The realms of the inconceivably huge and the unimaginably tiny will be united later this year in the countryside near Geneva, when the world's most massive physics experiment gets under way within a 17-mile ring spanning the French-Swiss border. Inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), massive, powerful magnets chilled to a few degrees above absolute zero -- colder than outer space -- will zip beams of superenergetic protons and lead nuclei in a loop at speeds within a hairsbreadth of the speed of light, then collide them head-on. The energy released will be so vast that the impacts will recreate conditions in the universe as they existed just a fraction of a second after the big bang. If the LHC performs as expected, it could at last nail down that holy grail of contemporary physics, the Higgs boson -- known as the "God particle" because it is thought to lend mass to matter. It may even finally unveil the secret of dark matter, the mysterious entity that makes up 85 percent of the universe -- thereby shedding light on as-yet-unexplainable motions of galaxies.
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Various magnets of the paradoxically named Compact Muon Solenoid experiment are moved into position at the Large Hadron Collider facility deep under the French-Swiss border.
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