In Search of the God Particle

By: written by Daniela Joffe | October 06, 2008 | Technology

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

In a sense, these words from Albert Einstein are surprising. Surely the man who made some of the greatest contributions to our knowledge of the universe would prize knowledge above all else? Not quite. What Einstein meant by imagination was not fairytales and unicorns. He was referring to that faculty of mind, inherent in all of us, that enables us to “go beyond.” On a small scale, it means to go beyond what the senses convey to us at any given time: I am imagining a steaming cup of coffee in my hands though, lamentably, it is not actually here. On a bigger scale, it means to go beyond what we currently know and understand about our world, by using the imagination in creative ways: Einstein attained several groundbreaking insights on the nature of time by imagining what it might be like riding on a photon deep in space. In short, then, imagination is more important than knowledge because it gives birth to more knowledge.

Taking this reasoning further, I would argue that the most active and colorful imaginations of the human repertoire can be found not in artistic circles, but within the scientific community. As proof for this argument, I present to you Dr. Brian Cox. Outside of his research on high-energy physics at the University of Manchester, Cox works as one of the leading physicists at CERN — the European Center for Nuclear Research — located in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is essentially the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and arguably the most important. It is home to some 8,000 of the world’s most brilliant scientists and engineers whose combined genius has resulted in discovery upon startling discovery about nature and our mysterious universe. The CERN team’s most recent project is perhaps the boldest display of this genius and a sure example of the sort of imaginative thinking I am describing.

A few years back, Cox and his colleagues decided to tackle the biggest question of them all: How, exactly, did the universe begin? Modern-day science tells an incredibly rich and complex story about the origin of the universe, commonly known as the big bang theory. The big bang theory is supported by every line of scientific evidence and observation, and is valid beyond reasonable doubt. Yet some of the theory’s details are murkier, more speculative, than others. And this is where Cox and his team stepped in.

The term “big bang” refers to the event, 13.7 billion years ago that marked the very beginning of the universe. As it so happens, it was not a bang so much as an appearance: Suddenly, out of nothingness, a thing of infinite density and infinite heat appeared. Time began, space began, matter began. Why did this event occur? What caused it? That we can never know. We do know that after the big bang, the universe began to evolve: It expanded and cooled very rapidly, and all kinds of interesting subatomic particles emerged. By the time one second had passed, protons, neutrons and electrons (the stuff of atoms) had formed. It took another 300,000 or so years before these three components came together to form atoms, and a few million years more for the creation of stars and galaxies. In the billions of years since, the first stars have died and spewed out heavy elements into space, giving birth to new stars and new planets. About 4.5 billion years ago, Earth popped up. About 200,000 years ago, we did.

What Cox and the boffins at CERN were concerned about were the parts of the puzzle that had not been solved. To name a few: 1. Things in the universe have weight. What happened in the split second after the big gang that caused the first tiny particles to gain mass? 2. It was way too hot right after the big bang for all these tiny particles to stick together the way that they now do inside an atom. In what alternative form did they initially exist? 3. The big bang produced not only particles of matter, but particles of antimatter, too. What is the difference between the two, and why does antimatter no longer exist?

These questions (and the many others like them) are age-old, but finding satisfying answers is incredibly difficult to do. It requires that scientists actually see what happens under the most extreme conditions of temperature and density — so extreme to be almost inconceivable to man. But these guys were determined. So, what did they do?

Well, first they obtained an enormous amount of money. Then they built the largest and most complex machine in the world: a particle accelerator with a 27-kilometer circumference. They then cooled the machine to minus 271 degrees Celsius, which is colder than the space between two galaxies, and the coldest temperature man ever engineered by man. The machine will launch beams of particles in opposite directions at 99.99999 percent the speed of light and smash them together. Because each beam has the diameter of a human hair but the energy of an aircraft traveling at 30 miles an hour, smashing them together creates the same high-energy conditions as just after the big bang.

