Credit: Mark Evans
Like some medieval cathedral, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has already outlasted some of its builders and will continue in daily use long after most are retired or dead.
And just like those vaulted temples of worship, the LHC commands silent awe from its visitors. As it should. The LHC is the most complicated and expensive scientific experiment ever, with the audacious goal of explaining the ultimate nature of matter.
Just to build the apparatus is costing upwards of a$5 billion (US$3.6 billion). Planning started 20 years ago, the first applied research began 15 years ago, and more than a thousand engineers, technicians and scientists have already been working on this project for at least a decade.
Visiting this cathedral to science, however, isn’t that simple. It’s hidden from most eyes, buried 80 to 100 metres deep as an oval tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva, enclosing an area big enough to squeeze in Bermuda, Monaco and four Vatican Cities.
There are occasional surface outcroppings – anonymous metal-sided sheds set well back from the roads. And there is a large jumble of nondescript off-white buildings that house the designers, builders and eventual users in a campus-like setting near the France-Switzerland border. But mostly there are cultivated fields, cud-chewing cows and placid villages, with the LHC’s tunnel passing below unseen and largely ignored..
Yet in mid-2007, if all goes according to plan, packets of high-energy protons will be accelerated in opposite directions around the 27 km tunnel, attaining velocities within a whisker of the speed of light, and then be deliberately smashed into each other at four separate locations.
Resembling the chapels in a cathedral, those four locations hold detection experiments. Fitting in with the religious analogy, two are multi-part detectors specifically designed to spot the ‘God Particle’: an elusive and theorised atomic fragment so called because physicists hope it will finally make clear how the universe works at the most basic level.
The God Particle’s real name is the Higgs boson, named after British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs who first proposed its existence. It is believed to be the last missing piece to the puzzle of the so-called Standard Model – the 20 fundamental forces and particles that, in various permutations and combinations, account for everything around us – light, magnetism, gravity and all forms of matter.
The Higgs is what supposedly gives mass to fundamental particles, such as quarks and leptons, which in turn constitute neutrons, protons and electrons, which in turn make up atoms and molecules and eventually this page, you and the entire universe. The hadron of the Large Hadron Collider is the classification for neutrons and protons, from the Greek ‘hadros’ for strong, because they are held together in the nucleus of an atom by the strong nuclear force.
Experiments at the collider are also intended to provide the ultimate test of Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2; to yield a long shot at identifying the mysterious dark matter that supposedly permeates the cosmos; to take a stab at recreating the quark-gluon goo or gas that existed for an instant at the Big Bang; and to roll the dice for a peek into extra dimensions of space-time.
Not to mention the real possibility of confirming supersymmetry. Also known as SUSY, supersymmetry is an arcane concept of paired elementary particles that lies at the heart of the theory that all the forces of nature are interconnected – the ‘theory of everything’ pursued by Albert Einstein for the latter third of his life.
“Simply to be a visitor here is tremendously exciting,” says Stuart Tovey, a pioneer in high-energy physics in Australia.
The 66-year-old Tovey is much more than an ordinary visitor at CERN, the campus-like setting close to the France-Switzerland border. Now formally called the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN is better known by the acronym for its former French name of Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire and operated collectively by 20 European countries.
Some know of CERN’s existence either because this is where the World Wide Web was born (so researchers could exchange data quickly) or because The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown fancifully invoked an anti-matter experiment that threatened world peace here in his earlier book, Angels and Demons.
Higgs 2nd, Laozi 1st?
The statement that the Higgs boson was thought up by Higgs is interesting. Are we forgetting that the fifth-century Chinese philosopher posited pretty much the very same thing in the poems of the Tao De Jing. The de of Taoist philosphy, the basic energy beyond -at that time, and ever since--until now, perhaps in Switzerland - the reach of man to describe, name (by any name other than simply de), see or understand. Laosi saw this fundamental reality (de) as the Source of all Nature/Cosmos. About as close to God as any of us free-thinkers are going to get. If de not God, then certainly it is still a holy thing that comes directly from the hand of God. He reasoned that in any case, this insight makes the whole of Nature sacred. A notion that some deep-ecology people believe would go far in helping us properly cherish and preserve our Earth. The Cosmos as our cathedral (much more impressive than Chartres) is fascinating. Anyway, it seems to me the Taoists have been on to something - for a very long time.
Respectfully,
Robert M. Stanley