Robert Colvile
IT LOOKS like any other university corridor: ducts running overhead, bulletin boards on the walls, a collage of outdated Dilbert cartoons on a door. And then you notice a bronze plaque on the wall, bearing the phrase: ”Where the Web was born”. This unremarkable office, occupied by a middle-aged man in a white cardigan, used to belong to Tim Berners-Lee – and it was here, in 1989, that he put together the design for what became the world wide web.
Visiting CERN, the research facility outside Geneva that is home to the Large Hadron Collider, is a remarkable experience, not least for the constant juxtaposition of the astonishing and the mundane. Given its estimated £6 billion ($A9 billion) cost, you expect either Bond-villain chic (scowling security guards, spotless lab coats, banks of flashing lights) or Silicon Valley casual (space hoppers, Segways, parkland).
Instead, the expensive stuff is buried safely underground, in the 27-kilometre tunnel around which beams of particles race at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. Aside from the line of pylons stretching to Geneva – from where they draw half as much power as the rest of the city combined – the low-key, low-budget campus feels more like a provincial technical college than the home of the world’s greatest minds. Indeed, when filming his Dan Brown adaptation Angels and Demons, director Ron Howard took one look at the control room and decided it would never do for Hollywood.
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Similarly, most coverage of the Large Hadron Collider has focused on the astonishing machinery and the mind-blowing ambition that has driven the facility’s creation. And, certainly, the facts are worth a little hyperbole. When, in November, the particle accelerator started smashing ions of lead together, the collisions were measured at 10 trillion degrees, mimicking conditions a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. At the current record speed, the particles travel the 27 kilometres 11,245 times every second. Atlas (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), the largest of the four detectors that monitor the collisions, weighs as much as 100 empty jumbo jets, is half the size of Notre Dame, and generates enough data every year to fill a 6.4-kilometre stack of CDs. ”If you turned Atlas outward,” says Dr Steven Goldfarb, one of the scientists who work on the device, ”it would be able to spot a grain of sand on Neptune.”
The reaction to CERN’s work, positive and negative, has been on an equally grandiose scale. Many in the media seemed to suggest that, at the moment the collider was switched on, all our questions about the universe would be answered. Conversely, when the collider had to be shut down shortly after launch, due to soldering faults that overloaded the magnets, critics mocked it as a white elephant. Then there was the lawsuit lodged in Hawaii, alleging the device would generate black holes that would destroy the planet.
Amid this publicity, however, little attention has been paid to the work CERN’s scientists are doing. As it happens, they are very happy about how things are going. This year, they have calibrated the machine by rerunning experiments carried out elsewhere, to check that their model of the universe is working.
Now, they are edging into unknown territory: when the lead ions collided, the resulting ”asymmetry”(an imbalance in the explosion of subatomic particles) suggested the formation of quark-gluon plasma, the ”primordial soup” of the universe at the time of the Big Bang. The experiments will continue next year, before a year-long overhaul to prepare the device for operating at 14 trillion volts, twice the current level, as the hunt goes on for the Higgs boson, aka ”the God particle”, and other strange dimensions, forces or symmetries.
So, to celebrate their success, the team at Atlas has come up with an unusual idea: releasing a charity album. The 3000 scientists decided to pool their musical skills to produce tracks from blues and rock to classical and folk. The result wasResonance, a surprisingly accomplished double album, the proceeds of which go to build an orphanage in Nepal. It was released earlier this month – ”13.7 billion years to the day after the Big Bang!” claimed the press release – and the band names are packed with scientific humour: Goldfarb’s group, the Canettes Blues Band, references both a local beer glass and another group from CERN, Les Horribles Cernettes (geddit?), whom he describes as ”the first group to do really good physics music”.
Yet while the Canettes’ song Atlas Boogie is probably the only single ever to refer to liquid argon and muon spectrometers, most of the acts play it straight. Among the exceptions are two standout tracks, a belting torch song from Cat Demetriades called Sweet Cernoid, and a charming number by the TLA (it means Three-Letter Acronym) called Points of Order. The lyrics should strike a chord with any office drone: ”When my wife gives birth, I’ll be in a meeting/ And when black holes destroy the Earth, I’ll be in a meeting.”
Genevieve Steele, a 26-year-old PhD student from Glasgow University, who plays Celtic harp on the album, says physics and music have two things in common: they involve taking something complex and laying it out clearly on the page, and they’re ”bloody hard work”.
There is something else that makes life at CERN special. The researchers on Atlas might come from 38 countries, but they speak one language – that of science.
Chris Thomas, who works as a technician at the site and produced the album, describes how in previous years a Jew who fled Germany in 1937 worked happily alongside a former member of the Waffen SS; more recently, Israelis and Palestinians and Russians and Georgians studied and partied alongside each other.
Atlas spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti – effectively its elected chief – says this open, global culture ”gives an example” to the world, with issues of age, gender and culture discarded as Nobel winners and esteemed professors work alongside PhD students.
”I talk to my team every day,” adds Goldfarb, ”and I don’t even know where they’re from; I don’t think about that. They say it takes a common enemy to bring different nations together, and we have one – we’re at war with ignorance.”
Looking at the glint in his eye, you have the feeling that it’s a war the brains trust at CERN are well on their way to winning.
Source: www.smh.com.au
