Johannesburg — MAYBE it's because I finally threw away my literary snobbery and read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, but I can't help being fascinated by one of the most expensive scientific apparatus ever built: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
With a budget of $9bn, the LHC is a large tunnel that straddles the border between France and Switzerland. It could answer our most esoteric scientific questions, such as how did the Big Bang actually happen, what is dark matter and what are black holes? It was built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern ) to test previously theoretical predictions about the behaviour of high-energy particles. It is a collaboration of more than 10 000 scientists from more than 100 countries.
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