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Sciencegate Lent 09

an excerpt of 'Whatever happened to CERN?'

'It’s the world’s most expensive experiment, existing in the alter-cosmos that is CERN - a place where the breakfast bowl of Miel Pops may be conventionally accompanied by a discussion of gauge coupling unification. The café terrace is the daily meeting place for the inhabitants of this strange world. Here napkins are not only for wiping away morsels of a mid-morning pain au chocolat, but are used by the locals, just for fun, to scribble a proof of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in 26 dimensions.

'And the focus of their efforts? Straddling the French-Swiss border, buried 100 metres beneath luscious fields of wheat and grapes, is the 27-kilometre tunnel housing the aptly-named Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the jewel in CERN’s crown. The experiment – which hopes to open up a new window on the fundamental building blocks of matter, lying far beyond the smallest scale of our understanding – has, naturally, the world’s largest price-tag in science. Currently, the LHC has cost more than £5 billion (four times over budget) and spending is almost certain to rise further.

'This introvert and withdrawn community found itself the focus of the world’s attention on 10th September 2008, the LHC was switched on for the first time. The successful completion of a full circuit of the LHC ring by two beams of protons led to short-lived jubilation among the 10,000 scientists and engineers who collaborated on the project, but caused disappointment amongst the media when the black-hole failed to materialise and consume the earth.'


The rest of this article is available in the Lent 2009 edition of Sciencegate. Download a copy of the magazine here.

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