Exploring the Large Hadron Collider

Journey to the Border of Science: Exploring the Large Hadron Collider

Are you ready? Right here, on the border between France and Switzerland, lies the biggest science experiment ever built. It's an enormous tunnel, over 100 meters underground and 27 kilometers long, running beneath homes, businesses, and farms. Inside this tunnel, scientists have placed a long blue tube big enough to crawl through, containing two pipes kept colder and emptier than outer space. Through these pipes, particles smaller than atoms are fired in opposite directions, accelerating faster and faster until they almost reach the speed of light. When they smash together, subatomic debris flies off into a massive detector.

The Magnitude of the Experiment

This underground particle smasher, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), took thousands of people from over a hundred different countries, $5 billion, and over 30 years to plan and build. But why? Why invest so much time and money to smash particles together in an underground tunnel? And now, why are so many people advocating for building an even bigger one?

The Future Circular Collider: A New Frontier

The proposed "Future Circular Collider" in Geneva, Switzerland, is set to be over three times larger and twice as deep as the current LHC I'm heading to Switzerland to the particle smasher itself to understand what's really going on and embark on a journey that will forever change how I see myself and the world around me.

The Large Hadron Collider: A Technological Marvel

I'm in an elevator, descending to the giant particle smasher, scientifically known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located inside the world’s most famous physics lab, CERN. It's a privilege to visit here, as thousands of scientists from around the world gather to conduct cutting-edge research about how the universe works. Beyond a yellow door lies the Atlas detector, one of the places where particles actually collide. The Atlas detector is enormous. To grasp its scale, just compare it to a person—people appear tiny next to this colossal machine. Constructing it involved lowering parts through a shaft above and assembling them in place, akin to building a ship in a bottle.

Understanding the Collider

The LHC accelerates particles to speeds close to the speed of light around a 27 km track. The collisions occur at a very specific point, with the detector symmetrically built around it. While the detector itself is massive, the actual collider part is quite small, with the beam pipe being about the diameter of an orange. Thousands of magnets force the particles within this pipe into a space as narrow as a human hair. Imagine shooting grains of salt at each other from far away—that's how scientists achieve particle collisions. They fire 100 billion protons in bunches in each direction, and out of these, about 50 or 60 collisions occur per crossing. This process is repeated 30 million times per second, resulting in approximately 1 billion collisions per second inside this massive machine.

The Scale of the Invisible

The particles themselves are incredibly tiny. For perspective, if a single strand of hair were as wide as the Earth, a cell inside that hair would be like the distance from Paris to Rome, and a protein within that cell would be like six soccer fields across. An atom inside that protein would be like a school bus, and the nucleus of that atom would be like the width of a grain of rice. The protons within that nucleus are comparable to grains of salt. It's mind-boggling to think that these protons are being squeezed into a space the width of a hair inside the LHC.

The Quest for Knowledge

Scientists conduct these experiments to glimpse what might have happened close to the start of our universe, the Big Bang. The collisions release an enormous amount of energy, though still less than a hand clap's total energy. This energy can transform into physical mass, potentially creating mysterious or unknown particles. These special particles exist only for an instant before transforming back into everyday particles that hit sensors. Scientists then work backward from the sensors' data to deduce what happened during the collision and what mystery particles were present. It's akin to solving a crime scene, and it's extremely challenging but crucial.

The Higgs Boson: A Major Discovery

One significant reason for building the LHC was to detect the Higgs Boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model but never observed. The Higgs Boson would confirm the existence of an underlying field that gives other particles mass, helping us understand why everything exists. After years of data collection, scientists finally detected the Higgs Boson, proving a fundamental truth about our universe. This confirmation appeared as a bump on a chart, a testament to the incredible amount of work and precision involved in these experiments.

The Need for a Bigger Collider

While the discovery of the Higgs Boson was monumental, there is still much we don't know about the universe. Some scientists believe that building a much larger collider, like the Future Circular Collider, is necessary to answer the remaining big questions, such as the nature of dark matter. This new collider would be significantly larger and more powerful, potentially revealing new particles or phenomena. However, the project faces debate and scrutiny regarding its cost and feasibility.

The Broader Impact of Pure Science

Despite the uncertainties, the byproducts of pure science at CERN have already led to significant advancements, such as new cancer therapies, better medical imaging, more efficient electric cars, sensitive radiation detectors, and the World Wide Web. Investing in fundamental research is essential for future technological breakthroughs, even if we can't predict their immediate applications.

A Vision for the Future

Ultimately, what we choose to spend our time and resources on reflects our values as a species. Building enormous monuments dedicated to knowledge and understanding our universe shows that we are a species that strives to learn and improve. The effort we put in today can lead to a world we can't even imagine, and that is something to be proud of.

This script was fact-checked by a physicist at CERN, but for more detailed explanations, I'll link to a few of my favorite explainers by actual physicists on YouTube. If you enjoyed this content and want more optimistic science and tech journalism, subscribe to our show "Huge If True." It means a lot and helps us create more incredible research for you. Thank you, for visiting my blog!