IF ALL goes well, on 10 September a lone beam of protons will complete the first lap around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. The trip round the 27-kilometre ring, which straddles the border with France, will take just 90 microseconds. Though the world will not end as some doomsayers have predicted, the event will rank as a monumental milestone.
The LHC is to physics what the Apollo programme was to space exploration. It is a massive technological achievement that promises to open up new vistas on…
