Wednesday, September 10, 2008

'Big Bang' experiment hailed as scientific milestone

An Australian physicist says a science experiment which begins in Switzerland today is a major milestone in the history of scientific discovery.

Scientists have built a 27-kilometre long underground circular tunnel that houses the Large Hadron Collider, which will allow them to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light.

The scientists hope to replicate conditions immediately after the Big Bang in an effort to learn more about how the universe began.

Professor Geoffrey Taylor from the University of Melbourne has spent 20 years working on one of the experiments to be conducted in the collider.

He says it is hoped it will help answer some important scientific questions.

"The idea of whether there are extra dimensions of space/time, whether we live in a world of nine dimensions rather than three," he said.

"Questions like this are akin to 'is the world flat or is the world round?'.

"They're really quite substantial questions that affect the way we see ourselves within the universe."

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