Nor did he have much luck with his plan to build the world's most powerful accelerator for nuclear research.

ECONOMIST: Sir Mark Oliphant

You'll need at least a 500-MHz Pentium III system and one of the more powerful graphics accelerator boards to run these, however.

CNN: Coming Attraction: HDTV on your PC

Searches for dark matter are also being carried out at CERN using the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and other laboratories.

CNN: Space station detector gives first clues to 'dark matter'

The consensus among physicists is that particles began massless and got their mass subsequently from something known as the Higgs field the search for which was one reason for building the Large Hadron Collider, a huge and powerful particle accelerator located near Geneva.

ECONOMIST: Cosmology