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“It’s not quantum mechanics” may often be heard, a remark informing the listener that whatever they are concerned about is nowhere near as difficult, as abstruse, as complicated as quantum mechanics. Indeed to non-physicists or non-mathematicians quantum mechanics must seem virtually impossible to appreciate – pages of incomprehensible algebra buttressed by obscure or frankly paradoxical “explanations”.

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Today, 60 years ago, the visionary convention establishing the European Organization for Nuclear Research – better known with its French acronym, CERN – entered into force, marking the beginning of an extraordinary scientific adventure that has profoundly changed science, technology, and society, and that is still far from over.

With other pan-European institutions established in the late 1940s and early 1950s — like the Council of Europe and the European Coal and Steel Community — CERN shared the same founding goal: to coordinate the efforts of European countries after the devastating losses and large-scale destruction of World War II. Europe had in particular lost its scientific and intellectual leadership, and many scientists had fled to other countries. Time had come for European researchers to join forces towards creating of a world-leading laboratory for fundamental science.

Sixty years after its foundation, CERN is today the largest scientific laboratory in the world, with more than 2000 staff members and many more temporary visitors and fellows. It hosts the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. It also hosts exhibitions, lectures, shows, meetings, and debates, providing a forum of discussion where science meets industry and society.

What has happened in these six decades of scientific research? As a physicist, I should probably first mention the many ground-breaking discoveries in Particle Physics, such as the discovery of some of the most fundamental building block of matter, like the W and Z bosons in 1983; the measurement of the number of neutrino families at LEP in 1989; and of course the recent discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, which prompted the Nobel Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert in 2013.

But looking back at the glorious history of this laboratory, much more comes to mind: the development of technologies that found medical applications such as PET scans; computer science applications such as globally distributed computing, that finds application in many fields ranging from genetic mapping to economic modeling; and the World Wide Web, that was developed at CERN as a network to connect universities and research laboratories.

If you’ve ever asked yourself what such a laboratory may look like, especially if you plan to visit it in the future and expect to see building with a distinctive sleek, high-tech look, let me warn you that the first impression may be slightly disappointing. When I first visited CERN, I couldn’t help noticing the old buildings, dusty corridors, and the overall rather grimy look of the section hosting the theory institute. But it was when an elevator brought me down to visit the accelerator that I realized what was actually happening there, as I witnessed the colossal size of the detectors, and the incredible degree of sophistication of the technology used. ATLAS, for instance, is a 25 meters high, 25 meters wide and 45 meters long detector, and it weighs about 7,000 tons!

The 27-km long Large Hadron Collider is currently shut down for planned upgrades. When new beams of protons will be circulated in it at the end of 2014, it will be at almost twice the energy reached in the previous run. There will be about 2800 bunches of protons in its orbit, each containing several hundred billion protons, separated by – as in a car race, the distance between bunches can be expressed in units of time – 250 billionths of a second. The energy of each proton will be compared to that of a flying mosquito, but concentrated in a single elementary particle. And the energy of an entire bunch of protons will be comparable to that of a medium-sized car launched at highway speed.

Why these high energies? Einstein’s E=mc² tells us that energy can be converted to mass, so by colliding two protons with very high energy, we can in principle produce very heavy particles, possibly new particles that we have never before observed. You may wonder why we would expect that such new particles exist. After all we have already successfully created Higgs bosons through very high-energy collisions, what can we expect to find beyond that? Well, that’s where the story becomes exciting.

Some of the best motivated theories currently under scrutiny in the scientific community – such as Supersymmetry – predict that not only should new particles exist, but they could explain one of the greatest mysteries in Cosmology: the presence of large amounts of unseen matter in the Universe, which seem to dominate the dynamics of all structures in the Universe, including our own Milky Way galaxy — Dark Matter.

Identifying in our accelerators the substance that permeates the Universe and shapes its structure would represent an important step forward in our quest to understand the Cosmos, and our place in it. CERN, 60 years and still going strong, is rising up to challenge.

