The two pipes in which proton beams will travel. Credit: Guido Mocafico
On a summer day, you can ride your bicycle through the narrow lanes that bisect fields of grass on the outskirts of Geneva with no thought that, dozens of meters below, one of the most complex construction projects in human history is underway. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just one year from completion at CERN, will be the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, the largest and most technologically sophisticated machine ever built, and one of the greatest scientific endeavors humanity has yet undertaken.
The late Austrian-American physicist Victor Weisskopf described the grand particle accelerators that began to take shape around the world in the 1950's and 60's as the "Gothic cathedrals of the 20th century." The comparison was, and is, apt. The medieval cathedrals pushed the limits of available technology, involved the craftsmanship of literally thousands of skilled workers, and took generations (and sometimes centuries) to complete. Modern particle accelerators require decades from conception to completion and involve scientists from about 80 countries, speaking dozens of languages, whose separate handiwork must mesh together perfectly on the scale of thousandths of millimeters. The physical magnitude of these distinct public works projects is similarly comparable—just one of the LHC's four detectors is large enough to house the Notre Dame Cathedral.
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But the true comparison that probably drove Weisskopf to make his claim is more subtle. Cathedrals were designed to celebrate the glory of God as manifested through the human spirit in words, music and art. The LHC has been engineered to celebrate and proclaim the glory of the natural world, and of our remarkable ability to comprehend it, as manifested through experimental science. It will probe the structure of matter on scales 10 billion times smaller than anything "nano," creating fleeting elementary particles that, since the Big Bang, have existed almost exclusively in the imagination of theoretical physicists. The issues it will seek to address range from the origin of mass to the origin of matter; from surpassing the near-complete Standard Model of physics, that precisely governs particle interactions on a subatomic scale, to unveiling the very fundamental mathematical symmetries that guide the structure and makeup of the natural world.
Weisskopf's comparison is also worth reflecting upon as we recall that Gothic Cathedrals, like their modern counterparts, strained the purse strings of the communities where they were built. The LHC's cost will exceed $8 billion. In a practical world, particularly one in which government deficits and basic human needs abound, one may reasonably ask whether such public largesse can be afforded to such a minority of special interest, particle physicists.
One argument is that the cost of the LHC, built as part of an international collaboration over a decade, pales in comparison to the cost of other government outlays, including maintaining the war in Iraq for a few months. But it is disingenuous to compare apples and oranges in this way. The real question is whether we as a culture can afford not to pursue the questions about the universe that have baffled us for millennia, especially now that we may have the capability to discern the answers. Science is often celebrated as the source of technology, but I believe that celebration is misplaced. Science is a vital part of our culture. Like any lasting piece of art, music or literature, it compels us to reassess our place in the universe—to question where we come from, and where we are going. To turn our back on these questions is to dismiss our cultural inheritance.