Cool philosophies

摘要

Whether through calculated seduction or natural attraction, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which starts up next week, seems to be enjoying a love affair with the media and the public. Some may revel in the Herculean feat of engineering at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, that has created a 27-kilometre tunnel colder than the outer cosmos. But the LHC s most potent allure surely stems from the air of mystery that attaches to its promise to reveal secrets from the first milliseconds of the Big Bang - in lay terms, to explain how it all began.