Two years ago I wrote a column discussing the Large Hadron Collider and the media’s role in making people fear it. Because the news media like to keep things “fair” and “balanced,” they gave equal screen-time to the scientists from the LHC and also to the outliers who thought that smashing high energy particles together at near light speeds would cause the creation of a black hole that would envelop the world. I remember one news station asking if we should be afraid of such a contraption. I also remember some pundits asking “What’s the point of this machine?”
If you haven’t been under a rock, in a cave or deep in the Amazonian jungle for the past two weeks, I’m sure you noticed that the LHC did have a purpose, a purpose that it more than lived up to. The scientists at the European Council for Nuclear Reasrch, or CERN (the acronym comes from its French name), were looking for the missing piece of the most widely accepted theory in physics: the Standard Model.
In brief, the Standard Model describes how the universe works in terms of forces (weak, strong, gravitational and electromagnetic.) As it turns out, the world of the very small — where gravity is negligible — is described beautifully by the Standard Model. But there is a missing piece, namely: Why do these subatomic particles have masses experimentally that they don’t have theoretically?
So, Peter Higgs and other physicists came up with a solution in the 1970s: the Higgs Field and its manifestation, the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Field is an undetectable field that developed in the moments after the big bang. All particles interact with it to varying degrees, and these varying interactions are what gives particles mass. It’s like walking through honey. The drag that results from particles moving through the Higgs Field is their mass.
Every second that the Large Hadron Collider is on, 40 million collisions occur between subatomic particles at near-light speeds to mimic the Big Bang. Two detectors, ATLAS — A Toroidal LHC Apparatus — and CMS, were analyzing what came out of the collisions.
On the afternoon of America’s Independence Day, an auditorium of physicists gathered at CERN in Geneva to watch spokespeople from the two experiments, CMS — Compact Muon Solenoid — and ATLAS, present their results. I was watching from my dorm room at George Washington University, where I’m staying for the summer. It was three in the morning Eastern Standard Time, midnight at the University of Oregon.
When Rolf Heuer, the director of CERN stood up and said, “As a layman, I think we have it,” chills ran down my spine.
The UO had its own presence at CERN, in the form of a group working with ATLAS. Professor Jim Brau@@checked@@ was the head of the UO group at CERN, although he didn’t get to attend the meeting on July 4th when they announced the findings to the world of high-energy physics.
Also involved was Jacob Searcy, a graduate student @@checked@@working on his PhD in high energy particle physics. His particular field of interest is dark matter, but he got to work as a shift leader at ATLAS. I asked him what it was like to be working on an experiment that could have such a huge impact on the scientific world and if he ever had one of those lightning-bolt epiphanies where the universe opened up and shared all of its deep, wise secrets.
Turns out, working at CERN was just like any other job — almost.
“You’re reviewing the computer, you’re churning through all the data,” Searcy said. “It’s easy to get lost in the details and lose track of the big picture.”
But he and his international colleagues did have those conversations over coffee, even though there was a strict no-work-talk policy in the lunchroom.
There’s so much more that the LHC can do for physics. The Higgs Boson is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many more theories that had been postulated by physicists over the years.@@but what does this DO?@@ The LHC is helping to either confirm or disprove these theories: If they don’t see it in these particle collisions, then they take it off the board.
“We’ve been killing whole swaths of these theories,” Searcy said.
The next big thing in physics is dark matter and anti-matter, two mysteries that have plagued physics for years. The Large Hadron Collider isn’t even cranked up to its full potential yet – over the next few years the energy of the LHC will rise and rise, and more theories will be confirmed or disproved. Physicists are secretly hoping that the Higgs misbehaves or doesn’t act like it’s supposed to act because that will give them a hint that there’s more to discover.
“For now it is simply a better understanding of the nature of the physical universe,” Brau said.