First semester's ending, and I feel as if it's been incredibly productive. I will hopefully get much revision and writing done over the break, but here's something I hope to work more on soon... my attempt to write a more traditional "odd-object" essay about, well, theoretical physics.

Grand Unification Theories


On September 10, 2008, I brushed my teeth with a new toothbrush I’d been saving. I showered, same as every day, and watched the Today Show while I drank coffee. I learned a twenty-five year old mother of three survived a car crash and was stuck in a ravine for five days. She told rescuers that remembering how her children needed her kept her alive. Britney Spears’ mother was shopping her new memoir/guide to parenting and all the hosts were asking her whether she was really an authority figure on that subject. Lehman Brothers announced a third-quarter loss of nearly five billion dollar and planned to sell assets. A video from the New York subway system showed a passenger being beaten, curled in a fetal ball on the dirty floor, while another rider read the newspaper two seats down. The fashion experts told me that white pants and accessories are still acceptable, despite the passing of Labor Day. Shrek was going to be made into a musical; Ed Harris talked about the limited opening of Appaloosa. Salvia: legal herb or a drug to be banned: discuss. Kim Jong-Il may have had a stroke. And scientists near Geneva, Switzerland flipped a switch, starting the Large Hadron Collider, which might completely change the way we understand the universe.

The Collider, a multi-billion dollar physics project, runs for miles beneath the Alps and Jura Mountains like the stone laid down roots, breaching the Franco-Swiss border. Two intersecting orange metal tunnels, lined with thousands of opposing magnets in the red and green and blue of tropical rainforest plants. Each tunnel contains a proton beam, infused with energy and blasted into the tunnel at milliseconds less than the speed of light. The goal is impact. Protons whirl in spirals around the edges of the tunnel, attracted by invisible force endlessly on toward each other. Scientists in a separate lab watch the white dots flash on the computer screen, guide the particles around the tunnel, wait for the crash.

No one knows what happens next. I imagine the protons, like two fast yellow-white bullets, colliding like movie slow-motion, splintering into thousands of metallic pieces. Or maybe like craggy rocks of ice, fused and slick with water, shattering into tiny crystals with sharp edges and mysterious curves, goggled men watching in awe from a separate room, as new, cold stars get born.
Science transformed from self-assured to hesitant, as they wait for a miniaturized version of the Big Bang in reverse, wondering, hoping that in that moment of impact, the origins of matter will be revealed. If/when two protons collide, they will split into smaller particles: this they know, this they are prepared for. What they hope is for something new, that some theorized but undiscovered particle will be born in that breaking apart of light and energy. And that particle could change everything.
The world of particle physics is built of theory, a world of imagining a solution and then squinting into the darkness to spot the elusive proof. The Collider, if successful, could provide the evidence—the missing particle called the Higgs boson—that confirms the accuracy of years of study. The Standard Model of physics explains the way in which all particles in the universe were created, but it’s just a thought. If the protons collide just right, and they split apart the way they expect, all that wondering becomes truth: this is what we could learn from destruction. The goal is to go back hundreds of billions of years, before DVDs and highways and boundaries and time, before we knew we came from monkeys, before we believed in and gods, before dinosaurs became fossils, and to peer through the shroud of matter into the moments before anything existed.

But we do exist. We can’t go back. We can only get there by taking protons, the smallest pieces of our puzzle, and breaking them apart. We can only get to our creation through destruction.

The scientists have code words—hadrons, electro-super-collision, dipolar magnetic—have dedicated their lives to developing the words and ideas and mathematical equations on which the Collider is based. They conjured the tunnels and the protons out of thin air—matter never realized until we named it. Some of the best minds in the world, spending days underground, scribbling and counting and hunched over stopwatches, predicting the way the universe will behave. Physics is the place where the impossible to define and the necessity to identify fuse, and the Higgs boson is the missing piece. The Large Hadron Collider, a dream they created in their own little universe, where the cosmos of supersymmetry exists, where new matter can finally be seen.

The thrill of their lives, those who spend their days imagining the universe as it once could have been, happens in those moments when two protons collide, because there are infinite possibilities for what could be discovered, each with its own tantalizing name: dark matter, neutrino mass, electroweak symmetry breaking. Stephen Hawking said that he hoped the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t discover the Higgs boson: that would mean the physicists get to start over, think again, challenge their aching minds and fast beating hearts to dream up a new universe, then try to create that one by smashing things up in a deep, underground tunnel.
There are six different detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, each with its own mystery to observe. ATLAS will investigate the origins of mass, and the possibility of extra dimensions. CMS will look for clues into the nature of dark matter. ALICE will study the quark-gluon plasma, a liquid form of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang. And, since physicists are sure that equals amounts of matter and anti-matter were created during the Big Bang, LCHb will seek the anti-matter that no longer exists in the universe. We don’t need to understand what all those words mean to understand the buzz, the sheer joy of potential discovery, and the magic of the language with which we talk about breakthrough.

Despite this, despite all the process and the potential, the world does not wait with bated breath. The LHC was another line-item on the Today Show, a blip between fashion advice and heart-wrenching human interest stories. But who’s to say whether the confirmation of a certain particle and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking matters more than a mother returning home suffering only dehydration, returning to cook chicken nuggets and slice apples and play ship’s captain. The Large Hadron Collider may prove that we don’t know how the universe was created, but Lehman Brothers’ third-quarter losses led to a bankruptcy, the elimination of more than 1300 jobs, thousands of unpaid credit card bills and cancelled vacations and missed field trips and sore throats unexamined. Theoretical physics couldn’t have protected a man on the subway. Kim Jong-il has broken trade agreements, built nuclear weapons and performed secret experiments, could gain the potential to annihilate humanity, if his nuclear developments go unchecked.

Given war and robbery and climate change and poverty and manic world leaders, does the Large Hadron Collider matter outside the world of particle physics? The Collider suffered a massive helium leak on September 18th, 2008, putting it out of commission until November. It would have been shut down for the winter anyway, so proton beams will not be circulated again until spring of next year. And even once the Collider is up and running, even if the Standard Model is correct, even if the Higgs boson exists, only a single one will be produced every few hours. In science, discovery is repetition, slow, lingering, waiting repetition. Years may pass before enough white dots appear on computer screens, before enough notes are taken and enough equations are recalculated to unambiguously, officially, verify the way the universe works. The Today Show may cover it, on some April morning in 2012, but will the world notice if the Collider tells us that scientists were right and the Big Bang is no longer just a theory?
And what if the Standard Model is wrong? I would still switch toothbrushes every six months and not eat meat and see the same constellations. Subprime mortgages would still have led to a massive worldwide recession, and random acts of violence would continue to occur and presidents and prime ministers and premieres will still abuse power in horrific ways. What will be different if Stephen Hawking wins his bet and there is no such thing as a Higgs boson? Probably nothing.

But there is a secret out there in the cosmos, whether in our troubled minds or the swirling galaxies of the universe and so we reach out to grasp it. Not because we have to, or because it will transform the way we cook our food or comb our hair, but because we can’t help it. The act of wondering is inescapable; imagining possibilities contained within the invisible particles of existence and inventing explanations is the endless journey of the human mind superimposed on the universe. We will always seek what we cannot see, tempted to reach out into the terrifying darkness. The repetition, the testing and the precise work of discovery is the lesson whatever universe we believe in will try to return to us. We ask the question and work towards the answer. And maybe that’s what the Large Hadron Collider teaches us—not just the origins of matter. But that we should never stop hurling tiny sparks together at impossible speeds, hoping they explode.