Street View has recently allowed viewers to take virtual 'tours' of Harry Potter's Diagon Alley and Dr Who's TARDIS, but now there's a real-life treat for those browsing Google's mapping service. The company is now hosting detailed images of CERN (or the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, including the Large Hadron Collider itself.
The LHC is a 27-kilometre long "ring of superconducting magnets", primarily designed to investigate the existence of the Higgs boson and other physics theories. The hugely complicated and expensive (it is estimated to have cost €7.5 billion) experiment met with many difficulties before and after commencing operation in 2008. Serious problems included a significant fault soon after its initial tests in September 2008 that caused a year-long shutdown, plus some commentators voicing minor concerns that it could trigger the apocalypse (thankfully disproved following robust safety tests).
However, the LHC has proven to be hugely successful experiment, and scientists have used it to discover an elementary particle they believe to be the Higgs boson.
Now you can get a glimpse at the LHC structure itself. You can view it below, or visit the Google Blog to find links to other CERN experiments such as the 7000-tonne ATLAS detector.
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