A diagrammatic view of the LHC. Image © CERN. It's hard to avoid
CERN these days. Last year's successful switch-on of CERN's
Large Hadron Collider, followed by a blow-out which is currently
being fixed, sparked wide-spread media coverage, and currently
CERN stars in the Tom Hanks movie Angels and Demons. So what
goes on at CERN and why the hubbub about the Large Hadron
Collider, known as the LHC? CERN is the European Centre for
Particle Physics and the LHC is the world's largest laboratory
experiment. It's a particle accelerator sitting about 100m below
the Earth's surface, in a huge tunnel on the Franco-Swiss
border. When the repairs are completed by the end of 2009, the
experiment will be smashing together tiny particles of matter in
the hope of finding answers to some deep questions about the way
our Universe works. How tiny are the particles? Electrons
orbiting the nucleus of a carbon atom. Image courtesy NASA.
Consider an atom of carbon, one of the most ubiquitous elements
on Earth. It's about a tenth of