briefing for Sunday Herald, 28 March 2010
On Tuesday, some will warn you, the world is at risk of being swallowed up by a black hole. Not metaphorically, but literally, as one of the legendary matter-gobbling vortexes is created when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on.
CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has announced that the huge circular particle accelerator in Geneva is to be fully powered up on 30 March. It has been mostly out of commission since a helium leak caused by an overheating electrical connection forced it to close after just nine days of operation in September 2008.
But on Tuesday physicists are hoping to do what they’ve been wanting to do for decades: engineer a head-on collision between two tiny particles travelling at ludicrously high speeds. The process, though, is a bit hit and miss.
“Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself,” said CERN’s director, Steve Myers. “It’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”
The last time it was tried by a smaller collider at CERN in 1989 it took three days to get particles to crash into each other. The expectation is that the smashes will produce particles that are new to physics, and help scientists understand how matter was created.
If all goes to plan this time, the experiment could run for two years, with a short break at the end of 2010. Data from the collisions will be distributed to computers around the world for analysis.
The prime candidate for discovery is the Higgs boson, a particle which theory suggests should exist but has never been detected. Known popularly as the God particle, it might enable us to learn a little more about the creation of the universe, and hence the birth of life.
Higgs boson: the God particle
The name comes from Peter Higgs, an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Edinburgh. Along with others in the 1960s, he postulated the existence of a type of microscopic particle at the root of matter known as a boson.
He is reportedly annoyed that it has since been nicknamed the God particle, because it might offend faith groups and overstate its importance. Some say it should really be called the “goddamn particle” because it is so difficult to find.
No-one has proved the existence of the Higgs bosun, but many physicists believe that it exists. Modelling has convinced them that the particle is necessary to explain inconsistencies in the theories that seek to explain the origins of mass in the universe.
The scientists who are looking for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider explain it thus. “In nature there are two types of particles: left-handed and right-handed,” they say.
Left-landed particles have weak electrical charges, which they lose when they become right-handed. But it is a mystery where the charge disappears to.
To help explain the mystery, scientists suggest that there is an as yet undiscovered ‘ether’ permeating the universe, made up of Higgs boson particles.
Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will find them, or maybe it will find something completely different. Either way, it will excite the hell out of physicists, and perhaps give others pause for existential thought.
Whether in the process it will bring us any closer to God, or turn us further from religion, can only be guessed at. Experience suggests that if the God particle is found, it will create at least as many mysteries as it solves.
The Large Hadron Collider: in practice
The Large Hadron Collider is like a gigantic doughnut, running 27 kilometres in a circular tunnel 100 metres underground. Based at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, it is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
When in operation, protons will be beamed around the doughnut almost at the speed of light, capable of completing more than 11,000 laps a second. The aim is to get them to crash into protons travelling just as fast in the opposite direction.
The hope is that the resulting high speed collisions will create new particles that will help us understand the origins of matter. The collisions are thought to resemble the tiniest split second after the big bang, which scientists theorise started the universe, and led to galaxies and life on earth.
They are also hoping for a greater understanding of dark matter, black holes and antimatter, with the ultimate ambition of discovering for the first time what mass is, and what everything is actually made from.
For physicists, the Holy Grail is to detect the Higgs boson, aka the God particle. The point out that the Large Hadron Collider, which was first conceived in 1979, is the latest in a long line of particle accelerators, from each of which something has been learnt.
Black holes: not the end of the world
A black hole is a region of space from which scientists say nothing can escape, not even light. It is believed to be caused by the bending of the space time continuum by a very heavy mass.
Black holes are thought to be surrounded by an undetectable surface, known as the event horizon, which marks the point of no return for anything absorbed by the black hole. In the population imagination, and in common metaphor, a black hole is something into which a great deal disappears without any obvious outcome.
If has often been suggested that the Large Hadron Collider could create a black hole which would suck in the whole world, ending life as we know it. Law suits have been brought, in an attempt to close the collider down, and save the world.
