All Things Considered, April 9, 2007 · The cows grazing by the roads outside Geneva, Switzerland, have witnessed some pretty strange things these past few years: Trucks roll by carrying big, superconducting magnets that look like missiles, and other brightly colored pieces of scientific equipment. The pieces are all taken to warehouse-sized buildings, where they disappear down shafts that reach 300 feet into the earth.

The work is all part of an $8 billion project at the international physics laboratory called CERN. At its heart will be an enormously powerful particle accelerator capable of smashing subatomic particles together, reproducing the energies that existed a fraction of a second after the big bang. What comes out may solve some fundamental mysteries about how the universe is put together.

But that’s if everything works. Physicists hope to begin operation this summer of what is arguably the largest and most complex science experiment ever constructed.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to begin operation this summer. When fully operational, it will smash protons together at energies that were present just after the big bang. The collisions will occur 600 million times every second, producing a spray of subatomic debris. Physicists hope somewhere in that haystack they will find the following needles:

The Higgs Particle (Named after physicist Peter Higgs)

What does it do? It gives things mass. The Higgs particle would be a companion to an (also hypothetical) Higgs “field.” The field would pervade the universe and act like cosmic molasses, making everything hard to move. That’s what we call mass.

Why do we need it? Without the Higgs particle, electrons would have no mass and atoms wouldn’t stick together. We would fall apart into piles of atomic nuclei.

Likelihood it’s real? High. Physicists generally agree the Higgs or something like it must exist.

How hard would it be to find? It depends on the Higgs particle’s characteristics. The Higgs doesn’t live long and quickly decays into other particles. Depending on what those are, physicists might be able to pick out Higgs fingerprints quickly, or it could take years of sifting through data.