Headline image credit: An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Image by Lucas Taylor, CERN. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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2014 marks not just the centenary of the start of World War I, and the 75^th anniversary of World War II, but on 29 September it is 60 years since the establishment of CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research or, in its modern form, Particle Physics. Less than a decade after European nations had been fighting one another in a terrible war, 12 of those nations had united in science. Today, CERN is a world laboratory, famed for having been the home of the world wide web, brainchild of then CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee; of several Nobel Prizes for physics, although not (yet) for Peace; and most recently, for the discovery of the Higgs Boson. The origin of CERN, and its political significance, are perhaps no less remarkable than its justly celebrated status as the greatest laboratory of scientific endeavour in history.

Its life has spanned a remarkable period in scientific culture. The paradigm shifts in our understanding of the fundamental particles and the forces that control the cosmos, which have occurred since 1950, are in no small measure thanks to CERN.

In 1954, the hoped for simplicity in matter, where the electron and neutrino partner a neutron and proton, had been lost. Novel relatives of the proton were proliferating. Then, exactly 50 years ago, the theoretical concept of the quark was born, which explains the multitude as bound states of groups of quarks. By 1970 the existence of this new layer of reality had been confirmed, by experiments at Stanford, California, and at CERN.

During the 1970s our understanding of quarks and the strong force developed. On the one hand this was thanks to theory, but also due to experiments at CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings: the ISR. Head on collisions between counter-rotating beams of protons produced sprays of particles, which instead of flying in all directions, tended to emerge in sharp jets. The properties of these jets confirmed the predictions of quantum chromodynamics – QCD – the theory that the strong force arises from the interactions among the fundamental quarks and gluons.

CERN had begun in 1954 with a proton synchrotron, a circular accelerator with a circumference of about 600 metres, which was vast at the time, although trifling by modern standards. This was superseded by a super-proton synchrotron, or SPS, some 7 kilometres in circumference. This fired beams of protons and other particles at static targets, its precision measurements building confidence in the QCD theory and also in the theory of the weak force – QFD, quantum flavourdynamics.

QFD brought the electromagnetic and weak forces into a single framework. This first step towards a possible unification of all forces implied the existence of W and Z bosons, analogues of the photon. Unlike the massless photon, however, the W and Z were predicted to be very massive, some 80 to 90 times more than a proton or neutron, and hence beyond reach of experiments at that time. This changed when the SPS was converted into a collider of protons and anti-protons. By 1984 experiments at the novel accelerator had discovered the W and Z bosons, in line with what QFD predicted. This led to Nobel Prizes for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer, in 1984.

The confirmation of QCD and QFD led to a marked change in particle physics. Where hitherto it had sought the basic templates of matter, from the 1980s it turned increasingly to understanding how matter emerged from the Big Bang. For CERN’s very high-energy experiments replicate conditions that were prevalent in the hot early universe, and theory implies that the behaviour of the forces and particles in such circumstances is less complex than at the relatively cool conditions of daily experience. Thus began a period of high-energy particle physics as experimental cosmology.

This raced ahead during the 1990s with LEP – the Large Electron Positron collider, a 27 kilometre ring of magnets underground, which looped from CERN towards Lake Geneva, beneath the airport and back to CERN, via the foothills of the Jura Mountains. Initially designed to produce tens of millions of Z bosons, in order to test QFD and QCD to high precision, by 2000 its performance was able to produce pairs of W bosons. The precision was such that small deviations were found between these measurements and what theory implied for the properties of these particles.

The explanation involved two particles, whose subsequent discoveries have closed a chapter in physics. These are the top quark, and the Higgs Boson.

As gaps in Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements in the 19^th century had identified new elements, so at the end of the 20^th century a gap in the emerging pattern of particles was discerned. To complete the menu required a top quark.

