.
John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist at CERN, said doomsayers assume the collider will create micro black holes in the first place, which he called unlikely. And even if they appeared, he said, they would instantly evaporate, as predicted by Stephen Hawking.
Gillies said the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the collider itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.
"On Wednesday, we start small," Gillies said. "What we're putting in to start with is one single low intensity bunch at low energy, and we thread that around. We get experience with low energy things, and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better."
The experiment is projected to restage -- trillions of times -- the moment around 15 billion years ago when, as cosmologists believe, an unimaginably dense and hot object the size of a small coin exploded, expanding rapidly to create stars, planets and eventually life on Earth.
Huge amounts of data will pour in -- so big that the lab's computers can't sift through it all. So scientists, who will monitor the experiment at above-ground control centers, have devised a way to share the load among dozens of leading computing centers worldwide.
The result is the "LHC Grid," a network of 60,000 computers to analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other. That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data.
"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," said CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the grid project.
Carnegie Mellon scientists helped create the Compact Muon Solenoid particle detector, which weighs as much as five jumbo jets but is designed to detect fundamental particles similar to electrons.
Despite his contribution to the project, Ferguson won't be in Switzerland when the LHC is turned on and the first proton shot around the tunnel.
"Unfortunately, I can't be there," he said. "I'm teaching."
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