Pretty imaginative, I’d say.

The Malibu Mag crew got to meet with Dr. Cox to learn more about this exciting endeavor. In the process, we gained critical insights into a wide range of other issues, such as the energy crisis, life on Mars, the role of science in the modern age and dark matter. We also got to learn about Cox’s own life, and discovered that being a highly distinguished expert physicist is by no means synonymous with being boring.

This free spirit only made his way to university (and physics) at the age of 24, after a four-year run as keyboardist with the rock band Dare. Cox and his band toured the world with the likes of Jimmy Page and Gary Moore, and recorded two successful albums. When the band split in 1992, Cox enrolled in the University of Manchester, where he went on to earn a first-class honors degree, a doctorate, and the prestigious accolade of Royal Society University Research Fellow. In the midst of this academic achievement, Cox joined another band, D:Ream, and produced a number of chart-topping singles with them.

Now a full-time experimental physicist, Cox makes it a priority to bring science to the public. He makes regular appearances on BBC television and radio, and has been involved in various documentary and commercial film projects. For his efforts in this regard, he has received many awards including the British Association Lord Kelvin award and honorary membership in the exclusive Explorers Club. But what drives Cox both inside the laboratory and out is quite simply a passion for scientific discovery — and a belief in its importance.

But I’ve said enough. See for yourself:

What he does at the LHC

“I work on the ATLAS experiment, which is one of the four big digital cameras that take pictures of these collisions. So we take protons, which are the nuclei of hydrogen, and we accelerate them around to 99.99999 percent the speed of light. They go around the 27-kilometer circumference more than 11,000 times a second. They are going so fast, by the way, that they weigh 7,000 times more then they do when they’re standing still and time passes 7,000 times more slowly for them, which is what Einstein told us. Things go very fast and time slows down, and it slows down by factors of 7,000. So one second for them is 7,000 seconds for us. Then you smash them together. There are up to 600 million collisions every second!

“ATLAS, what I work on, is essentially a 100 megapixel, 7,000-ton digital camera. It’s in a cabin bigger than St. Paul’s Cathedral, underneath the ground, and scientists and engineers from 40 countries have worked on building and operating this thing. I’m from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and we built part of it. We get to operate it and look at the pictures and discover new things. The camera can see up to 40 million frames per second. But, you can’t save all of that because you’ve got 1.5 megabytes per frame and 40 million frames a second. So instead, you take some quick looks to see if you have anything interesting. We have computer algorithms that do that; they go through the data and measure all sorts of things, then they write out the most interesting 200 or so frames per second. And those are the things we analyze later.

“The general rule of particle physics is that if you make something heavy, it eventually decays away into lighter things. For example, you make these things called Z particles, which decay into two electrons. So, if you make Z particles, you’ll see the electrons coming out. In the [Large Hadron Collider] collisions, we’ll be making these new particles we’ve never seen before. The trick is to look at all the pieces and reconstruct what happened in those collisions. A famous physicist once said that it was like getting two Swiss watches and smashing them together in order to find out how a Swiss watch works.”

What they’re hoping to find

“We have gotten stuck in physics. The thing to know about physics and science is that it’s common sense, really. It’s all about looking. If you have a question, you can’t just answer it, you can’t just guess; you have to go take a look for yourself. What we’ve found is that we understand how the universe works up to the point where mass appeared in the universe. You see, right back at the big bang everything was massless, traveling around the speed of light. And when the universe expanded and cooled, something happened to cause this stuff to get mass, which in turn allowed it to get structure and form stars and planets. Our best theory is something called the Higgs theory. The theory basically says that there is something called the Higgs particle, a new particle of matter, which is in the universe now, everywhere. Outside, in this room, in your body, everywhere. The way that the particles that make up you and me get their mass is by bumping into, and interacting with, these Higgs particles or this Higgs field. So, that’s a mathematical theory that works, but we’ve never seen the Higgs particle. But, we know exactly where it has to be, how heavy it has to be and how much energy you need to make it. The LHC was built to take us there. That’s probably the prime goal of the LHC, finding the origin of mass.

