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#2: The LHC Begins Its Search for the "God Particle"

After many years and billions of dollars, the LHC had its fateful first test run.

By Robert Kunzig
Dec 22, 2008 6:00 AMNov 12, 2019 5:19 AM
god-particle.jpg
A worker stands in front of one of the LHC's enormous particle detectors. | Maximillien Brice/CERN

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The most astonishing thing about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the ring-shaped particle accelerator that revved up for the first time on September 10 in a tunnel near Geneva, is that it ever got built. Twenty-six nations pitched in more than $8 billion to fund the project. Then CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—enlisted the help of 5,000 scientists and engineers to construct a machine of unprecedented size, complexity, and ambition.

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