Free Republic

GENEVA (Reuters) - Europe's top particle physics research center has taken a major step in its plan to build the world's biggest "particle smasher" which it hopes will eventually unlock the secrets of the origins of the universe. On Wednesday it inaugurated a huge bottle-shaped vault which will house Atlas, an enormous detector of the micro-items of matter that make up life, the universe and everything. Atlas, standing as high as a four-story building and twice as long, will almost fill the cavern, cut into rock beneath meadowland straddling the Swiss-French border outside Geneva. The giant piece of machinery will...