Steve Arnott looks at the science behind the headlines of the Large Hadron Collider, and argues that the big bucks behind such ‘big science’ is, ultimately, money well spent.
The bland and boring politicians of the ‘mainstream’ have by and large failed to spark a damp match in the current general election, let alone set our imaginations on fire, but, after an inauspicious start, the European physics community’s Big Beast, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, has certainly enjoyed its own big bang moment.
On March 30th this year, after a year and a half of teething problems, faults and dry runs, the world’s biggest and most sophisticated particle smashing machine reached the levels of performance required to match leading physicists’ expectations. Those expectations are not modest. They are that the LHC can, in time, provide hard experimental evidence for some of the most intriguing and mathematically consistent theories in cosmology. These include theories in big bang research, and unified field ‘theories of everything’ that attempt to unify quantum theory (which refers to very small things, like protons and photons) and general relativity (which refers to very large things, like snooker balls, you and me, suns, planets and galaxies).
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The successful collision between two high energy beams of protons, accelerated to within a small fraction of the speed of light, was the highest energy collision produced by scientists on the planet thus far. At 7 trillion electron volts the March 30th beam eclipsed the previous energy levels achieved by a factor of nearly four, but is still only half of the energy level the system is designed to eventually operate at. |
This level of energy is the equivalent of imparting to a single electron the kinetic energy of a flying insect. This may not sound like much – until you scale it up. It would be the equivalent of giving a pebble sufficient kinetic energy to knock a planet out of orbit. Here mankind is finally beginning to recreate the conditions that appertained in the earliest milliseconds of the big bang in which our universe came into being. In breaking down the fundamental building blocks of matter itself at these energies, scientists hope to accumulate enough experimental evidence to shed new light on some of the most intractable questions of modern physics and confirm or falsify many of the leading theories of modern cosmology. These questions include:
- Is the Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses via electroweak symmetry breaking indeed realised in nature?[16] It is anticipated that the collider will either demonstrate or rule out the existence of the elusive Higgs boson(s), completing (or refuting) the Standard Model.[17][18][19]
- Is supersymmetry, an extension of the Standard Model and Poincaré symmetry, realised in nature, implying that all known particles havesupersymmetric partners?[20][21][22]
- Are there extra dimensions,[23] as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we detect them?[24]
- What is the nature of the Dark Matter which appears to account for 23% of the mass of the Universe?
(Source Wikipedia)
That sounds like an awful lot of money. From a socialist point of view is it worth it? My argument would be absolutely, yes it is.
Firstly, although £5.6 billion is a large figure we have to understand that that is over the lifetime of the project, which will be measured in decades, and that the funding comes from a wide number of European countries. In essence it amounts to a small but significant fraction of the science research budgets of the major EU nations – annually it would be the equivalent of an independent Scotland spending about £30 or 40 million per annum (the cost of a medium sized hospital).
Secondly, what does humanity get back? Admittedly this is pure research with no immediate practical application, but firstly it would be very short sighted only to pursue those avenues of research that had an immediate obvious practical application. Many, many useful things we have today were built on the basis of original research and scientific theories which did not necessarily have a foreseeable practical value at the time. This was the basis of the objection made by leading scientists and academics to the Brown government’s Luddite proposal to link academic research funding to projects with an immediate commercial or practical application.
It’s perfectly possible – likely even – that the many experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider over the next decade will be looked on as groundbreaking in years to come, not just because they answered some abstruse questions you need a degree even to begin to get your head around, or won some scientist the Nobel Prize, but because the knowledge it gave us eventually led to groundbreaking technologies which vastly improved the lives of human beings, either in the sphere of energy generation, or quantum computing, or perhaps by opening the door to space drives capable of reaching significant fractions of the speed of light, thus opening the door for humanity, first to our own marvelous and fascinating solar system, and then perhaps the stars themselves.
Ultimately, however, socialists and progressives should support great and imaginative science projects like the LHC because it is part and parcel of our humanity; the desire to know and understand the true nature of the world around us; a continuation of the great thread of rationalism and enlightenment of which our own progressive view of humanity collectively sharing and enjoying the world is a part.
If you liked this article and would like to know more about the LHC, here are a few good links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2010/14/News%20Articles/1246424?ln=en
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/03/100330_cern_nh_sl.shtml
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100330-large-hadron-collider-lhc-record-higgs-boson/