Science: In the beginning…
We have seen the future and it short-circuited. The mighty Hadron Collider
buried deep beneath Switzerland should have been up and running by now, but
there was a bad join between two magnets and it began heating up. Like a
railway laid low by engineering works, it should be back on track by the
spring, setting up crashes between proton beams at a rate of 600 million per
second. Dr Brian Cox, the British physicist who helped to design it, says
breezily that in 27km of machine, you would expect there to be a fuse, and
this was it.
If there is an individual better framed for optimism than Dr Cox, this planet
has yet to disclose him. He is 40, but looks a decade younger. He resembles
some potential Doctor Who of the distant future, or else a pop star of the
less distant past. Which is what he was as keyboard player with D:Ream, the
band that gave us, and the first Blair campaign, that anthem of general
improvement, Things Can Only Get Better. He talks of impossibly
difficult subjects in a way that lets the layman in, and it is to this skill
that he owes his newer, more solidly stellar role. As well as presenting TV
science programmes, he made a great impact on Newsnight earlier this year
when he explained the problems of the Collider. He is from Oldham and one of
Manchester University’s High Energy Physics group.
The year 2009 will be a good one for him and his work if the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) does what is expected of it; that is, gets up to top speed
and shows how sub-atomic particles behave when smashed together at these
velocities. This, he says, should start to happen some time in the middle of
the year; May or June perhaps, but no later than August. He and his
colleagues at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, know the
Collider has the capacity; it has done the top speed, but not with the
particles on board. Like a car being test-driven, but with no passengers.
“Particle physics is often misunderstood,” says Cox, “because it is seen as
being a search for new particles, whereas what you really want to know is
what these particles do when they collide – basically, how the universe was
built at those energies. It’s not a matter of going up to high energy for
the sake of it; what we have found over the 100 years since Ernest
Rutherford [father of nuclear physics and professor at Manchester from
1907-1919] is that the universe looks simpler as you go to higher energies.
So you are gradually uncovering the underlying structure. We know exactly
the point at which our understanding fails, and that point is at ten times
less energy than the LHC has got. We know that something interesting happens
there, and we know that it is related to mass.”
At a crude level, this is the most tantalising of detective mysteries, with
the Higgs boson or “God particle” lurking somewhere in time and space. “The
thing about the LHC is that it is a new energy regime,” says Cox. “So
anything that we see is interesting. But if there is a Higgs particle, then
that is really quite tricky to see, and you would need to get the machine
going well to do that.” So he has never seen one himself? He gives a
patient, pedagogic smile and says, “No. Never. No one has.” And it is
unlikely that it will become visible in the course of 2009? “Oh, yes!
Unless… unless it’s something with a very dramatic signature, something that
we hadn’t expected at all. So, one example, which is right on the edge of
plausibility, would be extra dimensions in the universe. They would give you
very vivid signatures, and that could remove the need for a Higgs. That
would be completely new physics.” The outer edge of plausibility for 2009?
“The outer edge of plausibility, full stop.”
To envisage Dr Cox’s work, you have to think of him at a detector, in effect a
camera, strategically placed to photograph the results of the head-on proton
collisions. To say that the evolution of this “wreckage” is complex is to
show the inadequacy of words here; because of the random nature of quantum
physics, each of these 600-million-per-second crashes has a different and
unpredictable outcome. The paradox at the heart of the project is that while
the methods seem futuristic, the function is partly archaeological, peering
back for the origins of the matter that we inhabit.
So, moving on from 2009, will Cox understand, in the course of his lifetime,
how the universe, and the world, came into being? “That’s an interesting
question. Not unless there are extra dimensions. They are the key that will
unlock it for us. With the orthodox view, which at the moment is Einstein’s
theory of general relativity, the maths just breaks down at Big Bang and you
can’t address the question.” One fair prediction for 2009 is that Dr Cox’s
own world will change shape when he becomes a father in the spring. He is
married to TV presenter Gia Milinovich and is already stepfather to her
12-year-old son. This is the only time when his fluency deserts him. He says
he feels “great” about it, and describes the two scans he has watched as
“amazing”.
Talking of Einstein, where is God, and what might “His” future be? Einstein
said he was religious in the sense that, “Behind anything that can be
experienced, there is something our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and
sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection,” but he
also said he did not believe in a personal God. What of Dr Cox? “I think
that when you are a scientist, you are comfortable with the answer, ‘I don’t
know.’ The wrong thing is to guess; scientific training should make you know
what you know and what you don’t know, and to be comfortable sitting on the
edge. That’s where I am. It comes up a lot in the US, and I say, ‘I don’t
know how the universe began, and I think God is a guess.’ I don’t care about
the legitimacy of the guess – it’s a guess.
“I have a very good friend [the Rev Victor Stock, dean of Guildford
Cathedral], and we agree pretty much on everything. So, thoughtful
religiosity doesn’t close doors. The human condition is an interesting
thing, and a reaction to it is to try to understand the way the world works.
Another reaction is religion, which is a common one because you want to find
meaning in the world. In that technical sense, they are both valid
reactions. I don’t think they intersect because they are different
approaches to the same thing. There is no conflict at all unless they are
forced to intersect by some sort of misunderstanding. Religious people
wanting to treat the Bible as a textbook force them to intersect, and then
you do get a problem because it is clearly wrong. St Augustine knew that to
treat it as a manual for reality was a disservice to a philosophical text.”
This kind of collision, he agrees, is likely to be observed well beyond 2009.
Alan Franks
