Byline: Robin Turner
FIRST he was accused of endangering the universe, now rugby-loving Welsh scientist Dr Lyn Evans may be responsible for making the internet obsolete.
Dr Lyn Evans, 63, from the South Wales town of Aberdare, is in charge of building the giant atom smashing machine at Cern (the European Centre for Nuclear Research) on the border with France and Switzerland.
From next Wednesday, the pounds 3.5bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which would not look out of place in a Bond villain's lair, will start smashing hadron particles together at virtual light speed.
The aim is to split atoms into their smallest state in a bid to get answers to some of the toughest questions in science.
These include whether there are other dimensions, what makes gravity work and why 96% of the universe is invisible.
In a law suit in Hawaii two American citizens say LHC project manager Dr Evans should stop work now, claiming his machine is so powerful it could create a blackhole that could suck in the world and then the universe.
But the former Aberdare Grammar School pupil has dismissed the claim.
Instead he says the benefits of the scheme are immense.
And one of the major spin-offs of the project he has managed for the past 14 years is "the grid", tipped as the "next generation" internet. The grid is the information sharing system thousands of scientists will tap into next Wednesday.
Researchers at Cern, where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet in 1989, realised the huge LHC experiment would put out so much data it might actually cause the world wide web to collapse.
So engineers under the management of Dr Evans built a lightning- fast replacement.
At speeds 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, the grid could send the entire Beatles back catalogue from Britain to Australia in less than two seconds.
The grid uses fibre-optic cables and super-fast computers at its core and is already linked to many universities and some hospitals which use it to send detailed body scan photographs and videos.
It could also provide the power to transmit holographs and allow online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players as well as high definition video-telephony.
Dr Evans, a Swansea University physics graduate, said of his 14-year work on the LHC: "I've been around a long time and seen big projects, but when I go into that tunnel I feel really overawed.
"Day to day I run a lab with 2,500 staff - which is huge.
"I also oversee the co-ordination between all the other organisations building components for the accelerator and engineers worldwide.
"My job involves quite a bit of travel.
"Recently, I met the President of China and thought to myself, 'Not bad for a bloke from Aberdare!'"
Of the awesome technical challenge of sending tiny beams of particles around a 17 mile circuit so they hit each other head on, he said: "The challenge is not a trivial one."
Giant super cooled magnets will squeeze the particle beam into the circulating tubes which are the circumference roughly of a 50p piece.
The lawsuit against Dr Evans and Cern was brought earlier this year in Hawaii by former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and botanist Luis Sancho.
The suit, filed on March 21 in the Federal District Court, in Honolulu, sought a temporary restraining order prohibiting Cern from proceeding with the accelerator until it can prove safety.
Wagner and Sancho claimed the giant accelerator could spit out something called a Strangelet which could convert our planet to a lump of dense, shrunken "strange matter".
Or, they claim, it could create a kind of black hole which would start sucking in matter, grow bigger and bigger and never stop.
Worryingly for Sancho and Wagner, the suit has been put off until after the experiment begins next week though the court has no jurisdiction in Switzerland and France where the LHC is based.
However, Dr Evans said the doomsday scenarios were wrong.
He said: "The Earth had been bombarded with invisible cosmic rays travelling at huge speeds for millions of years and particles within the cosmic rays are constantly colliding.
"If the LHC can produce microscopic blackholes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more.
"Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC at Cern will be harmful."
LHC facts
10,000 scientists and engineers from 80 countries have been involved.
The ultra-high energy collisions will recreate the conditions one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang (the beginning of the universe).
The particles will make 11,127 laps of the 17-mile LHC circuit in a second before smashing into each other.
Particle physicists hope the collisions will uncover the Higgs Boson, the so-called "God Particle" proposed by UK scientist Peter Higgs in 1964 as an explanation for why matter has mass and so can form planets, people and stars.
Under the prevailing theory (the standard model) particles should not have any mass... unless (in theory) they first passed through a field of mass-giving bosons. In 1992, the then science minister Lord Waldegrave staged a contest for the best explanation and the winning analogy was of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wandering through a cocktail party and gathering hangers-on.
Another discovery could be that of dimensions other than the familiar three of space and one of time.
It might answer why 4% of space is visible, 25% is dark matter which can be inferred from gravity, but the remaining 71% is unseen "dark energy".
CAPTION(S):
COUNTING ON IT: Lyn Evans at the control centre of CERN, in Geneva, where the particle accelerator launches on September 10. PICTURE: Reuters/Christian Hartmann; SPLITTING ATOMS: The ATLAS detector being built
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