[media-credit name=’MARTIAL TREZZINI/Associated Press’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]The most energy since the Big Bang will be released in a tunnel outside Geneva today when a 17-mile long atom-smashing machine is turned on.

The device, known as the Large Hadron Collider, will be used to explore tiny particles in an effort to determine what makes up matter. Several University of Wisconsin scientists have been part of the program.

“It’s to answer some very esoteric questions, but it’s really answering questions that have been around the past two or three thousand years,” said Terry Millar, associate research dean for physical sciences.

Currently, physicists only have a basic understanding of matter and energy. Two theories have attempted to determine what matter is made of, and Millar said this device beneath the Swiss/French border could answer that question.

UW physics professor Wesley Smith, a member of the research team, said the study could eventually also determine what makes up dark matter and dark energy.

“We don’t understand where more than 90 percent of the energy and matter in the universe is,” Smith said. “We’re hoping we will discover some signs of the source of all of that unknown energy or matter.”

Results will not be immediate, and in the end, neither proposed theory could be true.

“Over the next year or two of data gathering, information will be coming out showing that these particles exist,” Millar said. “Or after enough time, it’ll show that these particles don’t exist, in which case it’s back to the drawing board.”

Researchers from 80 nations have worked on the project, which has been organized by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

The tunnel, at 17 miles long, is buried 100 meters underground. It will cause protons to travel at nearly the speed of light.

Since no reaction like this has ever been tested on Earth, some are fearful such an enormous amount of energy could trigger a micro black hole, destroying humanity as we know it.

Lawsuits have been filed in U.S. District Court and the European Court of Human Rights by skeptics to stop the research.

But Millar dismissed that notion, saying critics may as well be discussing “whether or not pigs can fly.”

“It’s more likely in the next 30 seconds that you and I are going to be annihilated by a meteorite hitting the Earth,” Millar said.

Even if it were to happen, UW physics Professor Sau Lan Wu told The Badger Herald from Geneva the micro black hole would pose no threat.

“Whether we actually produce this black hole is very questionable,” Wu said. “And if it’s produced it would decay immediately, so it’s not going to stay there to kill anybody.”

Wu is head of the CERN’s UW team. Smith said UW researchers built many of the devices that will be used to tabulate results and have been the most involved of all U.S. universities.

Millar also said there has been some talk of Wu becoming the third woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics when research is completed.

The collider has been under construction since 2003.