[tt] NYT Op-Ed: The Origins of the Universe - A Crash Course

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This is surely the best account of the Large Hadron Collider for the 
laywoman that I 
have read.

The Origins of the Universe - A Crash Course
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12greene.html

By BRIAN GREENE

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a
17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French
border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose
nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it's one of the
emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.

The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological
marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described
alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding
of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that
may destroy the planet.

After more than a decade of development and construction, involving
thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some
$8 billion, the "on" switch for the collider was thrown this week.
So what we can expect?

The collider's workings are straightforward: at full power,
trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track
and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999
percent of the speed of light -- fast enough so that every second
the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and
engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

The raison d'être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives
from Einstein's famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much
like euros and dollars, energy ("E") and matter or mass ("m") are
convertible currencies (with "c" -- the speed of light -- specifying
the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to
fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary
reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a
broad spectrum of other particles.

It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to
create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big
bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated.

Here's a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the
collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.

Higgs Particles

One of the mysteries that continues to stump physicists is the
origin of mass. We can measure with fantastic accuracy the mass of
an electron, a quark and most every other particle, but where does
mass itself come from?

More than 40 years ago, a number of researchers, including Peter
Higgs, an English physicist, suggested an answer: perhaps space is
pervaded by a field, much like the electromagnetic fields generated
by cellphones and radio broadcasts, that acts like invisible
molasses.

When we push something in the effort to make it move faster, the
Higgs molasses would exert a drag force -- and it's this resistance,
as the Higgs theory goes, that we commonly call the object's mass.
Scientists have incorporated this idea as a centerpiece of the
so-called standard model -- a refined mathematical edifice, viewed
by many as the crowning achievement of particle physics, that since
the 1970s has described the behavior of nature's basic constituents
with unprecedented accuracy.

The one component of the standard model that remains stubbornly
unconfirmed is the very notion of the Higgs' "molasses" field.
However, collisions at the Large Hadron Collider should be able to
chip off little chunks of the ubiquitous Higgs field (if it exists),
creating what are known as Higgs bosons or Higgs particles. If these
particles are found, the standard model, more than a quarter-century
after its articulation, will finally be complete.

Supersymmetric Particles

In the early 1970s, mathematical studies of string theory revealed a
striking step toward Einstein's unfulfilled dream of a unified
theory -- a single theory embracing all forces and all matter.
Supersymmetry, as the insight is called, is mathematically complex
but has a physical implication of central relevance to the Large
Hadron Collider.

For every known species of particle (electrons, quarks, neutrinos,
etc.), supersymmetry implies the existence of a partner species
(called, with physicists' inimitable linguistic flair, selectrons,
squarks, sneutrinos, etc.) that to date has never been observed.

Physicists believe these "sparticles" have so far evaded detection
because they're a good deal more massive than their known
counterparts, thus requiring more powerful collisions for their
copious production.

A wealth of calculations strongly suggests that the collider will
have that power.

The discovery of sparticles would be a monumental achievement,
taking us far beyond Einstein by establishing a deep link between
nature's forces and the particles of matter. Such a discovery also
has the potential to advance our understanding of dark matter -- the
abundant matter that permeates space but does not give off light and
hence is known only through its gravitational influence. Many
researchers suspect that dark matter is composed of sparticles.

Transdimensional Particles

A tantalizing idea considered since the early part of the last
century is that the universe might have more than the three spatial
dimensions of common experience.

In addition to the familiar left/right, back/forth and up/down,
physicists have contemplated additional directions that are curled
up to such a small size that they've so far eluded discovery.

For many years Einstein was a strong proponent of this idea. He had
already shown that gravity was nothing but warps and curves in the
familiar dimensions of space (and time); the new idea posited that
nature's other forces (for example, the electromagnetic force)
amounted to warps and curves in additional, as yet unknown, spatial
dimensions. Difficulties in applying the idea mathematically
resulted in Einstein ultimately losing interest. But decades later,
string theory revived it: the mathematics of string theory not only
requires extra dimensions but has shown how to resolve the issues
that flummoxed Einstein.

And now, remarkably, there's a chance -- albeit a small one -- that
the collider may find evidence for the extra dimensions.
Calculations show that some of the debris produced by the proton
collisions may be ejected out of our familiar spatial dimensions and
crammed into the others, a process we'd detect by an apparent loss
of the energy the debris would carry.

The unknown is just how powerful the collisions need to be for this
process to happen, a number itself determined by another unknown:
just how small the extra dimensions, if they exist, actually are.
The more tightly they're curled, the harder it would be to cram
anything in them and so the more energetic the required collisions.

Should the Large Hadron Collider have the power necessary to reveal
extra dimensions of space -- to overturn our belief that length,
width and height are all there is -- that would rank as one of the
greatest upheavals in our understanding of the universe.

Micro Black Holes

Now for the possibility that's generated the fuss.

Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might
produce black holes, providing physicists with a spectacular
opportunity to study them in a laboratory.

The common conception is that black holes are fantastically massive
astrophysical bodies with enormous gravitational fields. But in
reality, a black hole can have any mass. Take an orange and squeeze
it to a sufficiently small size (about a billionth of a billionth of
a billionth of a meter across) and you'd have a black hole -- with
the mass of an orange.

Physicists have realized that the collider's proton-proton
collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small
volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form -- black holes
even lighter than the one theoretically created by the orange, but
black holes nevertheless.

Why might one worry that this would be a problem? Because black
holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced
under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a
ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured?

It's a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.

Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black
holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long
enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them,
but short enough to avoid their wreacking any havoc.

Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong
and such black holes don't disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the
fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes
us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron
Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but
they've been taking place throughout the universe -- even here on
earth -- for billions of years.

Cosmic rays -- particles wafting through space -- constantly rain
down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars
scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of
those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more
powerful collisions haven't resulted in astrophysical calamities,
the collider's comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won't
either.

o

Should any of the particles described above be produced at the Large
Hadron Collider, from Higgs particles to black holes, corks will
rightly pop in physics departments worldwide. But the most exciting
prospect of all is that the experiments will reveal something
completely unanticipated, something that forces us to rethink our
most cherished explanations.

Confirming an idea is always gratifying. But finding what you don't
expect opens new vistas on the nature of reality. And that's what
humans, including those of us who happen to be physicists, live for.

Brian Greene, a professor of math and physics at Columbia, is the
author, most recently, of Icarus at the Edge of Time.