The Cern experiment will use the largest machine ever built by man to attempt to recreate the moment after the Big Bang. But could it swallow the Earth in the process? asks Derek Scally
ON A SUNNY Sunday morning, in a packed Geneva bus, an English teenager, giddy with excitement, is telling a stranger how he got there: "The flight alone was £300 but I told my parents, 'come on, this is Cern'."
Around him, strangers nod in approval. As others head to church or a football match this morning, over 50,000 people are on a pilgrimage to the biggest experiment on the planet.
Due to kick off in June, Cern (pronounced "sern") is a multi-billion euro attempt by 10,000 scientists from 100 countries to answer the big question: why is the universe as it is? These would-be masters of the universe hope the answers lie in the biggest machine ever built by man: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
In June, 100 metres below a Geneva suburb, two beams of protons will be sent whizzing around a 26km circular tunnel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light.
Millions of protons will collide each second, producing extreme energy conditions not seen since a split second after the Big Bang that formed the universe 13.7 billion years ago. At four points on the ring, massive detectors will be watching the subatomic fireworks display and noting the path, energies and identities of the even tinier particles produced.
The two gigabytes of data produced per second will be analysed by physicists around the world and, hopefully, give answers to fundamental questions, such as: Why do things have mass? Where has all the anti-matter in the universe gone? What does the 96 per cent of the universe we cannot see look like?
Central to the experiment is the hunt for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle that would explain why elementary particles of no mass nevertheless produce matter.
"In the long run, this experiment hopes to understand how nature works, which is vital to the future of man," says Prof Themis Bowcock of the University of Liverpool and a member of the Cern team.
A visit to Cern is a descent into a circus of superlatives. Hard-hatted visitors silently count off 55 seconds before the lift doors open into a scene from a vintage Bond film - a massive concrete underground cavern filled with blue metal gangways, endless pipes and wires, and a dazzling golden disc, 25 metres across.
This is the visible end of Atlas, one of Cern's two cylindrical detectors. It weighs 7,000 tonnes - more than the Eiffel Tower - and was assembled entirely underground. It is no surprise that Cern's visitors are greeted with music from Star Wars.
A few kilometres along the claustrophobic concrete tunnel of pipes and equipment is another experiment, LHC beauty (LHCb). It will explore matter and anti-matter by analysing particles passing through detectors and a massive green oyster-like magnet. "We're all very nervous," says LHCb team member Roger A Barlow.
Nerves have been frazzled of late by a claim from US scientists that the LHC experiment could produce a black hole that would swallow the earth. Cern scientists rubbish the idea.
"The only danger in the experiment is that we break the machine and, with it, many scientific careers," jokes Barlow drily.
Already 15 years in the making, Cern physicists are anxious to play down expectations of instant results after the June launch. "Like giving birth, the responsibility doesn't end there but goes on for 15 years," says Prof Bowcock.
Prof Ronan McNulty from UCD and a team of 20 researchers are involved in the LHCb project. Their international colleagues are full of praise for the Irish team, but say their efforts are hamstrung by Ireland's decision not to join the 20-member Cern organisation, which includes countries such as Slovakia and Bulgaria.
The decision makes Irish scientists second-class researchers and means that Irish technology companies producing the kind of equipment used at Cern cannot bid for multi-million euro contracts.
Among the 50,000 visitors to Cern last week was a group of fifth- and sixth-year students from Co Sligo.
"Cern has a huge impact on creating enthusiasm for physics in school," said Kieran Coen, a physics teacher at Coláiste Mhuire in Ballymote.
"The Government go on about pushing science, but our group looked everywhere for a grant for this trip and then had to finance it themselves."