2019-08-11_The_Week

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52 The last word


THE WEEK 10 August 2019

He looksabit 1968 –
beard, leather waistcoat,
jeans–and his job title is
downright hippie-
psychedelic. Paul Collier is
head of beams.Imeet him
in atunnel 300ft below
Switzerland, or maybe
France. Down here, it’s
hard to tell. We are inside
the biggest machine in the
world, the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC):a17-mile
ring beneath villages and
farmland on the Franco-
Swiss border.

Luckily, this machine is
not switched on. When it
is, there is radiation, and
something odd happens to
the surrounding air–none
of it good for your health.
I’m here now not only
because it’s safe to explore,
but also because the LHC
is having one of its periodic upgrades. This one is perhaps the
most important since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

When the machine is switched on, subatomic particles rush round
tubes inside the tunnel 11,245 timesasecond; these are the beams
of which Collier is the head. He tells me the particles reach a
speed that is within “walking distance” of the speed of light.
Ipress him on this. He recalculates. It turns out the figure is
6.2mph short of the speed of light–“so probably jogging
speed”–still not bad
considering light travels at
671 million miles per hour.

At certain points on their journey
these particles are tricked into
committing suicide by crashing
into particles going the other way round. The resulting splatters
and spirals may, one day, tell us what everything is made of and
how it came to be that way. Or not. Geneva-based Cern–the
European Organisation for Nuclear Research–ist he great hope
of every physicist. It runs the LHC, which is not only the biggest
but also the best instrument of its type in the world. If the truth is
to be found, surely it will be here.

Seven years ago, it seemed to be happening. Cern announced it
had discovered an elusive particle called the Higgs boson. Cernies
almost pass out with glee at the memory of this: “I queued for
12 hours to get into the room where the announcement was
made,” recalls Sarah Williams,a30-year-old physicist at
Cambridge University. It wasatriumph, but predictable. The
Higgs more or less had to exist because it is what gives mass to
almost everything in the universe–people, buildings, planets,
whatever. Williams compares the Higgs to the most famous
person inaroom; all the autograph-hunting particles cluster
around it. But what has not yet leapt out from all the data
spewed out of the LHC–and this is why some claim it to be

afailure–ist he holy grail
of contemporary science:
anew physics.

Here’s the problem with
the old physics in a
paragraph. We have
quantum theory for very
small stuff, relativity
for very big stuff and the
Standard Model, which is
the table of all the weird
particles we have
discovered. All seem to
be true, but relativity and
quantum theory contradict
each other and the model
doesn’t work. “You can’t
plug the Standard Model
into the universe, as it
would vanish,” explains
physicist Mark Williams,
based at Cern. On top of
that, physicists can only
study 4% of the universe.
The rest is made up of
dark matter and energy that we can’t see or yet detect.

In short, 500 years after Copernicus, 300 years after Newton and
100 years after Einstein, physics is back to square one. If there’s
one thing more astounding than our breathtaking knowledge, it’s
our stupendous ignorance. Astounding but, for the physicists at
Cern, also thrilling. “We have the exciting prospect of the next
generation of experiments,” says Williams, “both here and
elsewhere, which will make us even more sensitive to new
physics–discoveries beyond
our understanding.”

At first sight, Cern is probably
the least impressive temple of
truth ever built,arandom
assembly of nondescript and
generally shabby postwar architecture inside which long, beige
corridors seem to lead to nowhere in particular. In the canteen
it gets more exciting. It is seething with young people–mainly
school groups–and intense huddles of physicists and engineers.
In the garden, there’safat blue tube bearing the words
Acceleration of Science.

All the real grandeur of the mission is hidden below ground. Here
you are confronted with the central paradox of the place: in order
to track, observe and manipulate the smallest things in the world,
we have to build the biggest machine in the world.

The tunnel is so long it flexes with the phases of the Moon. This
could beaproblem for Paul Collier’s beams. “The moon deforms
the tunnel,” explains Glyn Kirby, the Cern engineer in charge of
magnets, “and so the LHC, like the sea, is moving. We correct for
this movement with thousands of small magnets that push the
beam back into position.” This scale can inspire wonder, but also
fear. When the LHC first went into action in 2008, some feared it
would createablack hole that would suck in the entire world or

Life, the universe and everything:

inside the world’s biggest machine

The Large Hadron Collider: “the great hope of every physicist”

Since 2008, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider has been providing the answers to some of our most fundamental questions.
Cananew upgrade help it unlock the holy grail of contemporary science? Bryan Appleyard getsarare guided tour

“When the Large Hadron Collider first went
into action, some feared it would cause a
disaster that would eliminate the universe”
Free download pdf