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By Pallab Ghosh
BBC News science correspondent | 
A 27km chain of magnets is part of the experiment |
Nestling in the foothills of the Alps is Europe's largest laboratory, the European Centre for Nuclear Research or Cern.
With its vast labyrinth of tunnels and equipment stretching for miles, the complex has the feel of a cathedral to science.
And now the scientists here have embarked on their biggest experiment ever, the hunt for a particle which gave the universe its form.
Its scientific name is the Higgs Boson, but because it is so fundamental in shaping the universe, others have called it the God particle.
It is a particle that is supposed to endow other fundamental particles with mass. Without it there would be no gravity, no universe as we know it - no "let there be light" moment.
No-one has seen it, but physicists have invoked it because it is the simplest explanation for how the universe evolved.
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"Cathedral", "God Particle", "Invoked", "The simplest explanation for how the Universe evolved..."
Interesting use of words and metaphors here. There was more of this sort of thing on BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme with Andrew Marr talking in hushed and reverential tones about "Cathedrals of Science" .
The way that the BBC News service has handled this particular news item (and I think that it is newsworthy) demonstrates how in our modern society science is now worshipped as the new religion.Science is the new faith and scientists are the new arch priests before whom we are all meant to bow down and become reverential.
If you deconstruct this news story with those ideas in mind then what you have here is a concerted attempt to finally "prove" that God does not exist. The Large Hadron Particle Collider is the ultimate scientific "test" that will prove this hypothesis. It is where material science has been going since The Enlightenment and now, today in Cern, it has arrived.
"Oh, foolish man"
Who created the "God Particle"? |
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