“The other really strange thing we’ve discovered in the last 10 or 20 years is that if you look into our distant galaxies, you find that there is a lot more stuff there than you can see — actually, five times as much. If you weigh a galaxy, only about 20 percent of it is in the form of stars and most of it, the other 80 percent, appears to be in the form of something else. We call that invisible something “dark matter” because we don’t know what it is. There is a good chance that the LHC will discover more about it by making these collisions. And that’s profound because most of the universe is made of that stuff and not the stuff that makes up you and me. If you want a complete theory of the universe, you better know what dark matter is. Obviously, once we know what it is, the term dark matter will fall away. It’s a cool name though, isn’t it? I’ll still call it dark matter.

“How the universe began is another question we don’t actually know the answer to. There are some theories that it’s been around forever. The Earth we know has been for around about 5 billion years, but the universe looks like it began 13.7 billion years ago. We know that number quite precisely. Well, we know that something interesting happened 13.7 billion years ago, but we don’t know what it was. There are some theories that maybe it was just our little bit of the universe that began then, or was very hot at that point for some reason. Again, you need to experiment with these theories and go back to the conditions that were present at the start of the universe to look, and that’s what we’re doing. We don’t really know what we’re going to find. So, these are some of the questions you can ask, and this is how you answer them. It’s just a bit expensive.” (Laughs.)

Why physics is useful

“Particle physics is the science of understanding the smallest building blocks of nature, looking for them and looking for the forces that stick things together. We have been on a quest for about a hundred years now, since the discovery of the structure of the atom. The electron, the thing that goes around the atom, was discovered in 1897, and the discovery of the nucleus was just after the turn of the 20th century, in Manchester actually. Ernest Rutherford discovered it. Now, the discovery of the electron was useful because it gave us electricity. Understanding the structure of atoms was useful because it led us to this theory called “quantum mechanics,” which has given us transistors and silicone chips. And the nucleus, of course, has given us nuclear power — or nuclear weapons, depending on which way you look at it. But the point is that what the history of particle physics shows us is that understanding what the world is made of is useful. The modern world was delivered to us because of this quest.

“The technological offshoots have been incredible as well. The obvious one is the World Wide Web, which was invented at CERN in the ’90s. It’s got nothing to do with particle physics of course, but you put a load of people together and ask them to understand the origin of the universe, and they invent the World Wide Web to do it. We’ve now invented this thing called The Grid, which is the next generation of the web. It’s basically a way of distributing the data from the LHC, and all the processing power, to scientists all over the world. We needed it because there is so much data. So, now anyone who is part of the experiment can work on the data from anywhere in the world, without physically being there.

“Another one: medical technology. Most medical imaging technology, if not all of it, came from particle physics detectors. Take PET scanners for example: PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography, and a positron is an antimatter electron. So, what was discovered in particle physics is now used in medical imaging. There’s also proton-beam therapy, where you use beams of protons (the same beams that we are using at the LHC) in the treatment of brain tumors. The weird thing about proton beams is that if you fire them into something, they lose all their energy in a very small space. If they go for a while without hitting anything and then suddenly collide, they just dump all their energy on collision. So, brain tumors are a good use for it because if you get the energy of the beam right, it will dump all its energy where the tumor is. And that kills the tumor. It’s the same as chemotherapy except that chemotherapy radiates your whole body, so it’s not very good for you, while firing a beam of protons into your head doesn’t really have much of an effect. This is a targeted destruction; you can fire the beam straight in. They’re just beginning to use this technology right now. Again, you need a little particle accelerator to do all this, so it’s the same technology that’s behind the LHC. There are immeasurable benefits.

