The Guardian View on the Large Hadron Collider: Back to the Future - Editorial/ TheGuardian.com
"Cern’s pathbreaking accelerator remains a breathtaking piece of engineering and science, as well as an example of European cooperation at its best.
Later this month an engineer will throw a switch and one of Europe’s most successful cooperations will be back in business. The Large Hadron Collider has already identified a mysterious entity from the first trillionth of a second of creation called Higgs Boson and won two physicists a Nobel prize – and that was at half power. The big machine at Cern in Geneva has now been overhauled, enhanced and retuned. It will cautiously accelerate to full energy in the summer.
In engineering terms alone, the partnership of thousands of scientists and engineers has been breathtaking. To function, the accelerator’s superconductors must be kept at just a degree or so lower than intergalactic space: that makes the instrument the coldest place in the universe. The piping around which the beams of protons whizz must be maintained at a vacuum as tenuous as interplanetary space. The matter accelerated in the collider is designed to reach 99.9999991% the speed of light in a vacuum.
If you shone a torch at the nearest star and simultaneously fired a Cern particle, the first torchlight would arrive in four years and the accelerated proton less than two seconds later. In the course of such acceleration the propelled fragment of an atom will have acquired the relativistic mass of a mosquito: the whole beam at full tilt has the momentum of an express train at full speed. A physicist at Fermilab in Chicago has calculated that an apple fired at such velocity would, if it hit the moon, excavate a crater six miles in diameter.
The astonishments of Cern are easy enough to discuss in engineering terms. The science is harder. It invokes physical phenomena that can only have been distinguishable within the first trillionth of a second of time, at temperatures measured in millions of billions of degrees. Words such as unimaginable become standard adjectives in such a world.
The paradox is that mathematical physics has imagined it, and confirmed the accuracy of that imagination to within the first second of time. Physicists call their blueprint of creation “the standard model”. It predicted the Higgs Boson and it links the nuclear and electromagnetic forces, and the particles and waves from which planets, stars, galaxies and people are all composed..."
Richard
