Birth of a New Universe
by Sarah Edmunds
Imagine a heat 100,000 times greater than the heat of the Sun, if you can. For a fraction of a second, in an area one billion times smaller than a speck of dust, scientists with CERN are going to make that happen. Well, eventually.
CERN, the French acronym for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, successfully launched the first beam of protons through what is known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on September 10, 2008. These protons were spun around the machine's 27 kilometer-long circular beam tunnel at 99.9% of the speed of light. Scientists also succeeded in sending a beam in the opposite direction later that day. Eventually the goal is to aim the two opposing beams at each other for a head-on collision that will result in the trillion-degree smashing of atoms, re-enacting the conditions that occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago.
Unfortunately, a series of faults with the hadron collider has halted the experiments. A week after scientists launched the first beam of protons, a transformer that helps cool the machine malfunctioned. After exchanging the 30-ton transformer, and scientists expected progress to resume in a few short weeks. However, on September 19, CERN shut down the machine again when temperatures of a section of the tunnel rose by almost 100 degrees Celsius, causing a ton of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel, delaying the experiment by an additional two months.
It appears that a two-month delay is unacceptable. Physicists and the public are becoming impatient for answers; they are not impressed that a machine that took two decades and multiple billions of dollars to create is malfunctioning. Hold your horses, people. The universe was not created in a day, and it will not be scientifically recreated in a day either. Concepts that were before unfathomable to the human mind are now not only fathomable, but are months away from providing answers to questions about the universe. We can wait months for these answers. Years, if we have to.
So how do we even know what the universe was like in the past? How will we know if the results of the LHC are even comparable to the creation of the universe? For centuries, scientists have been gathering knowledge about the universe's past by looking deep into space at the stars. Light from distant stars takes years to reach Earth. The Orion Nebula, for example, is located 1,500 light-years from Earth. That means when we observe the Orion Nebula, we are actually observing it as it appeared 1,500 years ago- about the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. When we look into space, we are literally looking at the past. The LHC is the future.
The results of the LHC experiment could yield extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the physical universe, pushing forward theories of particle physics. New worlds of unknown particles could be revealed, along with explanations as to why those particles exist and behave as they do. The experiments could reveal the origins of mass, solve the mystery of dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe, and possibly discover extra dimensions of space. Physicists are also hopeful of discovering the “Higgs boson” particle, believed to be responsible for giving every other particle its mass. Predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. The LHC could confirm its existence.
The Large Hadron Collider already costs billions of dollars, and will probably cost even more. There have been years of anticipation and months of delay. There was even the threat that the LHC might create a black hole that would destroy the Earth (a claim physicists dismiss). But the LHC experiments are of astronomical importance to the advancement of science; essentially, priceless.