The precision measurements at LEP could be explained if the top quark exists, too massive for LEP to produce directly, but nonetheless able to disturb the measurements of other quantities at LEP courtesy of quantum theory. Theory and data would agree if the top quark mass were nearly two hundred times that of a proton. The top quark was discovered at Fermilab in the USA in 1995, its mass as required by the LEP data from CERN.

As the 21^st century dawned, all the pieces of the “Standard Model” of particles and forces were in place, but one. The theories worked well, but we had no explanation of why the various particles have their menu of masses, or even why they have mass at all. Adding mass into the equations by hand is like a band-aid, capable of allowing computations that agree with data to remarkable precision. However, we can imagine circumstances, where particles collide at energies far beyond those accessible today, where the theories would predict nonsense — infinity as the answer for quantities that are finite, for example. A mathematical solution to this impasse had been discovered fifty years ago, and implied that there is a further massive particle, known as the Higgs Boson, after Peter Higgs who, alone of the independent discoveries of the concept, drew attention to some crucial experimental implications of the boson.

Discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN in 2012 following the conversion of LEP into the LHC – Large Hadron Collider – is the climax of CERN’s first 60 years. It led to the Nobel Prize for Higgs and Francois Englert, theorists whose ideas initiated the quest. Many wondered whether the Nobel Foundation would break new ground and award the physics prize to a laboratory, CERN, for enabling the experimental discovery, but this did not happen.

CERN has been associated with other Nobel Prizes in Physics, such as to Georges Charpak, for his innovative work developing methods of detecting radiation and particles, which are used not just at CERN but in industry and hospitals. CERN’s reach has been remarkable. From a vision that helped unite Europe, through science, we have seen it breach the Cold War, with collaborations in the 1960s onwards with JINR, the Warsaw Pact’s scientific analogue, and today CERN has become truly a physics laboratory for the world.

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We’re celebrating the release of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ with a series of posts by science writer Jim Baggott over the week to explain some of the mysteries of the Higgs boson. Read the previous posts: “What is the Higgs boson?”, “Why is the Higgs boson called the ‘god particle’?”, “Is the particle recently discovered at CERN’s LHC the Higgs boson?”, and “How does the Higgs mechanism create mass?”

By Jim Baggott

The 4 July discovery announcement makes it clear that the new particle is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson. The next step is therefore reasonably obvious. Physicists involved in the ATLAS and CMS detector collaborations at the LHC will be keen to push ahead and fully characterize the new particle. They will want to know if this is indeed the Higgs boson.

How can they tell?

I mentioned in the third post in this series that the physicists at Fermilab’s Tevatron and CERN’s LHC have been searching for the Higgs boson by looking for the tell-tale products of its different predicted decay pathways. The current standard model of particle physics is used to predict the rates of production of the Higgs boson in high-energy particle collisions and the rates of its various decay modes. After subtracting the ‘background’ that arises from all the other ways in which the decay products can be produced, the physicists are left with an excess of events that can be ascribed to Higgs boson decays.

Now that we know the new particle has a mass of between 125-126 billion electron-volts (equivalent to the mass of about 134 protons), both the calculations and the experiments can be focused tightly on this specific mass value.

So far, excess events have been observed for three important decay pathways. These involve the decay of the Higgs boson to two photons ( H → γγ), two Z bosons (H → ZZ → ι⁺ι^-ι⁺ι^-) and two W particles (H → W⁺W^- → ι⁺υ ι^-υ). You will notice that these pathways all involve the production of bosons. This should come as no real surprise, as the Higgs field is responsible for breaking the symmetry between the weak and electromagnetic forces, giving mass to the W and Z particles and leaving the photon massless.

The decay rates to these three pathways are broadly as predicted by the standard model. There is an observed enhancement in the rate of decay to two photons compared to predictions, but this may be the result of statistical fluctuations. Further data on this pathway will determine whether or not there’s a problem (or maybe a clue to some new physics) in this channel.

