Can a seventeen-mile-long collider unlock the universe?
MAY 08, 2007
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.021095
The New Yorker : The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, has its offices on the outskirts of Geneva, in an area once devoted to dairy farms and now given over to sprawl. The offices occupy several dozen buildings, some of them in Switzerland and the remainder, a few hundred yards away, in France. The buildings are reachable by roads with names like Route Bohr, Route Schrödinger, and Route Curie. By the entrance to the complex, there is a museumâmdash;nearly empty the day I visitedâmdash;that attempts to make particle physics comprehensible to the general public. Behind that there is a park where bits of old cyclotrons are displayed, like playground equipment from Mars.
© 2007 American Institute of Physics
