In scale and appearance, it can only be compared to a cathedral. The chambers that hold the particle detectors, the biggest of them built and maintained by Canadians, are indeed larger than most European
cathedrals, buried a hundred metres below the earth, charged with a city's worth of power and filled with an unholy light.
In its function, too, the Large Hadron Collider this morning will become something of a secular cathedral for the millions of people watching and the thousands of physicists on the site, which spans the Swiss-French border. Here, inside the largest science experiment ever conducted, is the stuff of meditation and prayer, mysteries of the sort that only religion and Big Science can unveil with such grandeur.
Here, emerging from a tunnel at almost the speed of light as protons are brought to impossible speeds around a 27-kilometre track, are the answers to the origins of time, the laws of the universe, the history of all things, and the truth about what the empty spaces hold.
Last night, in the control room of the ATLAS Project, where hundreds of physicists hope to detect for the first time the basic particles that will answer their most profound questions, the talk alternated between mechanical troubles and high cosmology.
"This is what our entire careers have been building up to: It's the one chance in our generation to answer the biggest questions of science," said Christopher Potter, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University who helped build the devices that will, he hopes, detect the mysterious Higgs boson - a widely hypothesized but never detected particle - and other sub-sub-atomic elements whose existence would fill in the embarrassingly empty spaces in our knowledge of the nature of matter and the history of the universe.
As he and his colleagues monitored the computer banks, he began to explain his excitement about the possibility of finding a particle - he is betting his reputation on something called the charged Higgs - that will help to explain what it is that fills the universe (we still really don't know), and what happened at the moment time began, 14 billion years ago.
He was interrupted as a siren's wail filled the room, sounding strikingly like the one on the Starship Enterprise (a bit of physicist humour), warning that a subsection of the $9.5-billion project was acting up.
This was not the only alarm the project has set off. A string of lawsuits have been filed, in European and U.S. courts, calling for the collider to be shut down because the plaintiffs, some of them scientists, believe that the high-energy particle collisions will create black holes or other highly destructive forces that could destroy the Earth. Such lawsuits, not taken seriously by the wider scientific community, have accompanied the launch of almost every major atom-smashing project.
"Of course, we all hope that the Higgs particle will be detected, and that could happen very fast once this collider begins producing data, maybe even next year. But the amazing thing is that none of us really know what will be emitted, and it could well turn out to be something completely new that turns all our theories on their heads," said Swagato Banerjee of the University of Victoria, who is the ATLAS Project's 24-hour on-call expert on the high-speed computer programs used to filter the scientifically useful collisions from the less useful ones, 40 million times a second.