But the Higgs field is also involved in giving mass to fermions (matter particles, such as electrons and quarks). The Higgs boson is therefore also predicted to decay into fermions, specifically very large massive fermions such as bottom and anti-bottom quarks, and tau and anti-tau leptons. Bottom quarks and tau leptons (heavy versions of the electron) are third-generation matter particles with masses respectively of about 4.2 billion electron volts (about 4 and a half proton masses) and 1.8 billion electron volts (about 1.9 proton masses).

These decay pathways are a little more problematic. The backgrounds from other processes are more significant and considerably more data are required to discriminate the background from genuine Higgs decay events. The decay to bottom and anti-bottom quarks was studied at the Tevatron before it was shut down earlier this year. But the collider had insufficient collision energy and luminosity (a measure of the number of collisions that the particle beams can produce) to enable independent discovery of the Higgs boson.

ATLAS physicist Jon Butterworth, who writes a blog for the British newspaper The Guardian, recently gave his assessment:

If and when we see the Higgs decaying in these two [fermion] channels at roughly the predicted rates, I will probably start calling this new boson the Higgs rather than a Higgs. It won’t prove it is exactly the Standard Model Higgs boson of course, and looking for subtle differences will be very interesting. But it will be close enough to justify [calling it] the definite article.

When will this happen? This is hard to judge, but perhaps we will have an answer by the end of this year.

Jim Baggott is author of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ and a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to pursue a business career, where he first worked with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Atomic: The First War of Physics (Icon, 2009), Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2003), A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), and A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2010). Read his previous blog posts.

On 4 July 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility in Geneva announced the discovery of a new elementary particle they believe is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, or ‘god particle’. Our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter — everything in our visible universe and everything we are — is about to take a giant leap forward. So, what is the Higgs boson and why is it so important? What role does it play in the structure of material substance? We’re celebrating the release of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ with a series of posts by science writer Jim Baggott over the week to explain some of the mysteries of the Higgs. Read the previous posts: “What is the Higgs boson?”,“Why is the Higgs boson called the ‘god particle’?”, “Is the particle recently discovered at CERN’s LHC the Higgs boson?”, and “How does the Higgs mechanism create mass?”

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We’re celebrating the release of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ with a series of posts by science writer Jim Baggott over the week to explain some of the mysteries of the Higgs boson. Read the previous posts: “What is the Higgs boson?” and “Why is the Higgs boson called the ‘god particle’?”

By Jim Baggott

Experimental physicists are by nature very cautious people, often reluctant to speculate beyond the boundaries defined by the evidence at hand.

Although the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the acquisition of mass, the theory does not give a precise prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson itself. The search for the Higgs boson, both at Fermilab’s Tevatron collider and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has therefore involved elaborate calculations of all the different ways a Higgs boson might be created in high-energy particle collisions, and all the different ways it may decay into other elementary particles.

At CERN, the attentions of physicists working in the two main detector collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, have been drawn to Higgs decay pathways involving the production of two photons (which we write as H → γγ), a pathway leading to two Z bosons and thence four leptons (particles such as electrons and positrons, written H → ZZ → ι⁺ι^-ι⁺ι^-) and a pathway leading to two W particles and thence to two leptons and two neutrinos (H → W⁺W^- → ι⁺υ ι^-υ).

Finding the Higgs boson is then a matter of looking for its decay products — in this case the photons and leptons that result — at all the different masses that the Higgs may in theory possess. Just to make life more difficult, at the particle collision energies available at the LHC, there are lots of other processes that can produce photons and leptons, and this background must be calculated and subtracted from the observed decay events. Any events above background that produce two photons, four leptons or two leptons (and ‘missing’ energy, as neutrinos cannot be detected) then contribute to the evidence for the Higgs boson.

