Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

253 "The LHC is the most powerful microscope that's ever been built," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist here at CERN. "It will be able to explore the inner structure of matter on a scale that is 10 times smaller than anyone's been able to do before." Ellis said the LHC also serves as "the most powerful telescope ever built," even though it looks inward rather than outward. "We know that the way elementary particles interacted with each other controlled the very early universe," he explained. "So with the LHC we are able to, in some sense, re-create the conditions that existed in the universe when it was just a fraction of a second old – the sort of thing that the optical telescopes just can't see." What's the point? Past experiments in particle physics have yielded scores of prac- tical spin-offs, ranging from new medical therapies to high-tech indus- trial materials – and even the World Wide Web, which you're using to read this report. But the potential for spin-offs isn't why more than 10,000 researchers around the world are looking forward so anxiously to the LHC. "People ever since the ancient Greeks – and probably a long time before that – have wanted to understand how matter is made up, how it behaves, where the universe comes from," said Ellis, surrounded in his office by stacks of research papers. "And so we are responding to that continuing human urge." The quest is not without controversy: Scientists say there's a chance that the LHC could create microscopic black holes, a phenome- non never before observed on Earth. They hasten to add that the tiny singularities will instantly pop out of existence, but that hasn't stopped critics from trying to block the collider's startup. Two of the critics have filed suit in federal court in Hawaii, seeking the suspension of LHC operations until more studies are done. Fact file: LHC by the numbers: • Cost: $6 billion to $10 billion; • Years in the making: 14;