📸 Photo

CHAPTER 2

Tangles, Links, and Webs

The research center for particle physics known as CERN straddles the French-Swiss border near the city of Geneva. Nestled under the limestone escarpments of the Jura mountains, ten minutes from the ski slopes, with Lac Leman below and Mont Blanc above, it offered unique research opportunities, and the area offered a very pleasant place to live.

Engineers and scientists arrived at CERN from all over the world to investigate the most fundamental properties of matter. Using enormous machines, they would accelerate tiny nuclear particles through a series of tubes that, though only a few inches wide, ran for several kilometers within a mammoth circular underground tunnel. Researchers would rev up the particles to extremely high energies, then allow them to collide. For an unimaginably brief instant, new particles might be made, then