Narrator Byron Wagner

The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built.
A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is
to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the
immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first
trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing
protons at record energy levels never created by scientists before, and it will reach even
higher levels by 2013. Its superconducting magnets guide two beams of protons in opposite
directions around the track. After accelerating the beams to 99.9999991 percent of the speed
of light, it collides the protons head-on, annihilating them in a flash of energy sufficient.
in accordance with Einstein.s elegant statement of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2.to coalesce
into a shower of particles and phenomena that have not existed since the first moments of
creation. Within the LHC.s detectors, scientists hope to see empirical confirmation of key
theories in physics and cosmology.

In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated experiment in the history of
science, Amir D. Aczel takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an
international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multibillion-euro
investment will fulfill its spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men and
women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC.and with the same clarity and depth of
knowledge he demonstrated in the bestselling Fermat.s Last Theorem.Aczel enriches all of us
with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will need to appreciate the discoveries
that will almost certainly spring forth when the full power of this great machine is finally
unleashed.

Will the Higgs boson make its breathlessly awaited appearance, confirming at last the Standard
Model of particles and their interactions that is among the great theoretical achievements of
twentieth-century physics? Will the hidden dimensions posited by string theory be revealed?
Will we at last identify the nature of the dark matter that makes up more than 90 percent of
the cosmos? With Present at the Creation, written by one of today.s finest popular interpreters
of basic science, we can all follow the progress of an experiment that promises to greatly
satisfy the curiosity of anyone who ever concurred with Einstein when he said, .I want to know
God.s thoughts.the rest is details..

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