This is kind of like Christmas in spring if Santa took two decades to deliver and if the presents cost $10 billion.
It is sort of like the moon landing, except the breakthrough happened 110 yards below Swiss-French soil and we, as a nation, barely paused to notice.
It's like … well, to be honest, Nebraska and Iowa physicists struggle for an apt simile to explain last week's fantastic voyage of the Large Hadron Collider, the stranger-than-fiction machine that changed science as we know it.
That's when it accelerated subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light, smashed them into each other and began to create new and wondrous things that local professors previously saw only in their dreams.
But how do you reduce that to a sound bite and explain it to us regular folks?
A physicist describing to non-scientists the importance of the collider a machine that thousands of experts, including more than a dozen area professors, have spent their careers building is a little like teaching a chimp to play chess.
Ken Bloom, who spends several weeks a year at the CERN laboratory near Geneva that houses the collider, gamely took a stab.
“I think we're going to discover some of the deepest truths,” said Bloom, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor of physics and astronomy. “How does space work? How does time work? How does mass work?”
And Creighton University professor Michael Cherney, a physicist who has spent large chunks of the past three decades at the Swiss-French laboratory, gave it the ol' Bluejay try.
“We're going to explain two-thirds of the universe!” he yelped, pounding his fist upon his desktop for emphasis.
“Well, hopefully,” said Bjorn Nilsen, a fellow Creighton physicist who was hunched forward in one of Cherney's office chairs.
And then they giggled, a little like two kindergartners on Christmas morning.
Physicists have ample reason to be giddy.
Many believe that the subatomic collisions at CERN collisions that now can occur at more than three times the power of what other laboratories can produce will allow us to peer back to the very beginning of the universe, one eye blink after the big bang.
Cherney, Nilsen and many others have long hunted for something called quark-gluon plasma.
No, that's not what Egon said during “Ghostbusters II.” It's a state of matter that the Creighton scientists believe existed a millisecond after the beginning of the universe.
It's also something that surely holds secrets about how the universe formed as it did.
Only one hitch: After more than a decade of research, neither Cherney nor Nilsen has ever actually observed quark-gluon plasma.
That might change soon.
The Large Hadron Collider accelerates two beams in opposite directions through its 17-mile-long circular tunnel, and then smashes them together, over and over, millions of times a second.
When all goes correctly, a giant structure named ALICE an ion collision detector built in the past decade by Cherney and 1,000 other physicists from around the world can collect data from these collisions.
With any luck, the awesome power of these collisions _ think of the Hadron as a Ferrari, and all the world's other colliders as jalopies _ will allow the Creighton scientists to see quark-gluon plasma as soon as this fall.
“This is the stuff at the outer limits of what we know,” Cherney said.
Bloom, the UNL professor, has done work that touches on another of physics' biggest mysteries: What, exactly, gives everything mass?
The prevailing theory centers on something called the Higgs boson. Its nickname, “the God particle,” helps you grasp its significance, though scientists hate that nickname because of its potential to offend.
Call it whatever you want: Higgs is really, really, important because it is the last puzzle piece that needs to be snapped into place so physicists can complete what they call “the standard model.”
Discovering Higgs might lead physicists such as UNL's Bloom and Iowa State University physicist Tom Meyer to better understand how the universe shifted from having no dimensions to one where there is a left and a right, an up and a down. A universe, as Cherney put it, in which everything is made of stuff.
Data from the Hadron's first week of mind-boggling collisions are already flowing into a UNL computing center. Bloom manages an American project that will collect and analyze the data.
Iowa State has a rotating cast of a dozen professors and graduate students working on one of the two main particle detectors that feeds information to UNL's computers.
What really excites these physicists is the idea that the Large Hadron Collider will eventually be tweaked to give it even more juice.
Collisions at the Hadron's level of energy are where “the existing theories just kind of stop making sense,” Bloom said. “All our theory points to the likelihood that something new needs to start happening.”
And that the potential for something entirely new is what makes this a “physicists' Christmas.”
Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will let scientists identify dark matter, that mysterious force thought to shape the cosmos.
It most certainly will lead to technological breakthroughs. After all, the laboratory housing the collider is where the Internet was invented.
Scientists there must now perfect the computer analysis of unimaginable amounts of data in order to take full advantage of the Large Hadron Collider.
Are you interested in extra dimensions? Time travel? Nilsen has several former colleagues at another American university who likely will use the collider to study those far-out ideas, he said.
And the farfetched, the mind-blowing, the seemingly nutso is exactly what area physicists figure we'll eventually accept as fact, thanks to Hadron.
Plenty of people once believed that Albert Einstein was off his rocker before he came up with a certain equation about energy, mass and light speed.
The power of Hadron, Cherney said, might be its ability to expand scientific knowledge in a way that will elicit answers that lead to questions we've never imagined.
Wrap your brain around that idea, and suddenly the image of Neil Armstrong hopping around on the moon seems, well, a bit trite.
“Yeah, they brought back some moon rocks and so forth,” Bloom said. “It's one thing to understand what the moon is made of, and quite another to understand what the universe is made of.”
So, the Large Hadron Collider is more exciting than 20 Christmases? It's bigger than a man on the moon?
Maybe we should just forget the similes and agree on the following.
This collider thing, this is something.
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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