“As for the LHC, we don’t know what it will bring us. We have some ideas, as I said earlier: the origin of mass and the universe, and also possibly some insight into gravity. We have problems understanding gravity at the moment, and we have had forever. Our best theory is Einstein’s, which is general relativity, and that’s from 1915. It hasn’t changed since then, but the LHC might help us learn more. So, you don’t know what these discoveries are going to amount to, but you can point to the track record of particle physics and say, ‘Look, it gave us everything.’ ”

Why nuclear research is necessary

“Both CERN and I are now involved in ITA, which is the European Fusion Reactor Project. So, we have a future energy thing going. The goal is clean energy by 2035. What ITA does is make energy the same way the sun does. You basically take hydrogen and make helium out of it, and you get a whole lot of energy. The sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen every second and produces 596 million tons of helium, so it loses 4 million tons of mass every second, which is the energy it produces. E=mc². That’s how the sun works; all stars do it. The trick is to build a little star on Earth, and then use the energy it produces. It’s been done, we know roughly how to do it, but we don’t yet know how to do it on a scale big enough to make a power station yet, because it’s hard. The center of a star is millions of degrees, and holding a little ball of gas at several million of degrees is not easy. The way we plan to do at ITA is by building a magnetic field and then literally suspending the little star in the magnetic field. Then you put hydrogen in (well, deuterium actually, an isotope of hydrogen), and the hydrogen makes helium and shines.

“This work is important; fusion is the only way forward in terms of energy. It’s kind of obvious, really. You do the sums on the back of an envelope and you find that solar, or let’s say geothermal energy, could possibly provide enough energy for the United States (if it cut back quite a lot) and Europe. But if you’re looking to bring everybody in Africa up to some kind of reasonable level, and everybody in India, then you find that you won’t be able do that with just geothermal energy. Renewable energy sources don’t do it on their own, so you need something else, but there is not going to be any oil or coal left. Even with nuclear-efficient power, which is where we get uranium, even then people do the sums and find that you might be able to get hundreds of years of supply, but not thousands. So, on long time scales, fusion is the only way you can eventually go because you have an unlimited supply of hydrogen — that’s not a problem. So, the question then becomes, when is it sensible to switch over? As I said, our goal at the moment is to have working designs by about 2035.”

Why space exploration is necessary

“It’s interesting, when you talk to people and ask them what they think the environment is, most people would see it as this thin sliver of atmosphere, but really more than two-thirds of all species that have ever existed have been wiped out by asteroid impact — including the dinosaurs, of course. Carl Sagan always used to say that if the dinosaurs had a space program they would still be around, which is funny, but actually true. Our environment does include the solar system. Things in our solar system have a direct impact on the Earth — asteroid impact is an obvious one. If you were to list the threats we face as a civilization (the so-called existential threats, the ones that could wipe out a species), you would find that most of them come that way.

“There are other things, too, like pandemic viruses. Again, that requires you to do biological research. You might have heard of Craig Venter, he is that quite famous biologist who is trying to recreate synthetic life. A lot of people attack him and say, ‘What are you doing? Are you trying to play God and kill us all?’ He says that understanding viruses is the one thing we know we have to do if we’re going to survive. And he’s right, because viruses wipe civilizations out. There are a lot of things that wipe civilizations out. More than 99 percent of species that have ever existed have gone extinct on Earth through viruses, meteorites and volcanic eruptions that mess up the atmosphere. And all of these things are out of our control unless we learn how they work, unless we do them ourselves. It feels safe to sit here on Earth and not do anything, thinking that if we don’t put CO² into the atmosphere we’ll be fine. But, that’s not true. Most species weren’t fine, and we are the only ones that have a brain capable of learning about engineering and finding solutions.”

