Knowledge & Atheism

Many religions have their creation stories, about how a divine being created the universe. Science, too, has its own creation story.That story is about how the matter which now exists in the Universe came to be. The difference between these two stories, is that the one proposed by science can be tested and recreated. We know much about how matter formed way after the big bang, but physicists are now stuck. What we need to do, is recreate the conditions that reigned only fractions of a second after the big bang.

Fast forwatd to September 10, 2008. CERN starts the first experiments with the Large Hadron Collider, and fires the first successful protons around the 27-kilometer tunnel which contains the worlds' larges particle accelerator. The purpose of the LHC is to recreate the conditions during the very first moments after the big bang, along with helping physicists testing predictions of different theories, as well as (in particular) prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson. This machine is going to revolutionize how we see high-energy physics, particle physics and human understanding of the physical laws of nature.

Situated underground, up to 180 meters underneath the French/Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC was built by more than ten thousand scientists and engineers from over a hundred countries. Many universities and other laboratories are also represented. It is, as mention above, the largest, and also the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world. The "ring" formed by the tunnel in which the collider is placed is 27 kilometers in length. The particles that are accelerated through this tunnel, will do eleven thousand (!) rounds around this circle every second. This means that the speed these particles have is equal to about 99.9999999% of the speed of light. There's an impressive feat of speed if there ever was one. I won't be going into the numbers of tera-electronvolts and so on, as it would more than likely make most of the article an incredibly boring read to those uninitiated.

The "stars of the show" here, are, of course, the different detectors that are scattered around this mega-facility. There are seven of them. I will mention a little bit about each one, and go a bit more in depth on a couple of them a bit further down the page. The detectors are named as follows:

ATLAS, which is one of two "general purpose detectors. It is used to look for such things as the origins of mass, (the Higgs boson), signs of new physics, and extra dimensions.

CMS, which has most of the same tasks as ATLAS, but with the addition of look for clues about the nature of dark matter.

ALICE, which studies a fluid form of matter called "quark-gluon plasma", which existed shortly after the Big Bang.

LHCb, which studies the nature of antimatter, and what happened to the missing antimatter that is theorized to have been created at the Big Bang.

TOTEM, which will aim at measurements of total cross section, elastic scattering, and diffractive processes.

LHCf, is supposed to measure the energy of neutral pions that are produced in the collider. This will help explain the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.

MoEDAL, whose prime goal is to search for the Magnetic Monopole or Dyon, and other highly ionizing Stable Massive Particles. (SMP's)

Now, considering that all the experiments in a year produces about 25 petabytes of data per year, you're going to need a massive analytical tool. Now, to put that in perspective, a petabyte is 1024 terabytes. To handle all this raw data, CERN created the LHC Computing Grid, consisting of a world-spanning, grid based networking infrastructure, connecting about 170 computing centers in 36 countries.

The ATLAS detector that was mentioned above was part of the quest to find the Higgs boson, a particle first theorised in 1964 by several scientists, but perhaps, most notably Peter Higgs, who is the particle's namesake. This particle was tentatively confirmed to exist on 14 March, 2013. This is a monumental discovery, since it appears to confirm the existance of the Higgs field, which is pivotal in the Standard model and many other theories in particle physics, where it explains why some fundamental particles have mass, when the symmetries controlling their interactions should cause them to be massless, and linked to this, why the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force. Its existence and knowledge of its exact properties are expected to impact scientific knowledge across a range of fields, and should eventually allow physicists to determine whether the final unproven piece of the Standard Model or a competing theory is more likely to be correct, guide other theories and discoveries in particle physics, and as with other fundamental discoveries of the past —potentially over time lead to developments in new physics, and new technologies.

The quest to understand the origins of the universe was undertaken by the first humans who looked up and asked: "why are we here"? There is nothing more fascinating to us than this question, naïve though it may be. As Stephen Hawking said; "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special." The universe in itself may not have a special purpose for our race of advanced monkeys, but it has ever been our desire to understand the world around us that has gotten us as far as we have to this day. Because of this, we have achieved leaps in all kinds of sciences, be it medicine, astronomy, physics and so on. We may have made a few mistakes along the way, and we may yet make new ones.

The work of every scientist at CERN and at the LHC may prove vital to our understanding of the universe that gave us life, and how that very universe came into being. What lies beyond that, no one can say for sure. But I like to hope, that because of the scientists who work in this field, we may come to know, in not too long.

“We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”

-Brian Cox.

Hope you enjoyed this lengthy read!

~ Lars