RIPPING THE
UNIVERSE A
NEW ONE
Lyn Evans Says There’s
No Need to Fear His
Large Hadron Collider
INTERVIEW AND PHOTOS BY TOM LITTLEWOOD
Last September, the opportunistic hypochondriacs who control the global media tried to convince us that the end of the universe was coming. The first test of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they said, would smash protons together at such a velocity that it would gut the space-time continuum and create a universe-swallowing black hole.
This turned out to be an exaggeration. The inaugural activation of the world’s largest and fastest particle accelerator didn’t destroy anything except itself. In a subterranean lab below the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC was activated for about nine days but failed shortly before reaching full power. Since then it’s been under repair. A second attempt is scheduled for later this year, which means we’re about to enter another cycle of fanatical worry and idiotic handwringing.
Regardless of your views on the matter, the geniuses who run the thing at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) don’t wish to destroy the world. They are actually trying to figure out the opposite: how we got here. CERN hopes to use the LHC to glean insights into dark matter, the Higgs boson, quark-gluon plasma, sparticles, and a whole bunch of other funny made-up science words.
Lyn Evans is an LHC project leader. He actually hit the ignition switch of this tall drink of Compact Muon Solenoid on its initial boot-up. And he hopes to flip it a second time later this year, with improved results.
Vice: How did you get involved with all this fancy science stuff?
Lyn Evans: I grew up in a Welsh mining valley in a village called Aberdare. There was a very good public school system and I have been interested in science for as long as I can remember. It was very natural that I went into the domain of chemistry, physics, and mathematics.
How did you end up at CERN?
I did a PhD in laser-produced plasmas. It’s a big business now, because they want to create fusion with laser beams. CERN was looking into this stuff as a side project, and I first came here as a visitor in 1969. A little later I joined the staff and I helped build the Super Proton Synchrotron—the antiproton-proton collider of the 80s that won us the Nobel Prize—and the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which then became the LHC. I had a period where I was the head of one of CERN’s biggest departments. It had 450 people. It was interesting to do for a while, but it was a very administrative job. Soon I was asked to become project leader for the LHC. I had worked on all the previous machines and had also worked in the US, so I had the experience. Of course I jumped at the chance. You don’t get to build something like this every day.
What’s been the project’s biggest challenge?
In the beginning it was getting the LHC approved. Back in 1994 there were very difficult political issues, and many members were trying to get in line with conditions for the single European currency. It was a tough time. It took a lot of persuading to get the 20 members of CERN to support the LHC. We then had a crisis in 1996, when Germany had to reduce its contributions to CERN because of the problems with reunification. Afterward came many technical problems that were solved on the way. It’s been quite a haul.
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This scary-looking monster is named ALICE. It’s going to detect the behavior of particles in the aftermath of a collision similar to the one that happened during the Big Bang. CERN is hoping that it will also generate a quark-gluon plasma, which will help us understand why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks that make them up.
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Not many people would be willing to make that type of commitment. Did you imagine it would take 15 years to get to this point?
No. I think it’s pretty good to be naive when you take on a project like this. We knew that we were breaking completely new ground, but we did not imagine that it would take us this long.
How did you feel when the first test failed at the last step?
Well, it felt like a real kick in the teeth. That’s the only way I can put it.
What went wrong?
September 10 was the proposed start date, which got into the media and was therefore necessary to keep. Of course we wanted to test everything up to the full energy before that date. The LHC is in eight independent sectors, and you can test them individually. Each one is about three kilometers long. We had already tested seven sectors, and when it came to the eighth we had taken that sector close to the full energy but not up to it. So we did that work, which went fantastically well. The beam was circling in the LHC, and then the next step was to bring that very last sector up to the same energy as the others. That’s when the incident happened.
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| Taylor, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
Black holes have amazed me since I first learned of them. There’s so much unknown about them and no way to learn because if you get anywhere close it sucks you into oblivion.
That would definitely be the best way to die. If I had the choice of my death, it would be by black hole. |
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| joe bananas, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
i wonder what the most outlandish claims that this guy read about were, he must have been worried about the state of the human race i imagine. |
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Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
i’d like to give this guy a pat on the back. everyone is too quick to dismiss failed attempts such as his and nasa’s when in reality the successful attempts are things that should be considered miracles. it was only forty-odd years ago we sent a monkey to space and now everyone thinks it’s no big deal. we have a space station! that was sci-fi shit only a little while ago! |
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Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
the thing takes nine days to warm up!! its an absolute beast! im pretty sure that he was feeling a bit more than a kick in the teeth when the thing broke down. |
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Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
i feel very very stupid right now. |
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| lazy eyez killa, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote:
thinking about shooting a single proton is mind-boggling. how do you load it into the proton gun? |
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