RIPPING THE UNIVERSE A NEW ONE Lyn Evans Says There’s No Need to Fear His Large Hadron Collider (Page 2 of 2)
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We happened upon a cross section of a replacement superconducting magnet. There are over 9,000 of these things in the accelerator ring. The two bits covered by tinfoil are the pipes through which the proton packets travel, completing over 11,000 laps of the LHC every second. At various points these two pipes join and the protons are forced to collide, generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core.
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It was a problem with some of the magnets bending, correct?
One of the joints between two magnets—there are 50,000 in the machine—was bad and we hadn’t spotted it. It wouldn’t be a big deal if it were not for the complexity of the LHC, but just to get in there you have to warm the machine up. It takes about six weeks before you can even see what’s going on. It’s not dissimilar to the Hubble Space Telescope. If something goes wrong, it’s a hell of a lot to repair, even if it’s a small thing.
There was a lot of media attention when the LHC first started running and some thought it was a giant waste of time and money. How do you deal with that and the reaction to the failure?
There was a huge amount of media attention, and I think a lot of it was due to the black-hole saga. Fortunately, I didn’t know that a feed was being beamed out live from the control room while we were working. The EBU [European Broadcasting Union], which took the feed, estimated the viewing audience at about 1 billion people. That’s never been heard of for a scientific experiment.
And what do you think of these critics? Are they hysterics?
I think these people are well known to us. They’re not scientists, but you can’t stop free speech. What it’s shown to me is the bad side of the web. I think that the web can be an amplifier of noise. In the blogs, people didn’t know what they were talking about. These problems get amplified, and you see that in other areas as well. For example, there is a measles epidemic in Switzerland right now. Mothers are not vaccinating their babies because of all the nonsense that is tumbling around on the web. Having said that, I think we dealt with the black-hole problem. There is not a single credible scientist in the entire world who sees any difficulty at all.
Are you really trying to re-create the Big Bang?
The LHC is intended to shed light on some of the very fundamental questions that remain in nature. Some call it the Big Bang machine, because in the LHC we can create conditions that were a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. During the Big Bang there was matter and antimatter. We can make antimatter in our accelerators, but it doesn’t exist in our universe in any substantial form like this. When we make antimatter, we always make an equal amount of matter with it—that is the law. So in the Big Bang there should have been equal amounts, but now all the antimatter is gone.
Where did it go?
This is one question we’re hoping to answer. What is this asymmetry that allowed matter to win over antimatter and for us to be here? It could’ve been a universe of just light. It’s a mystery why we are made out of electrons, protons, and neutrons, or why the photon is made of particles of light. The only viable theory is that there is this field, this sort of Higgs field throughout the whole of space, and these particles couple more or less strongly to these fields. If that theory is correct, then the famous Higgs particle should be there. We don’t know what its mass is, but we will find it.
Given the importance of the work you do, I find it a little odd that your lab is as open as it is.
As long as it’s safe, we can do whatever we want. Things will start to become really radioactive when the machine is properly cooled. CERN has always been extremely open like this. You can’t build a thing like CERN without the support of the locals. If you want to put up a pole for mobile phones, you have to ask the community. We have a very good relationship, so we’re open. We have nothing to hide.
What is the next step for CERN and the LHC?
This is one of the problems of the field and experiments like this. It’s been 20 years in the making. It will be 20 more years before we know what’s next—if there even is a next step.
Want to see the machine that some people think will gobble up the entire universe? Watch an extended interview with Lyn on Motherboard on VBS.TV.
See all articles by this contributor
 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. | | | Next 30 comments > |
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