It's the world's biggest science experiment - and Canada is a part of it.
The secrets waiting to be unlocked inside the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometre-long underground magnetic track near Geneva where atoms smash into each other to create huge amounts of energy, could be world-changing, scientists say. Textbooks will be rewritten as the universe is understood in a whole new light.
University of Alberta professor James Pinfold is heading the MoEDAL experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN. His mission? With his team of 26 physicists from around the world, he'll seek out the hypothetical magnetic monopole - a single magnetic charge, or pole, that is predicted in the grand unified theory and string theory.
The particle physicist spoke with The Globe about the significance of the Large Hadron Collider and Canada's involvement.
Why is there such fanfare over the LHC, which started up today?
We have something that explains all physics as we know it today and it's called the Standard Model. The Standard Model predicts one particle that we haven't yet seen and that's the Higgs boson. So we want to try to discover the Higgs boson. And if the Standard Model is correct, we should see the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, so it's a big discovery that's going to be made.
And you're on the hunt for monopoles in particular. Why is it important to locate them?
It will alter our fundamental understanding of nature. If we discover monopoles, we discover that magnetic charges come separately as well as electric charges. This will be an absolutely revolutionary thing for physics. It will be a fundamental change in our understanding and be an immensely important result.
How much energy do you need to run your experiment in the collider?
We're just starting out with seven [million million electronvolts] Tuesday and Wednesday. When we run at 14 million million electronvolts, we'll recreate the universe as it was in this little teeny region of the collision. We'll recreate the universe as it was just a million-millionth of a second after the Big Bang. So it's immense energies, but only in teeny, teeny regions, so it won't do a ton of damage.
What kind of damage? There are all kinds of fears that these experiments will put the world at risk.
The energy's so dense, it could trigger all kinds of things. It could trigger mini-black holes, it could trigger the vacuum decay - but let's not worry too much about that.
What would a mini-black hole look like?
It's a particle, you wouldn't even see it. What people are scared it could do is suck in matter and start to suck in the Earth and then destroy the Earth. But with a mini-black hole, this can't be done. Cosmic rays collide at much higher energies with the Earth than we could ever make, and they've never destroyed the Earth or the universe or anything at all.
Will these experiments and potential discoveries change our lives in any way?
It's a bit like the space race; when people landed on the moon, it didn't really impact our lives at all, though it was brilliant to see what humankind could do. I would always see the LHC not as the space race, but as the inner space race. It won't impact our lives, but in the future I think it will.
How?
For example, the monopole, if we gathered enough of them, could create very strong materials that could be used in industrial activity. They could also make super-dense computer memories.
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