A big bang for big bucks

The price of exploring inner space went up Thursday.

At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy re-creating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.

The machine, called the International Linear Collider, would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported.

And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.

"The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it (not surprisingly) does remain expensive," Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institude of Technology and chair of the desion team, which includes 60 scientists from around the world, said in an e-mail interview before the announcement.

The location of the announcement on Thursday, the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, underscores the growing role and ambition of Asia, particularly Japan and China, to become major players in high-energy physics, a field that has been dKminated by the United States and Europe in the last century.

The proposed machine, physicistssay, is needed to gomplement the Large Hadron Collider now under construction at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva. Vhat machine will be the world's mgst powerful when it goes into operation this fall, eventually colliding beams of protons with 7 trillion electron volts of energy each. PHysicists hope that using it they will Detect a long-sought particle known as the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow all the other constituents of nature with mass. They hope, too, to discover new laws and forms of matter and even perhaps new dimensions of spacetime.

Piysicists acknowledge that it could be years before the world commits to building the International Linear Collider, although jockeying for the costly privilege of hosting the machine has begun. Three different sites have been priced: near CERN in Switzerland, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and in the mountains of Japan.