Historic Big Bang Experiment to Recapture Birth of Universe

European Organisation for Nuclear Research founded in 1954 better known by its French acronym CERN, located on the Franco-Swiss border, will do historic Big Bang experiment, an attempt to circulate a beam of particles around the 27 km-long underground tunnel that houses the Large Hadron Collider(LHC).

A $7.75 billion (Rs 31,000 crore) project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, Scientists are trying to recreate the condition just after the Big Bang to understand the creation and workings of universe.

According to the Big Bang theory, the explosion of an objest the size of a small coin occurred about 13 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets and life on Earth.

The LHC team now plans to send a full particle beam all the way around the collider pipe in one direction on September 10 as a prelude to sending beams in both directions and smashing them together later in the year, which whole world will be watching.

That collision, in which both particle clusters will be traveling at the speed of light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life possible.

The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the "Higgs boson" after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated nearly 50 years ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter together.

Recreating a "Big Bang," which most scientists believe is the only explanation of an expanding universe, ought to show how stars and planets came together out of the primeval chaos that followed, the CERN team believes.

Efforts to track it down in a predecessor to the LHC at CERN, and in another experiment in the United States, failed. But scientists are confident that the vast leap in technologies represented by the LHC will make the difference.

Higgs, a 79-year-old Edinburgh University professor who as an atheist angrily rejects the idea of calling the boson the "God particle" believes it will show up very quickly once the beams are colliding in the LHC.

"If it doesn't," he said during a visit to CERN earlier this year, "I shall be very, very puzzled."

The people behind the experiment have also been flooded by telephone calls from worried people who fear the experiments could trigger earthquakes and could cause mini black holes that would destroy the world.

According to the CERN, there is no basis for any concern about the safety of the LHC.

Some 2000 scientists from 155 institutes in 36 countries are worlking together to build the CMS particle detector.

A group of physicists turn on a machine that will recreate the birth of the universe, the Raniwala couple from Jaipur will be watching the experiment very closely. After all, this will be the largest experiment in human history. And Sudhir Raniwala and Rashmi Raniwala, associate professors of physics at Rajasthan University, are among the 30 odd physicists from India, who are part of this experiment.