Chris Barton: CERN and science’s great collision

A feature article by New Zealand Herald senior feature writer Chris Barton, who recently visited the site of the Large Hadron Collider on the Swiss-French border.

An excerpt: read in full here. And a column by Barton on CERN

Buried near Geneva lies the world’s most expensive technology. Scientists designed it to unlock secrets of the universe and uncover the mystery of antimatter – the priceless substance which threatens to annihilate the Vatican in the Tom Hanks movie Angels & Demons. Disaster struck the world’s most expensive technology, set up to test predictions of high-energy physics, during tests last year. In a special report, Chris Barton takes us inside the complex to discover why it failed – and whether the experiment will ever work.