Minnesotans among those working on atom smasher

Avoiding hyperbole when talking about what's happening in a lab near Geneva, Switzerland, is not easy.

It's an $8 billion science experiment. Its mission is trying to explain the origins of our universe

"All the mysteries of life will be solved in this machine," laughed University of Minnesota physics professor Roger Rusack, who said the actual purpose of the experiment is more complicated. Details in a moment.

Rusack is one of thousands of scientists from around the world trying to recreate what happened immediately after the Big Bang, the celestial smashing of atoms that, scientists say, created matter. Matter makes up stars, planets, people ? everything.

The experiment at the CERN laboratory began Wednesday morning. In the coming weeks, scientists will send particles hurling through 17 miles of a tunnel called the "Large Hadron Collider," which is buried 300 feet underground at the Swiss-French border.

Inside the LHC, as it's known, particles will fly in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Eventually the scientists will engineer that primordial head-on collision which, they hope, will help answer greatest scientific mysteries.

"What we're doing is studying the physics which occurred right after the Big Bang, in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang," Rusack said.

He explained the scientists are trying to see, for the first time, something called the Higgs boson, which is a particle believed to give objects their mass and hasn't ever been captured.

"Seeing the Higgs, that would be a big deal," he said. "That would be a major step forward. It would be an amazing achievement of the past 40 years."

Rusack says the scientists also want to explain dark matter, which we can't see but makes up about 95 percent of the universe.

It will take years, maybe centuries, to wrap their scientific minds around the data they capture.

"There are probably no direct technical consequences of what we're going to discover at the LHC," Rusak said.

At least, after 14 years of getting ready, the grand experiment is under way.About 25 people from the University of Minnesota are working on the project.

And you might've heard some talk about the project creating a black hole that could swallow the earth. Rusack called that possibility "totally bogus."

He said the earth has been bombarded since the beginning of time with more energy than exists in this atom smashing machine. He and the thousands of other scientists working on this, insist the world is safe.

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