Today’s news report from The Age describes the Worlds largest experiment, aiming to simulate the Big Bang using the Worlds largest particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider in an aim to understand what the Universe is made up of.

The Large Hadron Collider is aiming to unlock the secrets of how the universe began. Scientists will use it to try to recreate the conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang — the birth of the universe — by smashing pieces of atoms together at high speed.

Atomic particles will spiral though a series of rings lined with powerful magnets that will accelerate the particles until they reach speeds close to the speed of light. Each particle will race around the 27.3-kilometre ring 11,245 times every second before being smashed headlong into each other, breaking into their component parts and releasing huge amounts of energy and debris.

The temperatures produced by these collisions will be 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun and scientists believe this will be powerful enough to reveal the first particles that existed in the moments immediately after the birth of the universe.

Among the particles the scientists will hunt for is the Higgs boson, a cornerstone of modern physics that is thought to be responsible for giving every other particle a mass, or weight.

More on the experiments to be conducted, from the CERN website and details for the layman with awesome pictures on the National Geographic . 

First Posted at Prem Panicker's on April 07, 2008.