Bill Bryson's Notes from a Large Hadron

Collider
From Eureka, our new monthly science
magazine: The bestselling author visits CERN
and meets the scientists who are hoping to
unlock the secrets of the Universe
Bill Bryson
In the event that it fell to you to identify the most exciting place on the planet, the likelihood is
small, I imagine, that you would pack a bag and travel at once to Switzerland. Still less, I dare
say, would you turn your back on Geneva and head out past its western suburbs and into the
pleasant but uneventful countryside beyond. There, in a broad valley shared with France,
stands a collection of buildings that look like the leftovers from a 1960s Festival of Bad Design.

This is it. You have found it. This is CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
Over the next few days the people who run the place will cautiously restart the immensely large
machine (almost 27 kilometres around) known as the Large Hadron Collider and begin
swooshing particles around it in a way that will, when it is fully humming, recreate conditions as
they were in the Universe one millionth of a millionth of a second after the beginning of the big
bang.

Click here to see a graphic of the Large Hadron Collider (pdf)

Imagine the moment before that moment, when there was no space, no time, no matter,
nothing. It is not easy to conceive such a nothingness, but that is what there was. Then, in a
moment of unimaginable majesty and abruptness, there came into being the spacious,
mysterious void in which we float, and all the matter therein and much else besides. Everything
there is — light, matter, the laws of physics — traces back to that moment of creation. Now, for
the first time in 13½ billion years, the circumstances of that event can be replicated, but with the
crucial difference that this time some of the smartest people on Earth can draw up chairs and
watch. It is this that may soon make CERN the most exciting place on Earth, or possibly
anywhere.

Particle physicists divine the secrets of the Universe in a startlingly straightforward way: by
flinging particles together with violence and seeing what flies off. The process has been likened
to firing two Swiss watches into each other and deducing how they work by examining their
debris. “We like to think it is a little more sophisticated than that,” James Gillies, a CERN
physicist who is now director of communications, tells me, smiling, as he shows me into a vast
hall called the Magnet Assembly and Test Facility.

Just over a year ago, as you may recall, CERN experienced a big bang of its own when the
newly unveiled LHC suffered an electrical arc in one of its 50,000 soldered joints. The result was
something called “a thermal runaway event” in the area known as Sector 3-4. This isn’t
something you want to have happen in your kitchen kettle, much less in the world’s biggest and
most expensive machine.
Off to one side in the magnet hall is a length of LHC pipe containing one of the damaged
magnets. Part of the cover has been removed to expose the interior and Gillies invites me to
have a look. The damage appears to be surprisingly mild considering that this has shut the
project down for a year and cost millions. There is no soot or scorching or anything like that. All
that betrays the costly havoc within is a small array of delicate metal prongs that should lie flat
and are instead curled backwards. They look as if they could be smoothed flat again with one’s
fingers and that all would then be fine.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Gillies judiciously agrees. A genial Englishman in his forties, Gillies has
a kindly knack for making even the most ill-informed comments sound judicious. “But obviously
we didn’t want anything like that to happen again. A big part of the past year has been spent
going over the whole system extremely carefully.”

The first thing that strikes you when you see the Large Hadron Collider is how remarkably
uncomplex it looks. It is essentially just a long, shiny pipe running through a large concrete
tunnel. It looks like a pipe that would run under any city street, carrying water or sewage, but
this is a deception. The interior of the pipe is a wondrous, sleek realm of cryogenics,
superconducting materials and much else of a technologically ambitious nature. To accelerate
particles satisfactorily, the medium through which they fly must be as airless as the surface of
the Moon and as cold as deep space. Try to maintain that over 27 kilometres of tubing —
actually 54, because there are two tubes, shooting particle beams around in opposing directions
— and you will begin to appreciate what is meant by the words “cutting edge”.

“Every bit of the technology is brand new and extremely precise,” Gillies tells me. “It’s nothing
like firing Swiss watches together.” The particles the LHC uses are protons or lead ions —
together known as hadrons — and when fully accelerated they will be moving so fast that they
will circle the 27-km-long track 11,245 times a second, at a speed 99.9999991 per cent the
speed of light. That is so fast that if a light beam and a CERN beam were sent simultaneously to
the star Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away, the CERN beam would arrive just two seconds
after the light beam. Keeping the particles shooting around the racetracks without banging into
the sides or shooting off into space is a fantastically delicate operation; getting them to collide
on command is even more so.

“The amount of precision required is pretty breathtaking,” Gillies tells me. “I worked it out
mathematically, out of cur-iosity, and I can tell you that getting two protons to collide is exactly
equivalent to firing two knitting needles from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean and having
them strike in the middle.”

“Wow,” I say, and he nods with satisfaction.

CERN is a huge and now venerable operation. (It launched in 1954.) Today it comprises 2,300
permanent staff and 10,000 scientists, who spend their days trying to answer the biggest
questions in the Universe by looking at the smallest things within it. There is a huge am-ount —
a really quite stunning amount — that we still don’t know about the Universe and how it is put
together. Consider the proton. A proton is a very small, fundamental part of an atom and it is
made from three even smaller particles known as quarks. But here’s the thing: the proton is a
hundred times more massive than the three quarks that make it. Where does all that extra mass
come from? We have no idea.

