Large Hadron Collider ‘to unlock secrets of Big Bang’

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London, Apr 6 : Scientists are all set to unlock the secrets of exactly how the universe began by using one of the world’s largest and most expensive science machines—the Large Hadron Collider.

They will utilise it to recreate the conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, that is the birth of the universe, by smashing pieces of atoms together at high speed, The Sunday Telegraph has reported.

The £4.4 billion new particle accelerator, which is buried 300 ft beneath the Alpine foothills along the Swiss French border, is 17 miles long and up to 12 stories high. It can generate temperatures of a trillion degrees centigrade.

“The Large Hadron Collider is like a time machine that is going to take us further back towards the Big Bang than we have ever been before by recreating the conditions that existed there. We are going to see new types of matter we haven’t been able to see before. The idea that it could cause the end of the world is ridiculous,” Frank Close of Oxford University was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

The report speculates that a 40-year-old theory about an elusive particle known as the Higgs boson may be proved as part of the huge experiment. The theory was developed by Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University.

“If we find the Higgs boson then it will prove our standard model of particle physics. If we don’t find it then nature may have another way of giving particles mass and that is going to turn science on its head,” said Jonathan Butterworth of University College London, who is among the UK scientists involved in the

Atlas experiment.

The collider may also reveal more exotic phenomena such as anti-matter, the opposite of ordinary matter, mini black holes and even extra dimensions. “At the level of energy we will be creating normal matter doesn’t exist. I expect we will see some things that are entirely new and could turn our current understanding of physics on its head,"”said David Evans of Birmingham University.