Text size:

When science is the life of the party

$8B and 15 years later, the Large Hadron Collider is celebrated as a new stage for research performance

BY ROBERT P. CREASE | Robert P. Crease, chairman of the philosophy department at Stony Brook University, is the author of "The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science."

October 14, 2008

The most sought-after party next week will take place on Tuesday, in the foothills of the Jura Mountains outside Geneva, Switzerland. The entertainment includes a concert with original music by Philip Glass, performed by the internationally renowned L'Orch-estre de la Suisse Romande. The cuisine will be prepared by world-famous chefs. Guests include a global cast of politicians and dignitaries. Those who can't nab one of the 3,000 invitations can watch the event live on Webcast and satellite TV.

It's the inauguration party for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful accelerator, at the international laboratory known as CERN.

Who would ever think to celebrate a particle accelerator? It's not like a ship, dam or road with a tangible effect on everyday life. The LHC, which took about 15 years and $8 billion to plan and complete, is mainly a string of superconducting magnets - each the size of a boxcar and weighing 35 tons - welded in a circle 17 miles around. Threaded through the magnets are pipes carrying counter-revolving beams of protons. Surrounding two intersection points are particle detectors the size of factory buildings, which track the fragments of collisions.

The inauguration ceremony might seem stranger still because during the machine's "dress rehearsal" last month a mechanical failure produced what amounted to an explosion that sent a shock wave blasting through several magnets, damaging surrounding structures. The laboratory has taken its time making the severity of the accident public. The machine has to be fixed and won't be collecting data now until the spring. Still, the party must go on.

Long Island has had several splashy accelerator inaugurations itself. In 1952, when Brookhaven Laboratory dedicated its 75-foot-diameter Cosmotron, government officials asked the lab to keep the event "scientific and academic." But the young scientists who had spent years building the machine managed to turn it into one of Long Island's most legendary parties, thanks in part to dozens of pitchers of martinis.

The keynote speaker wound up mixing the text of his speech with another he was to give in Canada, puzzling the Brook- haven scientists still paying attention with references to "your king." But although the Cosmotron was not yet running smoothly, nobody thought the revelry excessive. Its completion catapulted Brookhaven into one of the world's foremost scientific institutions.

In 1999, when Brookhaven dedicated its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the event was also exuberant despite pouring rain. The main speaker was Bill Richardson, then Department of Energy secretary and now governor of New Mexico. Entertainment was provided by the Longwood High School band, while the school's noted cheerleading team did a "collide the ions" formation and cheer. Strong gusts of wind disintegrated the colorful balloon bridge, sending segments flying like fragments of some mammoth balloon collision. The ceremony drew so much attention that it had to be divided into parts - even though the machine was still eight months away from its first collisions.

Why do we throw splashy parties for accelerators? Their purpose still bewilders most people. And they usually aren't even working when we inaugurate them.

It's because completing an accelerator is like discovering a new continent. An accelerator isn't built for some predefined, clear-cut purpose like a ship, dam or road. It's more like a stage that we build to mount new kinds of performances. Scientists don't know exactly what will happen on these stages, but whatever does happen reveals more than what they already know about a world that they could not otherwise see.

The Cosmotron, for instance, let scientists see cosmic-ray-like collisions in lab conditions for the first time. RHIC lets scientists study the universe a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. The completion of an accelerator inspires curiosity, excitement and wonder.

The LHC's completion is especially exciting. Part of the buzz stems from the thankfully groundless rumors - which also surrounded RHIC - that the machine's operation will create universe-destroying black holes (these rumors are probably part of the reason the lab has been so tight-lipped about the recent accident).

The more substantial cause for excitement is that the events on its stages - the detectors known as Atlas and CMS - will reveal answers to questions such as how mass is created and whether the universe has additional dimensions. Scientists have some expectations about what might appear, most notably what they call the Higgs particle. But a Higgs no-show would be more thrilling still, because whatever takes its place will also shed light on the origin of mass.

The LHC's stage will connect the opposite scales of the universe - the infinitesimally small and the infinitely large - in a way that can only be described as beautiful. So what if it's broken at the moment? A performance that goes smoothly at the first rehearsal means that the show is not ambitious enough.

Not throw a party to celebrate the LHC's inauguration? That would be unscientific.