Scientists Set to Carry Out CERN Experiment

(09 Sept 08-RV) Final preparations are being put in place at Switzerland’s European Council for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, where tomorrow scientists will carry out a historic experiment. They are planning to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang. A key aim of the experiment is to find the "Higgs boson," particle believed to be the force that gave mass to matter and made the universe possible. Jesuit Fr John Cunningham is Professor of Physics at Loyola University in Chicago. He explained the experiment in laymans terms: