An experiment which scientists say could change the way we see our universe is underway in Switzerland, and researchers right here in Wisconsin have a big part in the project!
Sridhara Dasu is an associate professor of physics at the UW Madison and says, “What this experiment does is to create conditions close to the time of the big bang.” The Large Hadron Collider fired up Wednesday morning in a 17 mile tunnel, 300 feet below Switzerland and France where protons will soon be made to collide near the speed of light. Dasu says, “It’s not that we’re doing something new on the surface of the Earth. The new thing is that we’re creating it in a laboratory conditions that can take a picture, but these events have been happening all the time in Earth.”