Colossus of Hilo: Walter Wagner's resumé runs the gamut from school teacher to nuclear physicist. Olivier Koning

The switch was officially thrown on September 10. Had everything gone as planned, proton beams would right now be traveling at nearly the speed of light around a 17-mile-long looped tunnel buried a few hundred feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border. With the machine up and running at full power, the beams—one running clockwise, the other counterclockwise—would intersect at various points inside the subterranean racetrack, whereupon a tiny fraction of the protons would crash into each other at energies unprecedented in the laboratory. As it happens, operation has been suspended until next spring, due to a helium leak in the tunnel, thought to have been caused by a faulty electrical connection.

Welcome to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the state of the art in atom smashing. A project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the LHC attempts to, in a sense, re-create creation by simulating conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the entire universe, implausible though it may seem, was being unpacked from one infinitely dense speck—a macrocosmic rabbit pulled out of a microcosmic hat.

Physicists at the LHC hope to glimpse things they have thus far only imagined, such as the so-called supersymmetric particles, which are expected to decay in ways that could shed light on the nature of dark matter—a sizable chunk of the universe and a complete mystery to science. Then there's the long-postulated Higgs boson, a.k.a. the God particle, the existence of which could explain why particles have mass, when theoretically, they should not. Discoveries like these, and others that can't be anticipated, may ultimately lead to a reconciliation of quantum mechanics with Einstein's general theory of relativity—a holy union that physicists wistfully refer to as the Grand Unifying Theory, or the Theory of Everything.

Even before the powering up of the collider made international headlines (and even if you have no interest whatsoever in cosmology or particle physics or science of any stripe), you may have heard about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC has received considerable media attention thanks to a Berkeley alumnus by the name of Walter Wagner '72, who sued to stop the LHC on the grounds that the experiment could go awry, spawning killer strangelets (about which more later) or creating black holes which could suck the Earth into the cosmic abyss. As stated in the court affidavit filed by Wagner, "this would be quite deadly to everyone." Indeed.

Most physicists are quick to dismiss Wagner's concerns as highly implausible, if not flat-out impossible. CERN and the U.S. Department of Energy, co-defendants in the suit, have issued statements and reports aimed at allaying fears. Journalists, meanwhile, can't leave the story alone. No surprise there. For connoisseurs of irony, Wagner's end-time scenario is too good to resist. Think about it: For all the hand-wringing over supposed existential threats like climate change, drug-resistant viruses, and Tehran's nuclear ambitions, everything (every last thing!) could be rubbed out in an instant thanks to a bunch of geniuses who were trying to unscrew the inscrutable.

CERN may be home to the highest-energy particle accelerator on Earth, but the age of "big-machine physics" begins in Berkeley. It was here, in 1929, that Ernest O. Lawrence, then a newly hired professor, invented the cyclotron, a spiral particle collider that managed, through repeated electromagnetic nudges, to produce high-energy particles without the need for correspondingly high voltage. Granted, the original cyclotron wasn't very big: It fit in Lawrence's hand. But, as greater and greater energies were required to further parse the atomic nucleus, accelerators grew larger and larger, expanding to fill whole buildings and eventually sprawling across the countryside (see "From particles to dust"). Fermilab's Tevatron, for example, has a footprint of 4 miles' circumference, puny compared to the Superconducting Super Collider, which was once slated to span 25 square miles of Texas real estate—that is, until Congress balked at the price tag and pulled funding. Funding may yet define the practical limits of high-energy physics, but for now the direction of the discipline is clear: Bigger and bigger machines aimed at finding the smallest components of the universe.

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