The “big bang machine”, the world’s most powerful atom smasher and so-called bringer of the apocalypse was, without a doubt, this year’s media darling. The Large Hadron Collider, buried 100 metres beneath the Alps at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, made particle physics sexy in 2008. News stories about the LHC ranged from the ridiculous to the awe-inspiring. Physicists received death threats, lawsuits were filed and thrown out, and physics was pushed to the forefront of public consciousness – culminating in a billion TV viewers watching the great switch-on and even a Google illustration to mark the day.
The LHC is large in every sense of the word – protons will whiz around the 27-kilometre ring of the $10 billion machine at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light, colliding 600 million times a second with unprecedented energy. An enormous intellectual and engineering feat, the particle smasher will attempt to answer such lofty questions as: do other spatial dimensions exist, what is dark energy, what happened to all the antimatter, and what gives matter mass?
The public’s interest in the LHC was apparent when CERN opened its doors on 6 April. Over 50,000 visitors from as far away as Japan and America flocked to catch a glimpse of the detectors. Still, opening the doors wasn’t enough to dispel the myths that the LHC could create a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth. The question on everyone’s lips when it powered up on 10 September was not, is the machine working but, is this the end of the world? Frustrated physicists everywhere spent all day reassuring the public that their fears were groundless.
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The machine finally whirred into action after months of delay with the first beam making a full circuit of the ring. Physicists were euphoric that it had gone so smoothly and got on with the business of fine-tuning their experiments. They were brought crashing back to earth nine days later when an electrical fault blew a hole in the helium enclosure, releasing 6 tonnes of gas into the tunnel and causing $21 million of damage. Operations manager Lyn Evans is confident that things should be back on track by the middle of 2009. Long may the soap opera continue.
