Countdown Begins for World's Biggest Physics Experiment

GENEVA - In a 17-mile circular tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border, engineers are chilling 1,600 superconducting magnets to near absolute zero for the September 10 startup of the Large Hadron Collider — the biggest, most expensive science experiment ever built.

The $5 billion collider at CERN will smash protons together at energies never before achieved, recreating conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Physicists hope the debris will reveal the Higgs boson — the so-called "God particle" that explains why matter has mass — and perhaps evidence of extra dimensions.

More than 9,000 scientists from 60 countries, including hundreds from American universities, have spent two decades on the project. The data will flow through a worldwide computing grid built to handle 15 million gigabytes a year.

The startup has also spawned a fringe of doomsday fears — that the collider could create a black hole that swallows the Earth. CERN commissioned safety reviews concluding the fears are baseless; cosmic rays produce far more energetic collisions in the atmosphere every day.

"We are asking nature questions it has never been asked," a CERN physicist said. "The one guarantee is that we will be surprised."

First collisions at full energy are expected by late October. Rival theorists have already placed informal bets on what the machine will find.

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Associated Press writers contributed to this report.

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