III In Which We Learn About Particle Accelerators, and the Playing of “Battleships”
DEEP BENEATH A MOUNTAIN in the heart of Europe, nothing was happening.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Lots of things were happening, some of them quite spectacular, but because they were happening at an infinitesimally small level, it was quite hard for most people to get too excited about them.
The Large Hadron Collider was, as its name suggested, very big. It was, in fact, 17 miles long, and stretched inside a ring-shaped tunnel burrowed through rock, near Geneva, in Switzerland. The LHC was a particle accelerator, the largest ever constructed: a device for smashing protons together in a vacuum, consisting of 1,600 electromagnets chilled to -271 degrees Celcius (or, to you and me, “Crumbs, that’s really cold! Anybody got a sweater I can borrow?”), producing a powerful electromagnetic field. Basically, two beams of hydrogen ions, atoms that have been stripped of their electrons, would whiz around the ring in opposite directions at about 186,000 miles per second, or close to the speed of light, and then collide. When they met, each beam would have the energy of a big car traveling at 1,000 miles per hour.
You don’t want to be in a car traveling at 1,000 miles per hour that crashes into another car traveling at the same speed. That would not be good.
When the beams collided, enormous amounts of energy would be released from all of the protons they contained, and that was where things got really interesting. The reason scientists had built the LHC was in order to study the aftermath of that collision, which would produce very small particles: smaller than atoms, and atoms are already so small that it would take ten million of them laid end to end to cover the period at the end of this sentence. Ultimately, they hoped to discover the Higgs boson, sometimes called the “God particle,” the most basic component of everything in the material world.
Take our two cars traveling at 1,000 miles per hour before pounding into each other. After the crash, there isn’t likely to be much of the cars left. In fact, there will probably be only very small pieces of car (and possibly very small pieces of anyone who was unfortunate enough to be inside the cars at the time) scattered all over the place. What the scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, hoped was that the colliding beams would leave behind lots of little patches of energy resembling those that existed seconds after the Big Bang, when the dot of which we spoke at the start exploded, and among them might be the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson would stick out because it would actually be bigger than the two colliding protons that created it, but it wouldn’t hang about for very long, as it would vanish almost instantly, so the scientists would have to be quick to spot it. It would be as though our two colliding cars had come together and formed a truck, which then immediately collapsed.
In other words, the scientists hoped to understand just how the universe came into being, which is a big question that is a lot easier to ask than to answer. You see, scientists-even the very clever ones-understand only about 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe, which accounts for the stuff we can see around us: mountains, lakes, bears, artichokes, that kind of thing. [3] That leaves them scratching their heads over the remaining 96 percent, which is a lot of scratching. To save time, and prevent unnecessary head injuries, the scientists decided that about 23 percent of what remained should be called “dark matter.” Although they couldn’t see it, they knew that it existed because it bent starlight.
But if dark matter was interesting to them, whatever accounted for the remaining 73 percent of everything in the universe was more interesting still. It was known as “dark energy,” and it was invisible, entirely hidden. Nobody knew where it came from, but they had a pretty good idea of what it was doing. It was driving galaxies farther and farther apart, causing the universe to expand. This would lead to two things. The first thing was that human beings, if they didn’t start inventing fast ways to move somewhere else, would eventually find themselves entirely alone, as all the neighboring galaxies would have disappeared beyond the edge of the visible universe. After that, the universe would start to cool, and everything in it would freeze to death. Thankfully, that’s likely to happen hundreds of billions of years in the future, so there’s no need to buy a thick coat just yet, but it’s worth remembering the next time you feel the need to complain about the cold.
The LHC would probably be able to help scientists to better understand all of this, as well as provide evidence of other really fascinating stuff like extra dimensions, which as everyone knows are filled with monsters and aliens and big spaceships with laser cannons and…
Well, you get the picture.
At this point, it’s a good idea to mention the Might-Cause-the-Destruction-of-the-Earth-and-the-End-of-Life-As-We-Know-It issue. It’s a minor thing, but you can’t be too careful.
Basically, while the LHC was being built, and lots of men in white coats were chatting about dark matter and high-speed collisions, someone suggested the collider might create a black hole that would swallow the Earth. Or, instead, it could cause particles of matter so strange that they’re called “strangelets” to appear and turn the Earth into a lump of dead gray stuff. It’s safe to say that this chap wasn’t invited to the scientists’ Christmas party.
Now you or I, if told we were about to do something that might, just might, bring about the end of the world, would probably pause for a moment and wonder if it was a good idea after all. Scientists, though, are not like you or me. Instead, the scientists pointed out that there was only a very, very small chance that the collider might bring about the end of all life on Earth. Hardly worth bothering about at all, really, they said. Not to worry. Take a look at this big spinning thing. Isn’t it pretty? [4]
All of which brings us back to the important things happening in the Large Hadron Collider. The experiments were being monitored by a machine called VELO. VELO detected all of the particles given off when the beams crashed. It could tell their position to within one two-hundredth of a millimeter, or one-tenth of the thickness of a human hair. It was all very exciting, although not exciting enough for two of the men who were responsible for watching the screens monitoring what was happening, so they were doing what men often do in such situations.
They were playing “Battleships.”
“B four,” said Victor, who was German and blessed with lots of hair that he wore in a ponytail, with some left over for his chin and upper lip.
“Miss,” said Ed, who was British and blessed with hardly any hair at all, and certainly none that could be spared for his face. Nevertheless, Ed quite liked Victor, even if he felt Victor had been given some of the hair that should, by rights, have come his way.
Victor’s face creased in concentration. Somewhere in the not very vast vastness of Ed’s board lay a submarine, a destroyer, and an aircraft carrier, yet, for the life of him, Victor couldn’t seem to hit them. He wondered if Ed was lying about all those misses, then decided that Ed wasn’t the kind of person who lied about much at all. Ed wasn’t terribly imaginative and, in Victor’s experience, it was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that. Victor had a little more imagination than Ed, and therefore lied more. Not much, but certainly a bit.
[3] And even all that stuff added together still amounts to much less than 1 percent of not very much at all, since more than 99 percent of the volume of ordinary matter is empty space. If we could get rid of all the empty space in the atoms of our bodies, the whole of humanity could be squeezed into a matchbox, with room left over for most of the animal kingdom too. Mind you, there would be nobody left to look after the matchbox.
[4] Anyway, the scientists figured, if the end of the world did happen, there wouldn’t be anybody left to blame them. There would probably be just enough time for someone to say, “Hey, you said it wouldn’t cause the end of-” before there was a bit of a bang, and then silence. Scientists, while very intelligent, don’t always think things through. Take, for example, the first caveman who found a nice rock, tied it to a stick with a piece of vine, and thought, “Hmm, I’ve just invented a Thing for Banging Other Things into Things With. I feel certain that nobody will use this to hit someone over the head with instead.” Which someone promptly did. In fact, they probably hit him with it so that they could steal it. This is how we end up with nuclear weapons, and scientists claiming that they’d only set out to invent something that steamed radishes.