HOME OF THE GOD PARTICLE

SWITZERLAND

One of CERN’S particle detectors generates a magnetic field 100,000 times greater than the earth’s.

Stephen Hawking worries that the field responsible for the Higgs boson (or God particle) may destroy the universe one day. Do you? Perhaps a trip to the laboratory of Cern—short for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire— is in order. CERN, in Meyrin, Switzerland, houses the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. Fired up in 2008, this device smashes atoms together at incomprehensible speeds to answer all conceivable questions we could have about the physical world. It answered one of the most compelling of those questions in 2012, when experiments first detected the formerly hypothetical Higgs boson and buttressed the Standard Model of particle physics. Before this machine went operational, there were fringe fears that it would be so powerful it would create a black hole that would suck in all of the earth. When that didn’t happen, the facility began admitting tourists, if only in the most serious of ways. Visits are limited to specially designated Open Days, the last of which was in 2013, and the next of which has yet to be scheduled. But stay alert, bucketeers: If you end up getting to boast that you were there when scientists did something like isolate 38 atoms of antihydrogen, as they did in 2010, you can be sure nobody will show you videos of themselves water-skiing at the lodge ever again.