Project signals Europe's bid to dominate particle physics
GENEVA -- The Large Hadron Collider experiments soon to get underway in Switzerland and France represent an ambitious bid by Europe to achieve dominance in particle physics.
The 1,232 super-conducting magnets and more than 7,000 smaller magnets positioned along the 17-mile underground course of the world's newest and most powerful particle accelerator will help push protons to nearly the speed of light. The result could be breakthroughs in identifying some of the enigmatic, unidentified substances believed to make up 95 percent of the universe.
The cross-border complex, run by the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by the French acronym CERN, is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.
The collider, when it fires up for the first time later this year, will boast seven times the power of the venerable Tevatron accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. , America's biggest.
"The US is no longer center of the universe when it comes to particle physics research," said Jim Bensinger of Brandeis University, one of the researchers participating in the European project. "The center . . . has shifted to Europe."
America more or less surrendered its lead in 1993, when Congress scuttled construction of a Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. Scientists were aghast, but politicians -- angered by huge budget overruns -- called the project a boondoggle.
The cancellation of the super collider unnerved a generation of American particle physicists. Research into major cosmic mysteries -- how matter attains mass, for example, or the nature of black energy -- are deemed impossible without accelerators capable of propelling subatomic particles almost to light speed.
"Physicists have a very human need to be associated with research that produces results," said George Brandenburg, an experimental particle physicist at Harvard. "In the US, spending on science research is flat-budgeted."
Still, although the US has only "observer status" with the European organization, it has kicked in some $525 million toward the CERN research. That makes it a key player, even if Old Glory isn't hoisted outside the lab complex. Americans represent 800 of the 7,000 particle physicists at work at CERN -- the largest national contingent.
Meanwhile, Asia is waiting in the wings.
An international consortium in February outlined a bold vision for an International Linear Collider, a 20-mile, straight-line accelerator -- more powerful than CERN's -- considered likely to be built in Asia, if it is built .
COLIN NICKERSON 