What finding life on Mars would mean

“The discovery of water of Mars is a big deal. I mean one of the biggest questions in science is whether there is life anywhere else. We may not be right, but we kind of think at the moment that water is probably a prerequisite for this. So, if you find water on Mars the chances that you’ll find life on Mars increase significantly. We know that life can move between planets, actually. We know that bacteria can move and survive. There were some bacteria that got taken to the moon on some early moon missions and were then brought back again and revived. So, they survived a flight from the Earth to the moon, sat on the moon, got brought back again, and they were still there. So, we know that these things can move around. If we find life on Mars, the main question would be, is it a common ancestor to this life or did it evolve separately? If it evolved separately it is a really big deal, because then it means there may be life all over the place in the universe.

“The way you determine this is by looking at a thing called “handedness” in molecules. There are left-handed and right-handed versions of some biological molecules. And, I always get this wrong, but on Earth all life is either left-handed or right-handed. One of the experiments that some of the space probes are taking with them now is to measure this handedness. If it turns out that there is life out there that uses the other twist, that other handedness, then it strongly suggests that that life evolved separately. So, you can do things like that. Or it could just be that the DNA is not there, you know, that it’s structured totally differently. So, you’ve got to take a look at it, too.

“I think the implications of all this are really important. There are only two possibilities: Either Earth is the only place in the universe, or in our galaxy, that has life on it, or it isn’t. And knowing either way would profoundly affect the way you behave, if you think about it. If we are the only place nearby, or even in our galaxy, that has life, then it puts a massive responsibility on us because we are the only place in the universe where there are things that live, that can look out into the universe and think about it. I mean, we better not fuck that up, right? But then, if there are other civilizations all over the place, that again would change the way you behave. And one of those two things is true. I think we behave at the moment, as a species, in a way that implies that we don’t even think about the question. Because which way do you answer that question, and what do you do? We wouldn’t fight amongst ourselves if there were other civilizations out there. And we wouldn’t fight amongst ourselves if there were not civilizations out there. One of them is true.”

Where science stands today

“You know, science used to be part of culture. Einstein gave a lecture in Manchester in 1917 (or maybe it was 1920), and he gave it in German. And he gave it like a gig, and he gave it loud. And thousands of people came to see a lecture, in German, by a scientist in Manchester that year. So, it used to be that you’d go to these events like you would go to a film. You would go see science lectures. And that’s gone; it’s no longer part of our culture, and it needs to be again. Science should take its rightful place. It’s not some difficult, technical and dull thing that a few clever people do. It’s actually very important that we ask these questions.

“Of course there’s opposition to science, too, which, as I was taught at a conference at Google last week, is a modern phenomenon. There was a Vatican astronomer there, he runs the Vatican observatory, and he showed a quote from Saint Augustine from 450 A.D. or something. In it, Augustine is saying to religious people, ‘Don’t ever try and teach the Bible like it’s a textbook because anyone who has any brain at all will see it’s not a textbook. It drifts out of date … textbooks go out of date. If you treat it like a textbook, it will go out of date, you will say wrong things, and you will do religion a disservice. Because it’s not supposed to be about that. It’s philosophical; it’s a way of living. It’s not a textbook.’ This was like 450 AD, right? And that lesson has still not been learned. Whatever you may think of the Bible, you can see it as a useful bit of philosophy, but you cannot see it as a textbook, because it’s not. I think that is peculiar to the states actually, that literal interpretation, which is where the friction comes from. You can’t defend it; you can’t say the world is 6,000 years old. It isn’t. (Laughs.) It just isn’t.

“But the guys in the Vatican would probably even say that it’s not meant to be; it’s not telling you when the world began. It’s something else all together, which, they would say, is much more valuable than that. So, it’s a very peculiar state of affairs. From my perspective, it seems that the problem of evolution and creationism, these two things that are banging together in the U.S. at the moment, spreads to a distrust of all of science. We have nothing to do with that stuff, you know? I think it’s all quite funny actually, but it becomes serious if it begins to inform science policy. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just got loads of people wandering around talking shit. I mean, who cares? (Laughs.) If it starts stopping you doing research though, then it’s a problem.”

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