What the CERN scientists announced on 4 July was a statistically significant excess of decay events consistent with a Higgs boson with a mass between 125-126 billion electron volts, about 134 times the mass of a proton. This is definitely a new boson, one that decays very much like a Higgs boson is expected to decay. But, until the scientists can gather more data on its physical properties, they can’t say for sure precisely what kind of boson it is.

It’s also important to note that although the Higgs boson is predicted by the standard model of particle physics, there are theories that also predict the existence of a Higgs boson (actually, they predict many Higgs bosons). Until the scientists gather more data, they can’t be sure the new particle is precisely the particle predicted by the standard model.

We just need to be patient and stay tuned.

Jim Baggott is author of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ and a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to pursue a business career, where he first worked with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Atomic: The First War of Physics (Icon, 2009), Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2003), A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), and A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2010). Read his previous blog posts.

On 4 July 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility in Geneva announced the discovery of a new elementary particle they believe is consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson, or ‘god particle’. Our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter — everything in our visible universe and everything we are — is about to take a giant leap forward. So, what is the Higgs boson and why is it so important? What role does it play in the structure of material substance? We’re celebrating the release of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ with a series of posts by science writer Jim Baggott over the week to explain some of the mysteries of the Higgs. Read the previous posts: “What is the Higgs boson?” and “Why is the Higgs boson called the ‘god particle’?”

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Subscribe to only physics and chemistry articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
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By Frank Close To readers of Neutrino, rest assured: there is no need yet for a rewrite based on news that neutrinos might travel faster than light. I have already advertised my caution in The Observer, and a month later nothing has changed. If anything, concerns about the result have increased.

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The science and even the popular press are filled with excitement at the moment after the OPERA experiment at Europe’s giant particle physics laboratory, CERN (to which I applied for a summer job when I was 16, but that’s another story). Apparently, neutrinos sent from CERN and captured at Italy’s INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory about 730 km away are arriving faster than scientists thought physically possible – faster than the speed of light travelling in a vacuum.

I had to write about this because the news reporting has really annoyed me. Every announcement has said that Einstein might be wrong because he (special relativity) says nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Poppycock! (As I’m being polite.) What the theory says is that nothing that has what scientists call “rest mass” can travel at the speed of light – there isn’t any block on things travelling faster. It’s always slightly surprised me that in a discipline where mathematical physicists are used to things called discontinuous functions, I rarely hear of people willing to accept that something could go from “slower” to “faster” without having to “equal”, but it might be possible.

One argument against travelling faster than light is that, although there are solutions to Einstein’s equations, they contain the square root of minus one which we sometimes call an “imaginary” number (as opposed to other numbers that are called “real”). This is a brilliant example of mathematical spin and how it has actually damaged our understanding of mathematics and the universe. There is nothing less real about these imaginary numbers than what are called the real ones. It’s actually by combining both set that we achieve a far deeper understanding of the mathematical and physical universe. But way back when they were first introduced, French mathematician and philosopher Rene Decartes was very distrustful of them so coined the term imaginary as a pejorative description, hoping it would mean they didn’t catch on. He’s got a lot to answer for.

What is a neutrino? Like the similarly named neutron, a neutrino carries no net electric charge (compared with other familiar subatomic particles such as electrons (-1) or protons (+1). Unlike the neutron, the neutrino has almost (but not quite) no mass. Having no charge and almost no mass makes a neutrino extremely difficult to detect.

Back to relativity! Anything travelling faster than light in relativity yields solutions including the square root of minus one which people have interpreted as meaning travelling backwards in time. That’s the reason for the joke that’s currently doing the rounds on the twittersphere:

Barman: “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t serve neutrinos in here.”

A neutrino walks into a bar.

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Today, I have the pleasure of featuring a guest post by Stephen Tremp. Stephen is the author of a science-fiction trilogy that incorporates wormholes, proposed theories of physics, and scientific discoveries. Being a fan of science, and that which might be, I look forward to reading all three of Stephen Tremp's books.


