Breaking Open the Unknown Universe

Blank Fate: Think of the 15-million-pound Atlas detector as a giant camera that can take pictures of dark matter:  Maximilien Brice/CERN

Down the Rabbit Hole

"They turned on the retinal scanners yesterday," warns Steve Goldfarb, a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, by its French acronym), the home of the LHC. "I hope this will work." He steps into the security lock, and the green phone-booth doors slide shut behind him. A wall-mounted scanner matches the pattern of blood vessels in the back of his eyeball against the database of those allowed entry. The system ensures that every person is tracked, that mission control knows exactly who goes down into the tunnels. In a month, trips down will be rare. In a month, the beam will be on.

Access granted. We wait at the elevator with stocky contractors in T-shirts and dirty work pants—murmurs in Polish and French, wary looks at the reporter's notepad, the red hard hat reserved for visitors—then climb in, and hit the button for floor –1. We are going to Atlas. The detector. The center. The collective work of tens of thousands of physicist-years, which is still, it quickly becomes apparent as we emerge through the concrete corridor and hear the first sharp pings of hammers on steel that echo throughout the chamber, not quite finished.

Though it's often compared to the interior of Notre Dame cathedral, the chamber looks less like a gothic sanctuary than it does the phaser room on the Starship Enterprise. There's an 80-foot high, 15-million-pound rolling pin of silicon and steel parked in the center, and it looks ready to fire. Except down here, the firing happens in reverse. In a month, once liquid helium cools the magnets down to 1.9 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero (that's –456°F), beams of near-light-speed protons will race not out, but in, meeting in the detector's center. (There is another equally sensitive detector, CMS, five miles away across the French countryside. The two groups will double-check each other's work and provide a bit of friendly rivalry as to who can discover what first.) The collision will concentrate all that speeding energy in an infinitesimally small space. And then that ball of pure energy will become something else entirely. "By Einstein's E = m², you can make particles whose mass is less than the amount of energy you have available," says Martinus Veltman, a physics professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a Nobel laureate. Energy becomes mass. This, in a nutshell, is why the protons need to go so fast—with more energy, the LHC can summon ever-heavier particles out of the ether. And the heavier particles are the interesting ones. The heavy ones are new.