NEWSLETTER

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.

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.

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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Comments

Anonymous, on Jul 17, 2009 wrote: scientific research is never a waste of time and never a waste of money
Anonymous, on Jul 16, 2009 wrote: I don’t care whether it killed the universe or not. Something so big and requires so much intelligence to even remotely understand frightens the shite out of me.
Anonymous, on Jul 6, 2009 wrote: once again technology blows my fucking mind. i swear sometimes i have to pinch myself to make sure i’m not living in a dreamworld where everyone is a mad genius.
Anonymous, on Jul 6, 2009 wrote: When push comes to shove, I’d rather have Evans’ finger on the so-called trigger than a good percentage of the world’s leaders with nuclear capabilities.
	turd to your mother, on Jul 1, 2009 wrote: what a way to go. better than slim pickens at the end of dr. strangelove.
Anonymous, on Jun 27, 2009 wrote: "I would HATE to be the person to hit the ignition switch because if it actually did cause some apocolotypic doom then you would be the person responsible for the end of the world" i would LOVE to. that would make me the most significant being fucking ever of all existence as anyone who ever lived knows it
	TheDon, on Jun 26, 2009 wrote: Maybe I just dont understand what this whole thing is about, but it seems like a huge waste of time and money...
Anonymous, on Jun 25, 2009 wrote: Worked on it for 20 years than one magnet out of 5000 caused it to break...thats gotta be tough.
Anonymous, on Jun 24, 2009 wrote: God help us all if that machine falls into the hands of terrorists or rapists.....god help us all
Anonymous, on Jun 21, 2009 wrote: there is no exented interview with Lyn on Motherboard. WTF? Does the editor not check these things before publishing statements like "Watch an extended interview with Lyn on Motherboard on VBS.TV"
Anonymous, on Jun 17, 2009 wrote: well i read that and have decided that a) im pretty tired b) i need to brush up on my physics and c) i should have paid more attention at school.
Anonymous, on Jun 16, 2009 wrote: @anonymous As far as breaking something goes, there are tons of redundant safeguards in place to ensure that that doesn’t happen - the machine has automatic ways of shutting itself off if it gets too hot or loses its vacuum or whatever far faster than any person could react to it. The problems happens when the machine fails in some entirely unexpected way, like what happened last September. It wouldn’t really be the person on shift’s responsibility, per se, were that to happen - it’s the machine design experts’ job to figure all that stuff out beforehand and put the right safeguards in place - but it’d still get pretty heavy if it did; you’d be under a lot of pressure to answer a lot of questions so they could figure out just what went wrong and how.
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: Funny you should make that association - MJQ does have a collider, only they use it after-hours to collide particles of cocaine in order to get rid of the cut.
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: @anonymous thanks for the insight on that. say you do break something. what next?
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: That is one serious price tag for the sake of curiousity. At least it wasn’t spent on something useless.
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: Nothing EVER works the very first time...
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: I work on this this thing, and I can confidently say it’s mostly harmless - high energy particles from deep space with the same sort of energy (or even more) as we’ll be producing here (once we get the damned thing working) have been smashing into the moon for the past 4 billion years, and it’s pretty plain to see that there are no black holes on the moon. That being said, it’s pretty sweet being on the cutting edge, and every time I have to go down (300 feet underground) to work on the thing and see it again, it’s a bit of a "holy shit" moment - it’s absolutely huge and looks like something out of Area 51. It always scares the shit out of me when I have to go on shift to run part of it - it’s like "Here’s ten billion dollars worth of the most ambitious science on Earth. Try not to break anything." Great feeling when I get off shift and everything’s worked out alright though.
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: that looks like something from stargate
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: I wonder what it feels like to be that smart. I bet its a huge burden
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: It looks like the lighting rig at MJQ in Atlanta. I will never feel the same there again.
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: if you really want to find out more about antimatter (it’s crazy and you might be more into it than you expected) you can read about it on the live from cern website. livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: "I would HATE to be the person to hit the ignition switch because if it actually did cause some apocolotypic doom then you would be the person responsible for the end of the world" it would especially suck if it allowed for an "oh fuck" moment where you knew you were past the point of no return and had fucked the universe in the ass for good. if it was instantaneous, then fuck it, i’ll flip the switch.
	boggle_brains, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: 1 of the 50,000 magnets in the machine was bad in that caused it to break!
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: jesus, i hope there is a next step. it would suck to spend 40 years on something and find out you’ve done all you can do and then nothing.
	lowbrow, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: i wouldn’t stress the end of the world predictions. every few months another "expert" steps forward that claims to have calculated the exact date of our demise. hasn’t happened yet. the fundamentalist nutjobs say the end is near. even they are more accurate than the so-called experts.
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: I would HATE to be the person to hit the ignition switch because if it actually did cause some apocolotypic doom then you would be the person responsible for the end of the world
Anonymous, on Jun 15, 2009 wrote: I hope they are careful testing the proton collisions. If that was what happened during the Big Bang, there is no need for a re-Big-Banging event to happen while I’m on Earth. Wait until I’m gone. Thanks.
Anonymous, on Jun 13, 2009 wrote: last september huh? every year is allegedly the end of the universe. scientists are the boy who cried wolf and when it really does happen I wont believe it till im dead
Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote: as soon as anti matter comes into the equation then im lost, can someone explain what he is talking about.
Anonymous, on Jun 10, 2009 wrote: so there is a guy from a wales mining town in charge of something that according to hysteria could end the world....im not as comfortable as i was.
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