Okay, now on to a very interesting guest post:

Write another book, for Pete's sake
Stephen Tremp

Some of the best advice I’ve heard in a while came from one of my Yahoo! Writers Groups. The discussion was promoting your book:

Member Post: You can definitely promote too much and people get sick of hearing about the author and the book. Especially if it's always the same title. I just roll my eyes and say, "Write another book, for Pete's sake"!

Member Response: I agree! Talk about something besides YOUR book or YOUR writing, whether you are touring or not. Remember human nature - people don't care about YOU, they care about THEM.

Simple, yet powerful. Fortunately, I’m almost finished with the drafts for the next two installments in the Breakthrough trilogy entitled Opening and Escalation. Honestly, I am tired of talking about Breakthrough. However, I will discuss the promotional and sales aspects of Breakthrough during the next few months, what works and what doesn’t work, as this falls under the “Remember human nature - people don't care about YOU, they care about THEM" catagory.

I did a Blog Book Tour last November and did not do much in the way of promoting Breakthrough simply because most people are familiar with it. Instead, I focused on relevant and practical topics people can use for themselves. This being said, I thought I would take a moment to promote my trilogy in its entirety. Each book is written as a stand alone story, yet there is still plenty unresolved conflict that readers will want to buy the next installment. In a nutshell, the three books compromise the following concepts:

Breakthrough: A scientific discovery of such magnitude it could radically alter the future of humanity – for better or worse – is in the wrong hands. A breakthrough in Einstein-Rosen Bridges, or wormholes, is stolen by a group of misguided M.I.T. graduate students and used to assassinate global figures. As the death toll mounts, will Protagonist Chase Manhattan escape their hit list and stop more murders?

Opening: Wormholes are just the beginning. They are the key that opens Pandora’s box. More proposed theories of physics (theories physicists propose may be true but have yet to verify under rigorous testing) are introduced. Faith and science collide with cataclysmic results.

Escalation: Events escalate on a global scale. In the end, technology has gone too far mankind and is not ready for one of the greatest scientific discoveries in the history of mankind. Will Chase be able to destroy the discovery which threatens life as we know it?

I'm fort

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Frank Close, OBE is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now the British Science Association), Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. His most recent book examines one of the oddest discoveries in physics - antimatter.

In the post below, Frank Close reveals the fallacies concerning antimatter in the Dan Brown novel (and now major cinema release) Angels and Demons. He has previously written for OUPblog on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Many people have never heard of CERN. Of those that have, most know it as the birthplace of the World Wide Web; fewer knew its main purpose, which is as the European Centre for experiments in particle physics. However, with the appearance of Angels and Demons CERN is about to become famous as a laboratory in Geneva that makes antimatter. These two statements about CERN are correct; much else in Dan Brown’s novel, which inspired the movie and has led to much of the popular received wisdom about antimatter, is not.

The movie is of course fiction, but the book on which it is based teases readers with a preface headlined “FACT”. This includes “Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation… is highly unstable and ignites when it comes in contact with absolutely anything… a single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb”. CERN is credited as having created “the first particles of antimatter” and the curtain metaphorically rises to the question whether this “highly volatile substance will save the world, or… be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made”.

These “facts” are at best misleading and even wrong, but many, including some in the US military, believe them to be true.

Antiparticles have been made for 80 years; a few atoms of antihydrogen have been made at CERN during the last decade; antimatter, in the sense of anti-atoms organised into amounts large enough to see, let alone contain, is still in the realms of fantasy and likely to remain so.

In Angels and Demons the experimental production of antimatter being equated with The Creation is so central to the plot that a scientist tells the Pope the “good news”, even though it is decades old. Whatever led to our universe, it was not akin to the creation of matter at CERN, in either the fictional or the real world. It is not “something from nothing… practically proof that Genesis is a scientific possibility”. This is at best cod theology and non-science.

