Breaking Open the Unknown Universe

The most powerful and complex science experiment in the history of the universe is finally—after 14 years and $10 billion—about to begin. There’s no telling what it may find, and that’s entirely the point

By Michael Moyer Posted 09.10.2008 at 11:16 am 7 Comments

Model Student: Inside the office of John Ellis, theoretical physicist at CERN. "SUSY" is short for supersymmetry: Michael Moyer

Know It All

The history of science is one of hubris. We think we have the natural world pretty much figured out, we think that our theories are pretty darn solid—and then someone does an innocent little experiment, and much to everyone's surprise, reveals the unfathomable. Never have scientists so self-consciously courted the unknown as they are doing with the LHC. No one thinks the Standard Model will end up being the whole story of the universe, despite its innumerable successes in explaining the world. Physicists know there is more out there, just beyond our reach. "I think of things for the experiments to look for," says John Ellis, "and hope they find something different."

"I think we all want to know where we came from and how we fit into the world," says George Smoot, a cosmologist at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in physics, "but some of us need to know how it all works in great detail." The 14 years, $10 billion and 10,000 people it took to build the LHC may be taken as simple measures of human curiosity, of how much we're willing to give to explore where we came from and how we fit into the world. You might wonder why it matters whether supersymmetry is true or not, why it's important that we find the dark matter. But understanding the universe is power. "Knowing the laws of physics, you know what can be done and what can't be done," says Nobel laureate Gerardus 't Hooft. "Knowing the laws of physics lets you see the future."

See all of PopSci's coverage of the Large Hadron Collider at popsci.com/lhc.

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7 Comments

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Dustman

09/12/08 at 8:30 pm

I hope this thing lives up to its staggering potential. What an exciting time we are in. Great to see money spent on the pursuit of understanding, instead of the pursuit of war. Also great to see people from so many different nations coming together for a similar purpose.

(Note on the opening paragraph: There are probably many other civilizations in the universe who have done similar experiments long before this one was even conceived of...)

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Science_Boy

09/14/08 at 4:05 am

Ah, but the second paragraph did say "known universe". We can't generalize from only 1 example. All of our thoughts about other civilizations in the universe are just guesses. As far as we can yet prove, Earth is the only planet in the known universe with life on it.

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Science_Boy

09/14/08 at 4:11 am

Doesn't the discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating change all our calculations about what we think was happening at the beginning of the universe? The article talks about when the first proton was formed and the size of the universe at that point. But weren't our ideas about the big bang all predicated on the idea that the expansion that Hubble saw was from a universe essentially coasting outward from an initial explosion?

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kevschap

09/14/08 at 10:13 am

Being that all matter is mostly empty space, doesn't smashing together protons reduce that empty space to nada...
Perhaps creating the world's first(and last) singularity???

Arguing over the internet is like racing in the Special Olympics, You might win, but...

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Calvin405

09/14/08 at 4:46 pm

I wonder what would be the results of this 10 billion dollar machine. Think about it the basic components of the universe itself...wow

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scisam

10/13/08 at 4:39 pm

What a remarkable and interesting machine. I'm so excited to see the outcome of this extraordinary experiment. It definitely had some people scared for their life. Nevertheless this is a great use of money despite the possibility that nothing could happen except for things that we have already recorded several times.

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genedoug

06/18/09 at 8:36 pm

We would have been doing the same thing decades ago, except for the greed of a lot of Texas contractors. When a 60 minutes report horrified a lot of senators, they flipped off the switch and sent them packing.

Is this a uniquely American thing, or does it only infect the rich?