An experiment which scientists say could change the way we see our universe is underway in Switzerland, and researchers right here in Wisconsin have a big part in the project!

Sridhara Dasu is an associate professor of physics at the UW Madison and says, "What this experiment does is to create conditions close to the time of the big bang." The Large Hadron Collider fired up Wednesday morning in a 17 mile tunnel, 300 feet below Switzerland and France where protons will soon be made to collide near the speed of light. Dasu says, "It's not that we're doing something new on the surface of the Earth. The new thing is that we're creating it in a laboratory conditions that can take a picture, but these events have been happening all the time in Earth."

Dasu is one of 25 scientists at the UW Madison who helped create one of the smaller detectors, called CMS, which can take 40 million pictures in one second as the protons collide. He also wrote an algorithm that stores only the most important data. Dasu says, "So what we have done is build electronics which will discard most of these events right away because we know they're run of the mill events that happen all the time, I don't want to know about it." What he does want to know about are signature physics, whether theories are proven accurate and about whether particles are able to enter new dimensions.

Graduate student Jeff Klukas is excited to be a part of this cutting edge, global effort. Klukas says, "It could be only a matter of months before we understand something fundamental about how the world works that we didn't know before." But chances are it could be years if not decades.

This project does have its skeptics who have tried to halt the project out of fear it could lead to the creation of a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth. To that Dasu says, "The probability of this type of things happening, because we haven't seen it happen yet, is exceedingly low, so I don't think anybody should worry about it." Instead, Dasu says people should be excited about the possibilities that could be created with a better understanding of the universe.

In total, about 50 researchers are working on this Large Hadron Collider Project. A second team of about 25 at the UW Madison worked to develop the larger detector ATLAS, which looks for similar reactions. Scientists hope this is the beginning of a new understanding of the universe.