Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Scientists in the UK have completed the first step in the Atlas experiment.

The finished element is the first of the four barrels that will form the central part of the SemiConductor Tracker (SCT).

When complete, Atlas will be 25m high (as tall as a five-storey building), 46m long and will weigh about 7,000 tonnes.

The SCT will track the movement of particles as they pass through the thousands of silicon wafers with which the barrels are populated.

The Atlas is to be housed at the LHC which is set to fire up in 2007. This is all ultra cool because those involved think this device may be able to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson and thus further solidify the "Standard Model" of physics.

See the linked BBC article for more details.

(Yet with the experimental success of the Standard model there still may well be other sub atomic particles/entities/thingys making up the Standard model particles? Nature doesnt have 3 pairs of these leptons at this weight, three at another weight, three pairs of these hadrons at this weight, 3 "colors" for each, and so on, right? Its one of those experimentally successful theories that just doesnt have the underlying reality down yet (like Newtons gravity and Quantum Mechanics). Superstrings maybe? Over my head, sorry, just had to comment that the Standard model is great experimentally but there has to be a more prosaic explanation for the bulding blocks of all matter, right? And either way this LHC is mega cool.)    Device to probe limits of physics