CERN's Large Hadron Collider Gets the Google Maps Treatment

The team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the outskirts of Geneva has been dazzling science and infrastructure geeks for years now with amazing discoveries and a futuristic lab complex that looks like something out of Star Wars. Now, Google has brought its ubiquitous Street View cameras down into CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the highest-energy particle collider ever made and considered by some as "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind." Also included are images of the 7,000-ton ATLAS detector, which operates from a cavern 100 meters below a small Swiss village to probe for fundamental particles, including the Higgs Boson. Photos are also presented of ALICE, a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider ring that's designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma forms. Google Street View has had a busy year, documenting the damage of the Japanese tsunami, Arabic culture, Harry Potter's world and even the stunning Galapagos Islands. For one of its first subterranean forays—check out its tour through the Wieliczka Salt Mine, too. In this slide show, we've taken a selection of the most spectacular sections of CERN for your enjoyment.