SAINT GENIS: A unique warren 100 metres under the French-Swiss border is home to thousands of scientists who aim to crack some of the biggest mysteries in the universe by recreating the Big Bang.
But the mind-boggling experiments conducted by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are an equal mystery to many of the people who live above its 27-kilometre circular tunnel in France and Switzerland.
In a bid to raise local awareness and to celebrate its 50-year anniversary, CERN, a publicly-funded laboratory grouping scientists from 85 different countries, will hold a one-off open day in October for the general public.
"It is a big birthday celebration," said Emma Sanders, the main organizer of the laboratory's largest ever public event. Life today might be quite different without CERN's efforts over the past five decades, which have produced most famously the World Wide Web.
"We have added a lot to mankind's knowledge of the universe and that is what we were founded for," said CERN's chief spokesman James Gillies. British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the web more than 10 years ago to enable CERN-linked scientists to communicate information and share data instantaneously anywhere in the world.
Other by-products of its research include vital medical equipment such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanners used in cancer diagnosis and techniques used to produce microchips.
"It is becoming increasingly important from a funding point-of-view that governments see these spin-offs," Gillies said, while noting that scientific minds at CERN were driven by a desire for knowledge rather than to make money.
Offering visitors a glimpse into the world of particle physics, 50 different sites - one for each year - will be open to the public on October 16, mostly at CERN's above-ground headquarters on the outskirts of Geneva.
Among the main attractions will be a chance to explore the huge underground tunnel, which has been used to smash particles together in four chambers as part of a project to explore the Big Bang - the massive explosion, about 12-15 billion years ago that is believed to have been the origin of our universe.
CERN, which launched the programme in 1994, has so far crashed lead ions together, briefly creating temperatures over 100,000 times as hot as the centre of the Sun and energy densities 20 times that of ordinary matter.
In their latest push to work out what happened at the dawn of the universe, thousands of technicians and scientists are building a 2.4-billion-dollar atom-smasher known as a Large Hadron Collider to replace a smaller version.
"This must be finished by 2007 when we will start creating mini Big Bangs," said Yves Schutz, a CERN physicist and spokesman. "We want to be able to say something pertinent about the origin of the universe, the origin of matter," he told a group of journalists on a brief tour of one of the four atom-smashing chambers in Saint Genis, a small town on France's border with Switzerland.
Dubbed ALICE - A Large Iron Collider Experiment - the 24-metre-high cavern houses an enormous, tube-shapped magnet that weighs as much as the Eiffel tower and will be used to contain and monitor the man-made Big Bang. -AFP