The Big Bang is the creation of all energy, all matter, and all of the known universe, together with its space and time. We cannot recreate that singular event, but we can examine what happened afterwards, within what became our present universe.

Energy, lots of it, is what turned into matter and antimatter. Energy is not nothing; it is measurable and when you use some the power company will charge you for it. When you create antimatter together with its matter counterpart, you have to put in the same amount of energy as would be released were they to annihilate one another; you do not get matter from nothing. Now reverse the process, such that antimatter meets matter and is turned back into radiant energy. That certainly is not nothing, as Angels and Demons recognises since the resulting blast is what is going to destroy the Vatican.

It is at this point that some in the US military seem to have adopted this fictional work as its practical guide to antimatter, and to have ignored its many contradictions. The preface of Angels and Demons described antimatter as the ideal source of energy which “creates no pollution or radiation and a droplet could power New York for a day”. Antimatter may not emit radiation so long as it stays away from matter, but in that case it offers nothing to bomb makers or power companies. In order to exploit this “volatile” substance, you need to annihilate it with matter, at which it releases its trapped energy as radiation such as gamma rays.

The statement that there are “No byproducts, no radiation, no pollution” is ironic given that it occurs within a few paragraphs of a warning to beware of the gamma rays. The US Air Force were enthused so much that in promoting their interest in antimatter for weapons they announced “No Nuclear Residue”. The media trumpeted that “a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military’s dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called `clean’ superbomb” San Francisco Chronicle 4 October 2004, uncanny examples of fiction, written in 2000, presented as if fact in 2004.

As a major milestone in antimatter science CERN is indeed marvellous, but trifling compared with what would be needed to make antimatter in industrial quantities. Even were it possible, the belief that antimatter technology could “save the planet” is specious. As we first have to make the antimatter ourselves, we would waste more energy in making it than we could ever get back, so antimatter is not a panacea for “saving the planet”. Thankfully, neither will it become “the most deadly weapon”.

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Frank Close, OBE, is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He received the Institute of Physics’ Kelvin Medal in 1996, awarded for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics. He is the author of The Void, Very Short Introduction to Particle Physics, The Particle Odyssey and many more.  Also, look for Antimatter in January, Close’s newest book.

We asked Close to explain the importance of the Large Hadron Collider to us.  He kindly sent us the post below and the following analogy, comparing the journey for answers about the origin of the universe to sewing a tapestry:  “The quest is like sewing a tapestry, but one where the picture is only revealed as you do so. First you have to make a needle, then feed it with thread and then finally start sewing. It took 20 years to design and build the needle. Last Wednesday we started to put thread through the needle’s eye. It will take some time before we have enough thread, tightly enough wrapped and in sufficient colors to start sewing. That will be later this year or next spring. If we are lucky there may be some parts of the picture where the image quickly comes clear; other parts of the picture may take a lot of time and careful work before the images can be discerned.”

Keep reading to find out the answers this tapestry may hold.

Only nature knows what happened in the long-ago dawn of the Big Bang; but soon humans will too. The visions of the new world will hopefully be tomorrow’s stories. If you want a machine to show how the universe was in the moments of creation, you don’t find it in the scientific instrument catalogs: you have to build it yourself. And so scientists and engineers around the world pooled their knowledge to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Immediately there were problems. Beyond the ability of a single continent, this became a truly global endeavor; unparalleled in ambition, in political and financial challenges. At its conception, the state of the art in cryogenics, magnets, information technology, and a whole range of technologies was far short of what would be required for the LHC to work. The whole enterprise relied on the belief that bright ideas would emerge to solve problems, any one of which could have proved a show-stopper. There were many who feared that particle physics had bitten off more than it could chew; that the LHC was over-ambitious; that this would be the end of physics.

