"Remember," Gagnon said, "according to Einstein, mass is congealed energy." In other words, if you create enough energy in one place, it can remake itself into a chunk of mass.
Gagnon compared the particles that have been created in other colliders to rubber ducks. "We've made millions of duckies," Gagnon said. "Now we want to make an elephant."
Because the new collider will be seven times as powerful as the Tevatron, if the Higgs boson exists, the CERN collider should find it.
"If we don't find the Higgs, the theorists have a lot of explaining to do," said UCLA postdoctoral student Greg Rakness over lunch in the CERN cafeteria, where one can hear conversations in a dozen languages.
The huge burst of energy in particle collisions becomes a kind of time machine, transporting scientists back to the first microseconds after the Big Bang.
The universe was only about 200 million miles wide, consisting of a viscous cloud of quarks and gluons floating in a searing plasma. As the universe expanded and cooled, the quarks combined to make protons and neutrons. The gluons held them together to form the nuclei of atoms.
To re-create this plasma, one of the collider's detectors, known as ALICE, will accelerate heavy lead ions. One of the heaviest of all elements, each lead atom contains 82 protons and 125 neutrons.
By pounding these sacks of protons and neutrons together, the scientists hope to free the quarks and gluons from their embrace into a free-floating quark-gluon plasma.
With this re-creation of the early moments of the universe, scientists may also be able to delve into the unexplained imbalance between matter and antimatter. So far, experiments have not been able to explain why there's so much matter in the universe and no antimatter, beyond what is created in colliders.
According to experiments, there should be 1020 (100 billion billion) more photons of light than protons of matter in the universe. In fact, Nakada said, the number is closer to 1010. That's a huge amount of unexplained matter in the form of galaxies, stars, planets and theoretical physicists.
A detector called the LHCb will try to unravel this mystery by making very precise measurements of a certain kind of quark that is created in particle collisions, the b meson, and its opposite, the anti-b meson.
Black holes
Then there's the matter of black holes.
Harvey Newman, a Caltech physicist who was one of the discoverers of the gluon and is leader of the U.S. contingent on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space.
But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only 10-27 seconds before decaying -- hardly enough time to start gobbling up the French countryside.
Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to block the start-up of the new collider until CERN produces a comprehensive safety report.
Speaking from Hawaii, Wagner said that despite assurances from scientists at CERN and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Wagner, who studied cosmic ray physics at UC Berkeley as a young man.
It's just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start chewing up normal matter, he said.
It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but there's no evidence that can't happen, he said.
His suit for a restraining order is to "preserve the status quo while the court considers the arguments. In this case, the status quo is Mother Earth being here," he said.
Another nightmare possibility is that the collider could produce something called strange matter, a theoretical substance that some physicists think exists in the center of the remnants of collapsed stars.
The pressure and temperature are so intense that the protons and electrons fuse into neutrons, then collapse into a mass of quarks.
Theoretically, the tremendous gravity of strange matter would convert any ordinary matter it came in contact with.
Mangano said he is now writing a report addressing such concerns. He said that protests of physics experiments were nothing new.
"Before each new accelerator started, there has been some panic," he said. Wagner, in fact, filed suit in 1999 to stop Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York. It went ahead and the world survived -- just as it will this time, according to scientists from Mangano to Newman and Stephen Hawking.
"Look," Mangano said, leaning forward in his chair at CERN's sprawling complex, "what if I told you tomorrow when you shave you will blow up the world? You laugh. You say that can't happen. But how do you know?
"The only thing we know is that there have been about a million billion shaves since people started shaving and the world is still here," he said. "So all we can say is the probability of you blowing up the world when you shave tomorrow is less than one in 1015."
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