MY JOURNEY from the jungle-covered foothills of Mount Kenya to an international particle-physics laboratory in the foothills of the Alps has been a long and exciting one. This encompasses a 15 year voyage of discovery involving the compact muon solenoid (CMS) detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Scheduled to come online in 2007, this multi-TeV proton-proton collider and its vast detectors will arguably constitute the most complicated piece of apparatus that science has ever seen.
When CERN was established 50 years ago, particle-physics experiments were carried out by small teams and took a year or so from start to finish. Today, CMS and its sister experiment ATLAS ("a toroidal LHC apparatus") comprise thousands of scientists, many of whom have already devoted a substantial fraction of their working lives to them. These researchers are driven by what lies at the high-energy frontier in particular the mechanism by which particles attain mass.
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