Recreating the Big Bang??

One of the most profound discoveries of modern astronomy is that our universe is "expanding": Galaxies are moving apart from one another, and the farther apart they are, the faster they move away. This implies that if we run things in reverse, galaxies get closer and closer together, and at some point in history, all the matter in the presently observable universe must have been concentrated into a very tiny and very hot region (think of compressing a gas in a container, which gets hotter as you compress it).

Since expansion from a hot starting point reminds people of an explosion, this description of the universe has been labeled the "big bang" theory.

The time required to go from this very hot and compact initial state to our present state is what astronomers mean by the age of the universe; somewhere around 15 billion years. For most of this time, the density and temperature of the universe would have been low enough to be described by well understood laws of physics - gravity, electromagnetism, etc. But at some point very close to the big bang, the density and temperature would have been higher than anything we've had previous experience with, so the behavior of matter under these conditions is unknown.

Researchers in Geneva at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) have taken a step toward improving our understanding of this very early time in the universe, by smashing atoms together to achieve a state of matter 20 times denser than an atomic nucleus, simulating conditions that must have existed a few millionths of a second after the big bang.
More details about the experiments can be found in these sources:

Newspaper story on the experiments:
http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500166052-500211117-50098119
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CERN announcement:
http://www.cern.ch/Press/Releases00/01-QuarkGluonMatter.en.html
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