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Scientists Fire Up Hadron Collider

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The Washington Post

Published: September 11, 2008

MEYRIN, Switzerland - It is the biggest machine ever built. Everyone says it looks like a movie set for a corny James Bond villain. They are correct. The machine is attended by brainiacs wearing hard hats and running around on catwalks. They are looking for the answer to the question: Where does everything in the universe come from?

Price tag: $8 billion plus.

The world's largest particle accelerator is buried deep in the earth beneath herds of placid dairy cows grazing on the Swiss-French border. The thing has been under construction for years, like the pyramids. Its centerpiece is a circular 17-mile tunnel that contains a pipe swaddled in supermagnets refrigerated to crazy-low temperatures, colder than deep space.

The idea is to set two beams of protons traveling in opposite directions around the tunnel, redlining at the speed of light, generating wicked energy that will mimic the cataclysmic conditions at the beginning of time, then smashing into each other in a furious re-creation of the Big Bang - this time recorded by giant digital cameras.

On Wednesday, they fired this sucker up.

It will be months before the proton beams reach full power and produce the kinds of exotic collisions that may herald an age of "new physics." If the machine works - this most ambitious, expensive, technologically advanced civilian scientific experiment in history - it would be a happening for humanity.

"I think we may have to rewrite our textbooks," said Fabiola Gianotti, a project leader for Atlas, one of the four huge detectors that will record and analyze the collisions. "There must be something more than we have seen. There is something missing from the puzzle."

From the fireballs, there might spring forth black holes and the elusive thing that gives matter its mass. Or not. There might be particles called "strangelets" and evidence of "dark matter" and signs of "supersymmetry" and maybe a little antimatter.

Oh, and they might find some extra dimensions. But this is the delicious part. They. Don't. Exactly. Know.

That accounts for the last-minute legal challenges by opponents who worry that the Large Hadron Collider - hadrons, by the way, are collections of quarks, which are the particles inside protons and neutrons, which form the nucleus of the atom - might spark a chain reaction of runaway events that could destroy the planet.

Their greatest concern is that the black holes, the stuff of a hundred "Star Trek" subplots, could grow and suck, grow and suck, which is what black holes do. A retired radiation safety expert in Hawaii sought a restraining order in a U.S. court but was denied. Another group filed its doomsday appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, which also declined to act.

To calm public anxiety, the proton smashers investigated safety concerns and said any black holes "would be entirely benign" and would decay almost instantly. They would be "mini black holes," just like the ones that occur (the theorists say) whenever a couple of cosmic rays collide in space. Nature has already conducted experiments just like this, the report concludes, "and the planet still exists."

These protons whizzing through the pipe and around the track? They travel in bunches. These bunches are inches long and half the width of a human hair. Each bunch contains 100 billion protons, give or take a few. Each beam carries about 3,000 bunches. They travel at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light. So they are able to complete 11,245 laps a second.

At four major intersections along the way, the parallel beams will cross one another and collide. The crash sites are the business end of the machine. That is where they put the detectors.

"Think of oranges," Evans said. "You collide two oranges together, you get a lot of pulp. We're not so interested in the pulp. What we want to do is see what happens when the pips - the seeds - hit each other."

The good head-on-smashup will erupt into a cloud of scattering particles, and the detectors (and their computers) will attempt to record the trajectories, energies, speeds, decays.

Astrophysicists have observed that visible matter accounts for only 4 percent of the universe. By looking at gravitational effects - for instance, how fast galaxies spin - they can guess that there is more stuff out there than they can see. But what is this "dark matter?" Could dark matter be composed of "supersymmetric" particles, which might pop up in the collisions at CERN? For this reason, some people have called the collider the "Hubble telescope of inner space."

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