In case you’ve been living with a lost tribe in the Amazon for the past twenty years, you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider and the scientific organisation CERN.
Firstly, CERN are not a league of supervillains. They are an internationally assembled scientific organisation that seeks to find the answer to the most pressing question in human history: Why?
Okay, forget the words black hole and doomsday for a second. Here’s what CERN’s all about.
Throughout the Twenty First Century, and more so since Newton’s theory of gravity, our interest in the way the universe works has grown dramatically. We often asks questions for which no one has the answer. What is matter? How did we get here? Could we travel to other dimensions?
Back in the beginning, before particle physics was a field of study, around the first Great Comet sighting, a Sir Isaac Newton was struck on the head by a very famous fruit. He went on to publish the Principia: his theory of gravity, as well as his three famous equations for the laws of motion. It was from such humble beginnings that the universe began to take its present form, as we see it in modern science.
However, such a theory was in itself incomplete. Newton admittedly sighted that although he understood Gravity and it’s practical application in our universe, he had little understanding of what it was or why it was.
Humanity was unable to branch any further into the great question of How? until five very memorable characters came into our vocabulary by the means of an unforgettable genius: E=MC2.
The equation itself doesn’t need to be completely understood. All we need to know is that E stands for “energy”, and M stands for “mass”. Einstein’s revolutionary equation stated outright that Mass was a form of Energy. When you think about it, it makes sense.
Think about our sun, for example. Here’s a simple exothermic reactor that generated light and heat. It transforms mass into its energy form. This ball of revelation has “floated” above our heads for millennia, and it’s secret was only five characters away.
What Einstein’s equation also suggested was that energy could also be transformed into mass. This idea was used in the creation of the Big Bang Theory, which suggests that all matter was once squeezed so small that it could fit within an atom. Such a small anomaly exploded and released unimaginable energies that formed into mass.
The final theory, which the CERN organisation hopes to develop, is the Grand Unification Theory. The Grand Unification Theory attempts to explain why energy can become mass and why different atoms move at different speeds. I.e. light (the particle) moves at the speed of light, while mass, such as you and me, are affected by gravity. Essentially, it would become the theory that explained everything.
The idea is that in this world, there are three dimensions of space, known as height, width and depth. But, these dimensions are limited in allowing us to explain out own existence or how things work. It was suggested that matter could be divided into unseeable particles called atoms. Past the nuclear sciences, atomic particle theories have evolved into modern chemistry, but are still to limited in explaining how the universe works.
We then discovered that atoms were actually divisible into further sub-atomic particles, such as the commonly known Electron, Proton and Neutron. But, this wasn’t the end of the line. A final stage of division was seen as possible. Subatomic particles could be divided into even smaller parts, known as Elementary Fermions. They were categorised into Bosons, Leptons and Quarks.
Our boys in the labs thought they had it all worked out: each of the Fermions dealt with an element of the mass/energy problem. However, there was one fundamental illness in this theory. There was not yet a Fermion that explained why different particles travelled at different speeds; Gravity was still essentially a mystery.
Here’s where the Large Hadron Collider comes into the picture. The team at the LHC are in search of a final Fermion known to them as the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle that acts like a sort of “treacle”, filling in the universe with an invisible substance that reacts differently to different particles, depending on their properties. The Higgs Mechanism (as this ‘treacle’ is known) supposedly responds greatly to “heavy” mass, such as you and me, the earth, etc. and not so much to lighter particles, like light. Hence, we are “slowed down” by the Higgs mechanism and appear to have mass, while light, which passes through the mechanism easily appears weightless.
Now; what actually happens at the LHC. Put simply, it’s an atom-smashing factory. Similar to the nuclear tests of the early 20th century, we want to know what stuff is made of and smashing it into smaller pieces helps. Basically, in order to find the Higgs Boson, the team at the LHC wants to separate sub atomic particles to reveal the various Fermions and hopefully unmask either the Higgs Boson, or, just as fantastically, another answer to the great question of How?
Maybe, just maybe, beyond the numerically incalculable tiny possibility that the LHC may sustain a black hole, we might come to appreciate the dedication and genius of the boys over in Geneva and indeed, in research stations posted around the world.
