Photo by Opal Gamble

by Ross Diener

Last night I went to the Heuther Hotel for Science in the Pub: The Biggest Gamble in Physics. Cliff Burgess and Lee Smolin, two physicists, were joined by Jennifer Ouellette and Wilson de Silva, two writers, to discuss the gamble in question, which is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC.) You might have heard about the LHC in the news, when it got a lot of hype over a few safety concerns, like the nonsensical possibility that it will destroy the Earth. Don’t worry; it won’t be a physics experiment that destroys the Earth. Nonetheless, this topic that was carefully discussed last night in the pub, among a few other interesting ones. I am going to try to relay some of that discussion in this blog post, and please check out this webpage to dispel any eschatological notions you might have.

Photo by Opal Gamble

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle physics experiment, so it makes sense to quickly discuss what particle physics is all about. You might be wondering, “What the heck is a hadron?” for instance, and there is a lot more jargon in particle physics, so we had better take a quick tour of the particle zoo. Actually, we should take a look at a map of the zoo. As far as we know, the particles in that chart are fundamental, and we call them quarks, leptons and bosons. You might recognize a couple of these particles, like the electron and photon. The others are a bit more exotic, but particles we know like protons and neutrons are made from these. Protons and neutrons are made from ‘u’ and ‘d’ quarks hanging around together like marbles in a pouch, or as Cliff Burgess said, like garbage in a garbage bag. Garbage bags of quarks are called hadrons, so now you know what a hadron is. At the LHC, these garbage-can hadrons are smashed together, and garbage flies everywhere. Then it is up to experimentalists to look through the garbage and find interesting physics there, except the garbage is actually fundamental particles.

Photo by flckr user cyclequark under creative commons

Picking through garbage doesn’t sound like a very fun job, so why are physicists so excited about the LHC? The LHC has the potential to discover the Higgs boson. This important particle is said to give mass to all the other particles. Mass is a bit of a mystery, but if the Higgs boson were discovered, our conception of mass would be that different particles are simply slowed down at different rates by the Higgs field, which permeates all of space. The Higgs boson would also explain why the electromagnetic and weak forces are different, through symmetry breaking. This is probably meaningless to most readers, and I’m not really doing particle physics much justice. But it usually takes part of an upper-level undergraduate physics course to introduce it qualitatively, and then a couple more graduate courses to discuss it quantitatively, and I haven’t taken those courses. So instead lets focus on the social aspects of the LHC, which was also discussed last night, and is something we can all appreciate.

 A common concern of pubgoers was the extraordinary cost of the Large Hadron Collider. Why spend nearly five billion dollars to play with particles that most of us can’t even pronounce. (Is it hay-dron or had-ron?) I hope to convince you that the cost is certainly justified. One panellist put this cost into perspective by noting that five billion dollars is the approximate cost of an aircraft carrier. Lee Smolin also noted that the recent cost of bailing one insurance company is the same as it cost a previous generation to put a man on the moon. So, one could argue that governments have lots of cash, and the LHC is but a minor expense. But you might not think that the government should spend billions of dollars on space exploration, bailouts, or aircraft carriers either, so I know some skeptics will be left unconvinced by the above arguments.

If the miniscule, billion-dollar cost of the LHC doesn’t convince you that it is a good idea, then hopefully the LHC’s potential to make our lives better will do the trick. There will probably be a global energy crisis before I am dead, but the LHC could mitigate that problem by yielding new insights in superconductor technology, possibly in two ways. First, the machine itself is a big pile of superconducting magnets, so advances in superconductivity came from having to build the darn thing. Second, particle physics and the physics of superconductors are not unrelated, so a new insight at the LHC might lead to a breakthrough in our understanding of superconductors. With better superconductors, we could greatly reduce our energy consumption, so my grandchildren might have enough energy to heat their homes. And, of course, this is just one example of the LHC improving our lives. Chances are good that if something new is found at the LHC, it will improve our lives in ways we could not have predicted, even if that happens hundreds of years from now. So there are two benefits, the spinoff technologies of here and now and the unpredictable benefits of the future. But maybe these are still not enough to convince you that the cost is justified, even though you are using the World Wide Web right now, which was a spinoff of particle experiments at CERN. I’ll have you convinced before the end of this blog post.

Jennifer Ouellette was wise to bring up the fact that the LHC will find a use once its done smashing particles. Chalk River Labs is nuclear research laboratory located here in Ontario. It was originally opened in the 1940s to study nuclear physics. Nowadays it produces around half of the world’s medical isotopes. Cyclotrons originally used to study particle physics are now proton beams being used to treat cancer. Old particle smashers are finding use in archaeology and forensics as well. Somebody will find a job for the Large Hadron Collider one it has retired from a career as a particle physicist, and so building it is doubly useful. But you might say that its future use is speculative, or that archaeology sucks, so I have one more argument for you.

The LHC costs a lot of money. It might not produce any new science, and even if it does, that science might never help a single soul. When scientists have given up on it, it may waste away slowly 150 metres underground, where it will be remembered as the biggest mistake in physics. Even if all that misfortune occurs, the LHC is still worthwhile. The LHC will produce thousands of highly trained individuals worldwide. Many of these individuals will make a career of physics, but many won’t. There are physicists working in banks and on Wall Street, building software, developing products for industry, and, of course, teaching. The skills that they developed to work on the LHC will be but to use elsewhere. These people didn’t learn these skills to become bankers. They wanted to learn physics because it is exciting. In fact, I am one of those people. I have been put to work on LHC-related research, and I learned a number of skills. I learned those skills because particle physics is awesome. If I flunk out of Perimeter Institute, I will take my skills and tackle the economic crisis, or the impending energy crisis I mentioned earlier. Maybe I will go work for RIM and build you a better Blackberry. The amount of human currency that the LHC produces is priceless. Thanks to the LHC, I’ve been trained to better understand and communicate physics, and you can’t argue with that; you just sat and read my whole blog post.