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As part of my summer vacation with my parents I had the chance to swing by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. A place I’ve been wanting to go for a long time.

CERN

If you don’t know what CERN is, here’s a quick run-down by wiki and myself:

CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border, established in 1954.^[1] The organization has twenty European member states, and is currently the workplace of approximately 2,600 full-time employees, as well as some 7,931 scientists and engineers (representing 580 universities and research facilities and 80 nationalities).

The Large Hadron Collider

Besides being the birthplace of the World Wide Web, the biggest and probably best known project at CERN is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as I mentioned in a post a while ago. The LHC is a particle accelerator designed to smash particles travelling nearly at the speed of light together to recreate the conditions present at the very beginning of the universe, the Big Bang.

ATLAS

The biggest experiment making use of the LHC is ATLAS, occupying around 2000 scientists and engineers round the globe. ATLAS is a humongous particle detector wrapped around the LHC tunnel, which detects and carefully stores (using a state of the art computer grid) what is present before, while and after a particle collision. The data generated will hopefully in the near future serve as empirical evidence proving or revolutionising old theories of physics, and lay the basis for many new ones.

My experience

I hope I succeeded in convincing you that this place is kind of a big deal, at least in the world of science. Spots for visits are popular so you’ll have to book your visit long time in advance if you want to go. We’re talking several months. For me, being only myself, about one month turned out to be enough.

Outside one of the characteric buildings of CERN above ground. The blue thingy is a huge magnet exactly like the ones used to create a magnetic field in the tunnel a hundred metres below strong enough to accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light. I apologize for the poor photo.

So, Friday 24-07-2009 at 10am I went. The visit lasted for a little more that two hours.

The tour was given by an English experimental particle physicist who had been there for years helping out on some component of ATLAS. He carried a laptop, had a big hole in his pocket through which his wallet nearly fell out, wild hair and talked really fast about really complex stuff. I guess he fitted the stereotype pretty well. You could feel that he was excited about his work and the possibility of discovering something really big.

Since visitors are not allowed in the experimental areas these times, the tour was limited to a couple of films, a couple of slide shows, questions and some of the buildings above ground.

The most interesting part were definitely the lots of questions asked, mainly concerning particle physics. I was at the visit with a bunch of American and Scottish students of physics, and they managed to ask about some interesting stuff, some of it way above my humble knowledge of physics.

Topics touched were big bang, the lack of proof for the standard model, how the Higgs field gives elementary particles mass, what the Higgs boson is expected to be, the actual detection of particles, elementary particles in general, mass and how we have no idea what gravity is, matter, antimatter, black holes, the LHC, life, the universe and everything. Moreover, I was very excited to hear about the gigantic computer grid set up, primarily at CERN but also around the whole world, to support the enormous amount of data analysis necessary to achieve meaningful results from particle collision. In 2004 there were over 5000 computers in the CERN part of the grid, all set up in a center 100 meters below the surface of earth (we saw pictures). Also, hundreds employed only with monitoring that everything is working as intended. Fascinating stuff, especially because the building of it is expected to contribute greatly to the “new” World Wide Web.

Obviously, none of the topics were discussed very much in-depth because of the time frame. But it was there and once again, I felt like studying physics.

In conclusion, because I wasn’t able to see the LHC underground, (except through 3d glasses on a projector) I’d like to go back. We were told that the LHC would be turned off about once every a year in the future. During those off-periods it will be open for visitors again, and I’ll be there.

So, today was the day the scientists at CERN were supposed to blow up the world. At least that’s what the media and some sceptical and dark people said. The scientists have created a monster that’ll suck us into a black hole. It’s obviously not true even though the popular machinery does look quite scary – and very cool.

More pictures here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html. As the first comment on the site says: "This thing is going to kill us all." : ) Maybe it will some day.

To sum up the story, scientists at CERN has for years been building this 27 kilometer long particle accelerator called The Large Hadron Collider. The building of it finished recently finished and today they started and tried it for the first time. I don’t know much about the experiments they are able to perform with it, but it’s supposed to collide particles nearly at the speed of light. This should result in enormous energy generation, creating conditions like those just after the Big Band. A crucial moment in understanding the creation of the universe.

I find all of this really exciting and amazing. Stuff like this makes me want to be a physicist.

The blowing up thing also puts some interesting thoughts in my mind: What if the whole world were told that it was 100% sure that the earth would go under in a year? What would happen?

I think there’d be three different possibilities – one doesn’t exclude the other.

1. Everything would become chaos. Crime and anarchy would prevail. People would steal, ruin buildings, get guns and go on killing sprees. And it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy because people who didn’t want to resort to crime would have to, just to protect themselves. It would be pushing the famous idea of Charles Darwin about “Survival of the fittest” to an absurd and more than literal extend. Humanity would wipe itself out before nature.
2. Everyone would become determined to save humanity. Governments would organize massive education of people and use every available ressource on figuring out what to do. Someone unfamiliar with solidarity would fly away a couple of hundreds of the healthiest, smartest, prettiest and most popular species of homo sapiens, first of all to save themselves but also to ensure the survival of our kind. What a burden (bullsh!t). I bet someone would even take money to ensure someone else a life in space. Retards like the Beckhams would probably go. I can see the point in resorting to this last chance, but suspecting how corruptly and unfair it would happen, maybe it shouldn’t.
3. We’d all become hippies, drop out of school and quit work to sit around in circles, play guitar, smoke tobacco, grow hair and spread peace, love and harmony. Think about this one. I can’t even imagine what would happen and what it would mean globally, but I bet it would be a great last time on earth.