Located in the salubrious suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border is the world's largest particle physics laboratory. CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of leading centres for scientific research. It was founded in 1954 and now has 20 members.
CERN is mainly trying to find out what the Universe is made of, and how it works. At CERN, the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments, including those from India, are used to study the basic constituents of matter -- the fundamental particles.
The most well-known scientific instrument at CERN is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is a particle accelerator that the physicists are currently using to study the smallest known particles.
The experiment being conducted now involves using the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams at very high energy. It is still not sure what will result from these collisions, but what's sure is that human understanding about the working of Universe will be enhanced by the experiment.
The essential idea is that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past and continues to expand to this day. The CERN is trying to create the big bang in a lab using LHC.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons charged with approximately 7 TeV of energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized that the collider will produce the Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model, and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.
The LHC has been in construction for some 13 years. According to BBC:
Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang.
They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October 2008.
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