More power to the collider

The New Indian Express
First Published : 03 Apr 2010 11:00:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 03 Apr 2010 12:35:04 AM IST

The long wait is almost over. The God particle lurks in the wings and may soon hog centrestage. On Tuesday, the cheers from CERN, whose Large Hadron Collider is finally pumping the expected wattages, were heard across the world as dewy eyed physicists celebrated the start of a new chapter in the story of elementary particles. And this one may turn out to be the most exciting, given a small, unnoticed caveat. There is, it seems, a chance that the God particle may be the last thing anyone will ever find because then we will cease to be.

Still, that is no reason not to celebrate a signal achievement. When the LHC smashed subatomic particles together at near-light speeds, it created, on an infinitesimal scale, versions of what George Gamow in a memorable understatement called a “hot, big bang,” which scientists believe created the universe. When fully operative, LHC will accelerate particles to 99.99 per cent of the speed of light (186,200 miles a second). At that speed and those energies physicists will observe what the universe may have been like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. In other words, the LHC provides a ride on a ray to the remotest past, to a time when time nearly wasn’t. That would be irresistible to the meekest romantic, and in this at least, scientists are nothing if not romantics. Their search for meaning is very different from the mystic’s quest for oneness, but it is no less pure, no less essential.

Still, there are sceptics, in hordes. What’s the use of it, they ask. And the cost, they groan. It’s true that the LHC cost $10-15 billion, and it will cost more to keep going, but just for comparison the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost trillions of dollars. This is about the search for a theory of everything, from subatomic to super-galactic, and a few billions is a small price. But as they search for the Higgs Boson, among other things, scientists might reflect that every time they thought they had found the grail, new unknowns opened up, a virtual infinity of them, like ‘islands’ in a Mandelbrot set. Perhaps this is folded into the structure of the universe itself, as Uncertainty Principle suggests. But that is another story. Right now, let us cry ‘more power to your collider’ as CERN charges into the future (or the past) in the quest for understanding.