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The hammering has stopped, the whining of power tools has
abated. Only the hum of electronic detectors reverberates through the
cavernous, eight-story space below the Swiss-Franco border that is stuffed with
9,300 magnets and enough niobium-titanium wire to stretch to the sun and back
five times.

But by September, if all goes according to plan, two narrow
beams of protons moving in opposite directions will begin making laps around
the underground laboratory’s 27-kilometer–long subatomic racetrack. The protons will pass from

This is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the mammoth atom
smasher operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better
known by its French acronym, CERN. More than 15 years in the making, everything
about the LHC is enormous, from the energies it generates — 14 trillion
electronvolts — to the nearly 60 metric tons of liquid helium required to cool
its magnets, to the 20,000 tons of metal it houses and to the staff of
thousands of scientists involved. All this just to study the tiniest particles
in the universe.

But more than the $8 billion price tag is riding on the LHC.
Depending on what’s detected, physicists may find out if they understand the
fundamental building blocks of nature, or if “everything that physicists have
been talking about for 45 years is wrong,” says CERN theoretical physicist John
Ellis.

Computing is perhaps the field where Cern’s international credentials are best displayed. The experiments will produce a staggering amount of data from particle collisions. Even after internal electronic “filters” at each detector have weeded out the least interesting 99 per cent of primary data, there will still be 15 million gigabytes a year to process – enough to fill 100,000 DVDs.

That is too much for Cern to handle on its own, so 80 per cent will be distributed to 200 computing centres around the world, using a special “grid” infrastructure set up for the purpose. Cern is proud of its title as the birthplace of the world wide web, which Tim Berners-Lee created in 1989 to enable scientists to share information from the previous LEP collider.