CERN: Outrageous Ambition
Beneath a blue sky on the sunniest day, you hold your arms out and feel the sunlight. That light was created eight minutes before the time it touches your skin. When night has come, the stars shine, what we can see with the naked eye is over four million years back in time. The light of those stars, new to you, is a glimpse of our universe from before our species even existed. The universe, however, is 13.7 billion years old. To look further 'back in time', scientists need something stronger than the human eye. The world's most powerful telescope is The Hubble Telescope, first put into orbit in 1990 after more than 70 years of research and development. The Hubble can see into the "Cosmic Dark Ages," a time in the universe's past when the universe was still so compact, so dense that not even the light of the stars could escape it. These dark ages were within thousands of years--not billions, mere thousands of the initial "Big Bang," that cosmic event which was the catalyst for all of the universe as we know it. This 13 million years into the past brings astronomers to the "Visual Edge." For most people, that would be far enough. What else could we possible learn of the stars or the universe by looking further than that?
Nobel Laureate and Particle Physicist Dr. Leon Lederman answers that question, "we have the outrageous ambition of understanding how the world works." He along with the more than 10,000 engineers from 85 countries, collectively known as CERN, have over the course of two decades conspired and toiled to build the most ambitious time machine of sorts. It is a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) spanning a circumference of 16.8 miles, 328 feet below ground in Geneva and straddling the borders of France and Switzerland. It was built to accelerate protons close to the speed of light causing as many as 800 particle collisions per second. These collisions are capable of creating the same conditions present in the universe 1/1billionth of a second following the instant of the "Big Bang." Built with upwards of 2,000 electromagnets the ultimate purpose of the LHC is to explain everything. After all, one scientist explains, "Science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing."
CERN's incredibly ambitious and equally expensive project, is the final focus of the Horizon Special "The Six Billion Dollar Experiment," aired originally on the BBC. I say 'final focus' because for Director James Van Der Pool to draw the audience's enthusiasm for the LHC up to that of the scientists featured in the documentary, there was first a lot of explaining to do. To Van Der Pool's credit he was able to not only make the documentary very visually stimulating but used techniques and a classy soundtrack that almost made me forget that it was a documentary. Between the somewhat intimate portraits of several scientists, Van Der Pool set his pace by the extraordinarily enthusiastic Dr. Brian Cox of England's University of Manchester. The BBC has featured the forty year old particle physicist on several shows for his skill at introducing and explaining complex science to nonscientific audiences and graciously without making us feel stupid. Cox's good looks and enthusiasm have earned him the reputation as the "Rock star of the physics world." He's easy to find on the Internet and his charisma is infectious. One anonymous online commenter described him as "the happiest scientist I've ever seen. More than anything that tells you CERN is the particle physics equivalent of getting laid." Direct, but not off the mark.
With glimpses of the massive CERN structure peppered throughout to remind you what the documentary is actually about, the film steps through a basic outline of how astronomy and particle physics came to intersect. The history is delivered by a handful of scientists, with interludes of Cox's metaphorical explanations, sly smiles and quick British wit. What is of interest is not just the demonstration of the Hubble Telescope's methodology and power, but an introduction to a lost legend of the physics world, the Horn Antenna. Tucked away and abandoned at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, this now historic landmark was the site of one of science's greatest discoveries. It was the discovery of microwave background radiation by two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. That makes little sense to most of us, and at the time it was to them simply nuisance noise. What they had uncovered, however was the sliver of proof needed to confirm George Gamow's and Abbe Georges Lemaitre's "Big Bang" theory. This incredible moment in science made in 1965 is now represented by an empty metal horn occupied by bugs, a novelty that still stands in New Jersey if you'd like to see it. Professor David Spergel of Princeton University tells the history of it with a suppressed glee, proving that Penzias and Wilson's discovery was a huge turning point for cosmic science, when cosmology ceased to be primarily theoretical speculation and became an active, quantifiable observation.
In keeping with Spergel's demonstration of the hard changes in science, the documentary takes a turn for the more complex. The remainder of the film gears up the audience to have a deeper understanding of the actual science behind the CERN Large Hadron Collider. This is necessary for two reasons; one, to be able to address the public concerns people voiced of the safety issues, and two, to address the exciting possibilities that the LHC may offer. Early in the film there were narrative whispers of the public's fear that turning on the LHC could create a black hole that would then consume the Earth. Done of course for dramatic effect, the director waits until near the end to dispel that notion. Professor Lisa Randall of Harvard University states that those black holes that may form are so minuscule and dissipate so quickly, they pose no threat. She also goes on to describe the possibilities of uncovering those dimensions of which we are still not yet aware, a prospect which seems to excite her greatly.
Dr. Brian Cox animatedly tells of their collective hopes of "discovering what makes stuff stuff," and in the process explains what, exactly, a Higgs particle is and why we need to find one. Meanwhile Dr. Lederman and the others express that discovering there is no Higgs particle would be just as important. Van Der pool is very tactful at avoiding controversy and never allows it stated that this Higgs particle of which they speak was bluntly labeled by the Press as "The God Particle." The Higgs Boson, they explain, is the missing piece toward understanding how and why some matter attains mass and other matter does not. It is the final piece to the twelve particle construct known as The Standard Model. The periodic table of a elementary particles, the actual building blocks of all the known universe. As no one in the documentary denies, it is an ambitious search. Perhaps with another $6billion the team at CERN will find the answer, but there will always be another question.