It is called Atlas, after the Greek god who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders: 150 feet long, 82 feet high and weighing 7000 tonnes, this mammoth machine has been designed to measure particles so small you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair. For the next few months, PhD students and Nobel prize winners will hurry around it like Lilliputians tending a giant. Every pipe, magnet and sensor will be tested and tested again. Then the machine will be switched on, and the world will hold its breath: the search for the so-called ‘God particle’ will start. Some of nature’s deepest secrets will be investigated: What is dark matter? Why is the universe expanding? What are its building blocks? Located at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva, the world’s largest particle accelerator has taken 25 years to plan and £1.5 billion to build. When up and running, it will fire two beams of proton particles in opposite directions around a 17-mile ring some 300 feet under the earth’s surface. Travelling in a vacuum, the beams will approach the speed of light, making 11,245 […]