The suggestion is, however, almost certainly nonsense. According to CERN scientists, the risk is as close to zero as it’s possible to be. If black holes are created by the collider, they would be microscopic and would disappear in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
But lawyers point out that the scientists used to say that creating a black hole was impossible, but then changed their tune. What if they are wrong again? That’s the scintilla of uncertainty that the world now lives with.
Higgs boson: in fiction
“So, if we created a negative Higgs field,” says one of the characters in the 2002 film version of Solaris, “and bombarded them with a stream of Higgs anti-bosons, they might disintegrate.”
It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does the movie. Staring George Clooney, and following an iconic 1972 Soviet film of the same name by Andrei Tarkovsky, it has dead people apparently coming back to life.
The Higgs boson has also featured the the science fantasy TV series Lexx, in John Ringo’s book, Into the Looking Glass, and in Robert Sawyer’s novel, Flashforward. It is often imagined as a horrendously dangerous particle, capable of causing enormous explosions, enabling people to reach parallel universes, or to travel in time.
Bizarrely, one track on Trance-Fusion, an album of guitar solos by the American rock musician, Frank Zappa, released after his death in 1993, is called “Finding Higgs’ Boson.” And in Terry Pratchet’s novel Nation, there is a character called Bos’n Higgs.
Physics theories: wormholes, tachyons and dark matter
So much of the lingo of theoretical physics has been borrowed by sci-fi films and popular TV series like Star Trek, that is sometimes difficult to be sure where fantasy begins and reality ends.
Physicists have come up with many theories, which might or might not be correct. Take for example the wormhole, easiest understood as a tunnel that connects distant parts of space or time.
In fiction it is a frequently used device to travel huge distances to far galaxies, or to different times. But in reality it is no more than a theoretical concept, for which there is no proof and which may only exist for a tiny fraction of a second.
Tachyons have been envisaged as tiny subatomic particles that can move faster than the speed of light. But despite much searching, proof of their existence has proved elusive.
Then there’s dark matter, mirror matter and, of course, antimatter. The idea of dark matter has been invented to explain inconsistencies in the mass of the universe, but it cannot be proved.
Mirror matter, also know as Alice matter, is another hypothetical concept, based on the idea that the particles we can see might all have invisible reflections.
Antimatter, however, does exist, and has been imagined, most recently in Dan Brown’s best-seller, Angels and Demons, as an extraordinarily destructive bomb.
But according to Rolf Landua from CERN, that’s not a real risk. CERN has made less than 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter in 30 years. "Even if that exploded on your fingertip it would be no more dangerous than lighting a match,” he told New Scientist.
CERN: European Organisation for Nuclear Research
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. Built in 1954, it is situated in a suburb of Geneva in Switzerland, close to the border with France.
With an annual budget of £600 million, CERN involves more than 10,000 scientists from about 80 countries. It is funded by the member states of the European Union.
It is famed as the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and was where the internet’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It houses some of the world’s most powerful computers.
Nowadays, though, CERN is more famous as the home of the Large Hadron Collider, which hopes to make major discoveries about the fundamental nature of matter.
Brian Cox: the rock star physicist
Not many people make the transition from rock star to celebrity physicist, but Brian Cox has managed it. From playing keyboards for D:Ream, whose hit ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ was New Labour’s theme tune in 1997, he is now one of Britain’s most famous scientists.
Cox presents the current BBC Two series, The Wonders of the Solar System, which has him visiting some of the world’s most extreme and dramatic places. He has also presented many other TV and radio programmes, and was the science adviser for Danny Boyle’s disturbing 2007 sci-fi film, Sunshine.
Originally from Oldham, Cox is a professor of particle physics with the University of Manchester. Between media appearances, he works at the Large Hadron Collider run by the CERN in Geneva.
Often labelled as the “rock star physicist”, Cox is an unapologetic enthusiast for CERN’s pioneering research. And he is dismissive of its alleged risks. "Anyone who thinks the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world is a twat,” he says.
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