CERN Generates the Next Big Bang

The biggest scientific experiment in human history is getting hyped like a Harry Potter book release. But instead of nine-year-olds lining up outside of the bookstore for hours, a generation of physicists watched the live Web cast of CERN’s Large Hadron Collier as it started up today at 3 a.m. EST. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, will try to recreate conditions similar to the moment after the Big Bang by slamming two hadrons, subatomic particles that include protons and neutrons, into each other at 99.99 percent of the speed of light. The collision, scientists hope, will answer questions as mystifying as the Ministry of Magic’s Department of Mysteries: Does the Standard Model of particle physics hold? Does the as-yet-undetected Higgs boson exist?

(According to the AFP, famous British physicist Stephen Hawking, has a $100 bet that the Higgs boson, aka “The God Particle,” won’t turn up.)

The event is so big, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, near Chicago held a “pajama party” to watch the start up this morning, reported The New York Times. Produced with the help from the scientists at CERN, enthusiastic YouTuber alpinekat produced a rap explaining the science of the Large Hadron Collider. On the other end of the spectrum are the doomsday criers. A small cadre of critics believe that future LHC experiments that collide particles after a trip around the 17-mile wide underground ring will create mini-black holes which can swallow the planet. These scientists tried to obtain an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights to prevent the start up, but the court rejected their application, reported the Telegraph.

And all of this excitement could have been in Texas. In October of 1993, the House of Representatives voted against continued spending on America’s own Superconducting Supercollider in Waxahachie, TX . The 54-mile oval would have become the world’s largest collider and help lead the world in high energy physics. But, as congress explained, the costs were getting out of hand, rising from estimates of $4.5 billion in 1982 to $11 billion in 1993. The project was scraped, leaving one-fifth of the collider complete and ending at least 7,000 jobs in technical and scientific areas. Marty Kaplan, writing for the Huffington Post, wrote about his love for the Large Hadron Collier, but his dismay with America’s “political timidity and poverty of imagination” to end construction of the Superconducting Supercollider. “[H]aving wasted 10 years of planning, two years of digging and $2 billion on a 54-mile proton racetrack beneath Waxahachie, Texas, that is now worthless for probing the secrets of the universe but a real contender for the title of world’s most expensive mushroom farm,” Kaplan wrote.

A project like the LHC can inspire the next generation of physical scientists and push our understanding of the universe forward. As CAP outlined in its “National Innovation Agenda” report: “Advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and increasing our understanding of ourselves and the world around us are worthy goals themselves. We want to understand the ultimate fate of the universe, the nature of matter, the origin of life, and how human consciousness emerges from 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses.”

Tags: physics

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