Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, November 29, 2009: The bronze Nataraja in its famous tandava pose gleams golden as it catches the first rays of the sun. Scientists, walking briskly to their labs through the chilly mist, cast quick glances at the statue, sitting above the tunnel where two proton beams are colliding at the rate of 40 million hits per second. This is where an explosion in a pipe on November 10 last year brought the world’s biggest scientific experiment ever to a halt.
But, the Nataraja, gifted to Cern or the European Centre for Nuclear Research five years ago by India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), is not the only Indian presence here. More than 100 Indian scientists have been working since the day the large hadron collider broke down last year. This happened just as 6,000 scientists were starting an experiment that hoped to find Higgs Boson — the so-called god particle — by creating conditions similar to that of the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.
“India’s biggest contribution has been its scientists,” says Nick Chohan, a British scientist who worked with Indians to fix magnets that direct the proton beams in the tunnel. “Without their work, this experiment would not take off again. They came here in groups and worked round the clock in shifts and we fixed the problem.”