The most remarkable information gap of all surely is that we don’t know what most of the
Universe is made of. If you add up all the matter there is, it accounts for only about 4 per cent of
all that there must be. To explain things like how fast galaxies spin and the rate at which the
Universe is expanding, the Universe must be full of much more stuff. Scientists call this missing
stuff dark energy and dark matter, and it’s everywhere. It’s here with us right now, but we just
can’t see or measure it, in much the way that we can’t see or measure a thought. Thoughts
exist, clearly, but they have no physical presence. CERN’s challenge is to work out what these
cosmic thoughts are made of.

To do so, they build massive, complex detectors. Ten miles or so from the main CERN campus,
deep underground, stands the vast and heavy piece of equipment known as the Compact Muon
Solenoid. All but filling a cathedral-sized chamber, it is a gleaming, multicoloured, exquisitely
engineered, massive, awesome creation — surely the largest thing ever to be built with the word
“compact” in its title.

The CMS is the work of 2,000 scientists, among them Tejinder Virdee. Virdee grew up in Kenya
but came to England when he was 15. He is a professor at Imperial College London, though it
has to be said that the position is a little on the nominal side these days. He has been on leave
of absence for 16 years. Virdee has spent two decades planning and overseeing the building of
the CMS and he explains every bit of it with an endearing enthusiasm, as if he can’t quite
believe that something this marvellous really exists.

One of the things Virdee hopes to find with his ingenious solenoid is the famous, and famously
elusive, particle known as the Higgs boson. It is the particle that endows things with mass. “It
is,” Virdee tells me, “what allows us to exist. Without the Higgs boson we would all be puffs of
radiation.”

The Higgs boson is named for Peter Higgs, a British physicist who was one of several physicists
to posit its existence more than 40 years ago. It is a hypothetical particle, invented to plug a hole
in an equation, so there is no certainty that it exists at all. Even if real, it is a fairly notional thing.
Scientists won’t be able to fill up a jar with Higgs bosons and pass them around for examination.
Higgs bosons die as soon as they are born, so they reveal themselves as what they decay into.
If a researcher sees four muons (a particle similar to an electron) tracking across his screen in
the right way and if that can be repeated often enough to achieve a statistical condition known
as Five Sigma, then they know they have got the elusive Higgs boson.

Virdee and his colleagues also hope that they may find gravitons, the hypothetical particles that
act as the carrier of gravity, and the heavy particles that would substantiate the theory called
supersymmetry. This in turn would explain dark matter, or at least begin to. With luck they may
find particles and dimensions not yet imagined, or hints to explain why the vast amount of
antimatter that must have been created when the Universe began is nowhere to be found now.

Three other mighty detectors are arrayed around the LHC perimeter, all of them complex and
wonderful and calibrated to find various puffs of quantum liveliness. It is hard not to be struck by
the inverse relationship between the tininess of what the physicists are looking for and the costly
massiveness of the equipment needed to find it. I ask Virdee if it can possibly be worth investing
so much money and brainpower in a search for obscure and evanescent particles.

He smiles, but instantly says: “Yes. Undoubtedly. You know, a little over a century ago when the
electron was discovered nobody saw it as having any practical applications. It was just an
interesting addition to the sum of human knowledge. But that bit of knowledge was what made
the electronics industry possible. Imagine a world without electronics. It is impossible to know
where discoveries we make here might lead, but you can be certain that one day people will be
glad we made the effort.”

His sentiment is echoed later when I meet Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a distinguished physicist from
Hamburg who is now director-general. “To stay at the technological frontier, you have to be
constantly at the knowledge frontier,” he says. “If you stop doing basic research, you stop being
civilised. It is natural to be curious — and noble, too, I should say.”

Now all that remains is to get all this complex apparatus working smoothly, which, as last year’s
blowout demonstrated, is no simple ambition. “It has all grown pretty amazingly complex,” Steve
Myers, head of operations, tells me in the control room, a place that brings to mind the flight
control centre at a major airport, except that here every person sitting at every computer screen
has a PhD in physics or engineering.

Myers came to CERN from Northern Ireland 37 years ago. “Back then we had almost no
computer power,” he says. “If you needed to do a calculation to adjust a beam, say, you had to
run downhill a kilometre to the computer centre, do your calculation, sprint back up here, twiddle
some knobs and see if it worked. Then you would repeat all that till you got it right.”

These days there is a lot more power, but also a lot more stress. The particle beams that fly out
around the LHC ring represent a huge amount of concentrated energy. “It is equivalent to an
aircraft carrier moving at full speed, but with all that energy concentrated into a tiny point —
enough to punch a hole about a hundred metres through rock. If something goes wrong, we
have less than a minute to get rid of all that energy. It’s a pretty stressful job because when
things go wrong they have the potential to go wrong in a big way.”

I ask him how confident he is that the LHC will run smoothly this time. “Completely confident,”
he says without hesitation.

His expression is so uncharacteristically earnest that I am not sure for a moment if perhaps he
is pulling my leg. “Truly?” I say. He looks at me without a flicker of doubt. “Truly,” he says.