CERN Particle Accelerator – The God Machine

Beneath the rural tranquility of suburban Geneva, where the shores of Lac Lemon melt into wide open grazing pastures, scientists are looking for God. Looking for ways this Universe came into existence and the possible 10 dimensions that surround us. Here underneath 100 meters of solid rock and sandstone lies one of the biggest, scariest, and most complex machines built by man.

The machine is called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and when working at full tilt it will drive two beams of particles in opposite directions around a 17 mile (27km) ring at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Every second each of the beams will complete 11,245 laps of the machine.

The machine will search for extra dimensions, which could be curled up into microscopic loops. It might produce “dark matter”, the unknown substance that stretches through space like an invisible skeleton. And it will almost certainly discover the elusive Higgs boson, which helps explain the origin of mass, and is better known by its wince-inducing moniker, the God particle.

I got to visit this site in March 2008 – or at least drove past it – during my visit to Evian-Les-Baines on the French side of Switzerland.  This machine was turned on in September as the world paused to see if it would get sucked into a man made black hole which was a distinct possibility if things didn’t go per plan. (Check out a graphic video of what this would have felt like – for a trillionth of a second – would have been quite a show – after all crossing the “Event horizon” doesn’t happen everyday)

But given that you are reading this post today the black hole didn’t happen. The experiment is safely underway and even as we speak particles are speeding up to approach the theoretical light barrier. Here is a good site to keep up with the particle progress: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/

I’m sure God is smiling somewhere as he watches us trying to understand his consciousness by making his particles go round and round very fast in circles.