Large Hadron Collider's Spills, Chills, Thrills

After a rough start last year which saw some pretty important electrical components fry just as things were getting interesting, the 17-mile Large Hadron Collider that loops beneath the French-Swiss border just outside of Geneva is moving back towards operational status.

In September of 2008, a little over a week after the first beam was circulated through the collider’s chamber, a failure occurred in several of the massive electromagnets that focus and direct the beams. Six tons of helium flooded the chamber, causing temperatures to rapidly rise by about a hundred degrees. Extensive repairs were required, setting things back more than a year.

In preparation for full powered experimentation into still-hidden aspects and properties of matter — those that may help us move closer to an understanding of the origins of the universe — the LHC chamber is once again among the coldest known places in the universe at a couple mere degrees above absolute zero, as the BBC reports.

Low energy beams and their ensuing smashing of particles will reportedly begin in November, with full power experimentation slated for December or January.

Or will they?

In an article worthy of the mantle of truth being far stranger than fiction (science fiction or otherwise), the New York Times writes of two prominent physicists who propose the setbacks at Hadron — and the failures of other physics facilities intent to seek out the same physics holy grail, the Higgs boson — may not be accidental at all (just a bit strange for us lay folk to wrap our minds around).

It goes like this:

The Higgs boson, a proposed but not yet documented elementary particle, is theorized to be that which gives matter its properties of mass. But physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya speculate that the particle is, to put in vernacular terms, not a toy.

As the Times’ Dennis Overbye writes:

"A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists has suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

The pair fully understands how batty it all sounds, and that neither the recent Hadron failure, nor the U.S. pulling the plug on its large collider project in the 1990s, provides proof of anything. That’s why they did the math, showing all their work, indicating the theoretical viability of their strange sounding notion.

Photo courtesy of Julian Herzog, via Wikimedia Commons