Now we are almost there. Wednesday, Sept 10 when the current was turned on, and for the first time a beam of protons circulated through the vacuum tubes colder than outer space, was just the start. The next step will be to send two beams, in opposite directions – well, that’s been done but not yet intensely enough to smash into one another and produce data. That is still for the future. At first, and for some months, they are likely to be too diffuse and low energy to produce anything of great use to science. Only later when high energy intense beams collide, and the debris from those mini-bangs pour through the gargantuan detectors, which in turn speed signals to the waiting computers, will the moment we’ve waited for have arrived. A year or two accumulating data and the first answers to the big questions will begin to emerge.

The seeds of matter were created in the aftermath of the Big Bang: quarks, which clustered together making protons and neutrons as the newborn universe cooled, and the electron, which today is found in the outer reaches of atoms. We and everything hereabouts are made of atoms. In the sun and stars intense heat rips atoms apart into their constituents, electrons, protons and neutrons.

By colliding beams of particles, such as electrons or protons, head-on, it is possible to simulate the high-energy hot conditions of the stars and the early universe. At CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) in the 1980s a machine called LEP (Large Electron Positron collider) collided electrons and their antimatter analogues, positrons, fast enough that they mutually annihilated and created for brief moments in a region smaller than an atom, the conditions that occurred within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang. Trying to reach time zero is like finding the end of the rainbow, and the LHC will take us ten to a hundred times further than ever before. At the LHC the beams of protons will pack a bigger punch and their collisions will show how the universe was at its infancy and perhaps give us some insight to how the universe evolved.

Within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the material particles from which we are made, and the disparate forces that act on them, had become encoded into the fabric of the universe. However, the events that led our universe to win the lottery of life were decided earlier than this. Some of them we believe occurred in the epoch that is now within our reach. That is what the LHC promises to reveal.

As the 21st century begins, physics can explain almost all of the fundamental phenomena revealed in the search for our origins, yet there are niggling loose ends. We see hints of a unified theory vaguely in the shadows, but what it is and how the structures that led to the particles and forces that molded us are still perceived only vaguely.

Why are there three spatial dimensions; could there be more? Cosmology suggests that “normal matter” is but one percent of the whole, and that we are but flotsam on a sea of “dark matter”. What that dark sea consists of, how it was formed, why there is any matter at all rather than a hellish ferment of radiation, are unknown.

Why is there structure and solidity to matter when our theories would be happier if everything flitted around at the speed of light? Theorists believe that all structure and ultimately the solidity of matter are the result of a field of force that today permeates the universe known as the Higgs field. This can be made to reveal itself if the conditions are right. For example, as an electromagnetic field can be stimulated to send out electromagnetic waves, so can the Higgs field create waves. However to create these waves requires huge energy. The LHC has been designed to achieve these conditions. As an electromagnetic wave comes in quantum bundles, particles known as photons, so the Higgs waves will come in the form of particles known as Higgs bosons.

There is also the question: why there is anything at all? In the beginning there was nothing: “there was darkness on the face of the void”. Then came a burst of energy: “let there be light and there was light”, though from where it came no-one knows. What we do know is what happened next: this energy coagulated into matter and its mysterious opposite, antimatter, in perfect balance. Anti-matter destroys anything it touches in a pyrotechnic flash. So how did the early universe manage to survive self-annihilation between the newly born matter and antimatter? Something as yet unknown must have occurred in those first moments to upset the balance. For several years we have glimpsed a subtle asymmetry between arcane forms of matter and antimatter made from “strange” and “bottom” quarks and antiquarks. One of the goals of the LHC will be to produce large numbers of particles of bottom matter and their antimatter counterparts in the hope of finding the source of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter.

Ultimately however, this is a voyage of discovery into a world that once existed but was lost in the sands of time, 13.6 billion years ago. Like some astonishing Jurassic Park, the LHC will show once more what that epoch was like. We have ideas of what is to be found, and there are certainly questions, such as those above, whose answers we crave. But in focusing on them like this we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are at the stage of witnessing remarkable engineering, and it is those we should be applauding; as for discoveries in fundamental science – watch this space.

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