¿La partícula de Dios?

El último número de la revista National Geograhic vale la pena comprarlo aunque sea por este artículo sobre un experimento que se llevará a cabo en los alpes suizo-franceses en los próximos meses y que nos puede dar grandes sorpresas. Enterrado a centenas de metros está el Large Hadron Collider, un inmenso anillo de 17 millas donde se busca conocer la fábrica, el tejido más intimo del universo. Copio:

"If you were to dig a hole 300 feet straight down from the center of the charming French village of Crozet, you'd pop into a setting that calls to mind the subterranean lair of one of those James Bond villains. A garishly lit tunnel ten feet in diameter curves away into the distance, interrupted every few miles by lofty chambers crammed with heavy steel structures, cables, pipes, wires, magnets, tubes, shafts, catwalks, and enigmatic gizmos.

This technological netherworld is one very big scientific instrument, specifically, a particle accelerator-an atomic peashooter more powerful than any ever built. It's called the Large Hadron Collider, and its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.

Starting sometime in the coming months, two beams of particles will race in opposite directions around the tunnel, which forms an underground ring 17 miles in circumference. The particles will be guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages. At four locations the beams will converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out..."

Esta super colisión de materia y energía puede provocar efectos en el tejido de espacio-tiempo. Quizá no es por nada que una parte del experimento dentro del gran anillo se llama Alice...