The Large Hadron Collider
As I usually do, I listened to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on my way in to work this morning, enjoying the chance to use the time to keep up with what’s going on in the world, and sometimes hear a good bust-up in a John Humphreys political interview. This morning, though, there was an air of excitement about the programme, because today was, apparently, a monumental day in the world of science. Today, said Today, was the day when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was to be activated for the first time. Now I don’t know a great deal about Large Hadron Colliders. I’m aware that they are going to shoot some sort of particles around a sort of tube at high speeds in the hope that they’ll smash into each other.
So, it’s a bit like scientific stock car racing, then. The scientists certainly seemed pretty geared up about it, and I wondered if they were placing bets on their favourite particles. When they switched it on there was a bit of a cheer and some applause. The BBC’s commentator for the event almost missed it whilst interviewing a scientist about it. After that, not much happened for a bit, and then they apparently did the old “switch it off and back on again” trick familiar to all computer users in order to go for the next stage. Stage two was similar to stage one, only with a bit more technical talk, and then everyone applauded again as what was described as a “flash” appeared on a computer monitor in the control room. This, we were told, was the activation now one eighth of the way to being sorted. This isn’t what we want from science, is it? We want explosions! We want terrifying nuclear weapons exploding in deserts! Gigantic Saturn 5 rockets launching astronauts to the Moon! I was at least hoping that moments after the LHC was switched on, a green-skinned alien with pointed ears would appear in the control room and announce that The Council Of Clever Aliens now deemed us “ready”. These days, though, science doesn’t seem to happen with explosions, or at least not the ones visible from miles around. Science now is happening in tiny physical realms. In 2000, we had The British Prime Minister and US President jointly announcing that the Human Genome Project was pretty much finished, but only in a sort of “rough draft” way. Then everyone sort of shuffled off and told us to wait for a few years, when the really good stuff would happen. If this had happened in a Hollywood movie, the announcement would have been made by clones of the two leaders, and their real versions would step out, grinning to the cameras that were beaming the breakthrough to a brave new world. The LHC has a similar problem, in that it has the potential to solve many of the universe’s greatest mysteries, but it isn’t going to do it today, tomorrow, or even next week. A couple of years, they’re saying, and we might have some excellent stuff to tell you. Science journals are doubtless going to be watching with excited, and expert, eyes. The rest of us are going to have to learn a lot about physics if we want to get along for the ride. I’m going to try, therefore, to boil down what the LHC does in layman’s terms. I’m no physicist, and last sat an exam in the subject at age 16, which was more than half my life ago. Here goes, anyway…
The LHC is a particle accelerator. We’ve heard of those, right? They do what they say they do. They accelerate particles. They shoot particles of one sort or another, so that they are going very, very fast indeed. They are also called “atom smashers”, because a popular purpose for accelerating the particles seems to be to get them to crash into each other in a controlled environment, and to see what happens when they do.
They do other things, but I’m not even going to try to get into every possible use here, because I don’t have time to do a degree or PhD this morning. Out of interest, though, it turns out that the older CRT type of television is a sort of particle accelerator, too. So, this LHC thing, then. It’s going to look at what happens to particles when they hit each other by sending them hurtling round in a huge circle (17 miles, or 27km, in circumference), and then watching them smash into one another, with all manner of exciting effects happening at a sub-atomic level. They do this by sending two bunches of particles around the LHC in opposite directions (there are two tubes), and then getting the two to crash at an intersection. When the crashes happen, various detectors at the intersection points will be watching very closely for whatever it is that they are designed to look for. Each of them is looking for slightly different things, but here’s where the excitement comes in. They might find evidence that time travel is possible. They might find out exactly what “dark matter” (the stuff that theoretically makes up the vast majority of the mass of the universe) is. They might, in fact, find out that today’s most accepted theories are completely wrong.
This, according to Professor Stephen Hawking, would be even more exciting, since it would mean that everyone has to go away and find new theories instead. Hawking has even bet US$100 (about £50) that they won’t find the elusive “Higgs Boson“, or “God” particle, which would prove The Standard Model to be at least a stab in the right direction.Either way, we’re not going to know very much for a while. But if they are going find a way to travel through time, presumably they would have come back to tell us about it by now?
