Real lives

摘要

K nown worldwide by its French acronym, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland, is the Vatican of particle physics - only true seekers need apply. Luckily for me, I am deemed one of them. What we seek at CERN are the building blocks of the universe and the accompanying manual that nature uses to assemble them. We do this with the help of a highly complex machine made up of one particle accelerator-the Large Hadron Collider - and six detectors, all found 100 metres below the surface of the Earth. The accelerator collides beams of protons travelling at close to the speed of light. The detectors, some the size of cathedrals, capture these collisions at a mind-numbingly fast rate. Think of a 100-megapixel camera taking 40 million frames every second.