Visit to CERN'S giant atom-cracker

Dear Friends,

I had the rare opportunity of touring a particle accelerator near Geneva this April.

This is how it happened - I was visiting my sisters in Europe and one of them signed us up for a visit to CERN (The European Organisation for Nuclear Research) which had organised an open day for the public.I had read about the centre before - it has a 27 kilometre tunnel that runs in a circle about 100 metres underground.

What it is doing in its latest project is to send beams of atomic particles (protons) racing around the tunnel close to the speed of light. One beam goes clockwise and the other anticlockwise.Then they are made to collide into each other. What happens then is that the protons annihilate each other in a blast of energy and an array of new atomicparticles are produced, which scientists then study.

When we arrived there, we thought we would be justgiven a tour of the premises and a lecture but we were actually taken underground into the tunnel!

Cern hasjust finished building the accelerator - a project that has taken them several years - and will be turning it on soon. Since it hasn't begun operation yet, it was safe for us to go underground.

We had a Chinese professor from Beijing University who acted as our guide. He took us down in an elevator and then into a huge chamber where they had assembled a device called the Atlas detector - as large as a 5-storeybuilding - which tracks the various new particles created by the collisions.

What struck me was the sense of fascination that was there among all of us in the group. We were all working our brain muscles to understand what Professor Sijin was telling us - we didn't want to miss any thing out. The concept was grand - they hoped to reproduce with the collisions the same conditions that existed when the Big Bang created the universe!

Those conditions existed for a tiny fraction of a second. Particles were produced, existed for a moment, and then changed into the more long-lived kinds that are still present today. But by using the accelerator, they could keep producing a stream of these short lived particles, giving them time to study them at leisure.

As we returned home we discussed what we had seen. Although none of us had much of a scientific background, we were all gripped by the sense of having been at the cutting edge of research. I found myself vicariously identifying with the scientists who work there and admiring an institution where knowledge was valued for its own sake and not for the commercial benefits it might or might not bring.

I'm still trying to figure out why we were all so thrilled by the experience and why we felt like we wanted to hold on to it in some way.

Sometimes things happen that throws apart for a brief moment the curtain that veils the mystery of life. It could be the birth of a child or a death, or a descent into a tunnel under the earth. And although the curtain closes again, the mystery remains around us.