Phil Schewe explores the uses and ehallenges of the vacuum and discovers that it is far from empty. THE LARGE Hadron Collider summons superlatives. Basically a machine for accelerating protons to high speed and then letting them glide around a 27km ring-shaped course over and over again, LHC is the largest scientific instrument ever built. It is the best time machine in existence as it recreates a tiny portion of the very early universe; when two protons are violently smashed together in LHC's tunnel far beneath the bucolic countryside outside Geneva, the ensuing fireball resembles a small speck of the primordial matter that filled space less than a nanosecond after the big bang.
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