Deus Ex Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is like the moon: round, large and mystical. To doubting thinkers, it's like the moon missions: expensive and unnecessary. If you're a fan Dan Brown’s book “Angels & Demons” or the movie based on it, the LHC is dangerous. But whatever you think of it, the Large Hadron Collider is going to change our world -- and here are some of the ways how:

Finding the Higgs Boson: God From the Machine

It's not true to say the LHC was built in Geneva for one reason ... but if it were, the Higgs boson would be it. The Higgs is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics, which explains how our universe works. But it's the only particle in a rather large list -- quarks, electrons, protons, and so on -- that's never been observed. It's important because if it exists it will help explain why things have mass in our universe, which is still a mystery. That makes the Higgs boson so fundamental, and mystical, that it's earned itself a nickname: the God Particle.


Just Building the Thing

The Large Hadron Collider, which is expected to be fully operational this year, really is astonishingly … well, large. It's essentially a giant circular vacuum tube within which particles are accelerated up to a good portion of the speed of light and banged into each other. We've been doing similar things for decades but never on a scale this enormous. Years ago, I worked with a synchrotron -- a superficially similar machine -- and took great pleasure walking the 100m (328-foot) distance around the top of the beam tube, ducking and weaving around the equipment.
Image courtesy of FastCompany.com


But the LHC’s main ring has a circumference of nearly 27 kilometers -- over 16 miles. The key bits of machinery are advanced magnets, about 9,300 in total. Some of them have to be super-cooled to run -- a coolant leak caused the accident that disabled the LHC last year -- and when it's working properly it'll be at a temperature of -271.25ºC (-456.25 Fahrenheit). That requires around 96 tons of liquid helium, and makes the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world. The main ring is also dotted with experimental chambers where the actual physics will happen -- the largest of these is five stories high.

Think about all this being carved into the rock under a mountain, along with all the wiring, cooling, heating, computing and so on. Just building the LHC has taught us a lot about mega-scale engineering.