Big Bang! Blown out of proportion

It all started with a bang that's what physicist and astronomer Georges Lemaître had postulated.

According to his theory, the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition some 15 billion years ago and continues to expand to this day, owing to some sort of an explosion thus was coined the nomenclature of the Big Bang Theory. But until today, this postulation could not be physically explained, at least not what had happened in the initial stages following such an explosion.Therefore, on September 10, 2008, the European Organisation of Nuclear Research (CERN), after fourteen years of study, attempted to create a mini-version of the “Big Bang” about 300 feet below the Swiss-French border by using its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle smasher, which is a 17-mile tube that has been designed to facilitate high energy collisions between protons. Scientists believe that these collisions will recreate exactly those same energy density conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang.

The collision is also expected to give way to the appearance of the 'Higgs boson' or 'God's particle' that made life possible in the universe. The launch on September 10th, although a success, did not run the LHC at full capacity yet. Protons will not begin colliding for a couple of weeks. The goal is to begin proton collisions at 5 trillion electron volts before the end of the year. The real hype about this project though stems from possible implications of this experiment. Scientists believe that there is a very narrow possibility that the experiment could create a black hole with the capability of ending the universe. However, officials from CERN say that such conditions are unlikely. Mixed reactions have always characterized any revolutionary experiment.

Whatever the results, the experiment is expected to generate huge amounts of information, that will create an unprecedented breakthrough in our understanding of the universe.