What is CERN ?

CERN has been the trailblazer on a number of other highly credible projects, which may tempt people to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding CERN, which certainly ranks as one of the most comprehensive and expensive scientific experiments in history.

In 1989, under the guidance of Tim Berners-Lee, CERN began the World Wide Web project, which led to the first webpage in history. On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.

CERN is the world’s biggest machine
Straddling the French-Swiss border, the $9 billion CERN collider complex is buried at a depth of up to 575 feet (175 meters). The tunnel complex runs along a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circuit.

Scientists involved in the project say the laboratory was built underground because the Earth’s crust provides protection against radiation.

They also say it was buried out of respect for the natural landscape, which sounds slightly ironic considering the massive damage the collider could possibly cause down the road.

On the outskirts of Geneva, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) mimics the aftermath of the Big Bang by sending beams of protons hurtling into one another at close to the speed of light.

Massive gravitational pull
The CERN collider is composed of some 9,600 super magnets – which are 100,000 times more powerful than the gravitational pull of Earth - that fire protons around a circular track at mindboggling speeds.

“95% of the universe in still unknown,” Fabiola Gianotti, the Director General of CERN, explained in a presentation to staff at the World Economic Forum. “We are all driven by a shared passion for knowledge.”

A beam might rotate for up to 10 hours, travelling a distance of more than 10 billion kilometers, enough to make it to the far reaches of our Solar System and back again.

In other words, however sophisticated we imagine our age of space exploration and self-driving cars to be, we are still staggeringly ignorant about almost everything in the universe.

CERN wants to change that. It is a grandiose undertaking that not only sheds light on the esoteric world of particle physics, but also on international collaboration, purpose and progress.

Travelling just below light-speed, a proton in the LHC will make 11,245 circuits every second.

No less amazing are the magnet’s coils, which are made up of 36 twisted 15mm strands, each strand comprised in turn of 6000-9000 single filaments, each filament possessing a diameter as small as 7 micrometers.

As the Romanian flag is raised for the first time this week to mark the arrival of CERN’s 22nd member state, here are some startling facts about Europe’s most ambitious scientific project.

The 27km length of the LHC demands some 7,600 km (4,100 miles) of cable, which amounts to about 270,000 km (145,000 miles) of strand — more than enough to circle the Earth six times at the Equator.

A cryogenic cooling system keeps it this frigid for the sake of the superconductor electromagnets, which send proton beams hurtling towards one another in a loop 100 metres below the ground.

According to the CERN website, if the filaments were unraveled, they would “stretch to the Sun and back five times with enough left over for a few trips to the Moon.”

The Higgs Boson is unlikely to prove or disprove the existence of God, but it does help to cement the Standard Model: a physics theory developed in the 60s, which outlines the building blocks of matter and the forces that govern them.

CERN generates extreme temperatures
There may be another reason for the CERN super collider being buried hundreds of feet underground: The unbelievable hot temperatures it can reach.

Even after the discovery of the Higgs, the Standard Model is not complete, because it only explains how three out of four fundamental forces work, omitting gravity. While gravity is well covered by the Theory of Relativity, the trouble is that there is no framework linking these two theories together to give us a unified understanding of the universe.

Well, about as hot as conditions in the Universe after the Big Bang, or more than 100,000-times the temperature at the center of the Sun

Nobody knows where fundamental research will lead. Famously, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 at CERN, as a tool to allow scientists around the world to share data.

The complex instruments developed for particle physics, at CERN and other similar facilities, have spawned numerous other uses, including PET scans, the most common tool used to diagnose cancers.

This will be achieved, CERN says, by accelerating and colliding together two beams of heavy ions, an epic scientific event that will take place next month.

But Stephen Hawking is worried
Although it may require some mental gymnastics to wrap one’s brain around exactly what the CERN scientists are attempting to achieve in their underground lab,