SKIRMISHER

Scientists working on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) either calls it “The Machine,” or simply, “Hell.”

Why “Hell?” If it’s any indication, this photo of one of LHC’s major massive particle detectors, called Atlas, is built in a cathedral-sized cavern 150 feet long and 82 feet high [admire, if you will, these eight toroidal coils that compose the largest superconducting magnet ever built. Click image to enlarge.] The whole thing runs deep underground for 16.8 miles, where it must have driven through previously thriving communities of subterranean badasses.

The Machine is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, perhaps the most ambitious physics experiment ever created. If all goes well with its November 2007 launch, the LHC will help answer some of scientists’ most fundamental outstanding questions: What is mass? What is the invisible, near-undetectable dark matter that seems to make up most of the universe? How did any of the matter that makes up our own cells survive the big bang?

Some researchers dub these particle accelerators the cathedrals of modern science: complicated, beautiful and an expensive testament to faith in a reality that transcends our everyday experience. Descending into the LHC’s caverns, dwarfed by equipment designed to measure the unimaginably tiny, I can immediately understand that awe.

via WIRED

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