After nearly two decades of preparation, dozens of University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists and engineers are eagerly anticipating Wednesday’s scheduled startup of the Large Hadron Collider — billed as the largest physics experiment in history.
This $10 billion endeavor is a collaboration of thousands of scientists and engineers from around the globe, and is expected to eventually revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
“We are taking another step in the exploration of the world around us,” UW-Madison physics professor Wesley Smith, who is directly involved with the project, wrote in an e-mail to The Capital Times. “Since people first walked on Earth, each generation has learned more about the world and passed this knowledge on to the next. Each gain in understanding has resulted in substantial dividends in technology, many completely unpredictable except that they have always followed these gains in understanding.”