The Large Hadron Collider

September 4, 2008

Multinational science is indeed a headache - the LHC has broken. It will cost 21 million dollars to fix and might not work again until next summer. The end of the world is postponed, it seems.

Next Wednesday, the first protons will begin their journey around a 27-mile ring of supercooled magnets under the French and Swiss border, in preparation for the largest scientific experiment in history. The Large Haldron Collider, or LHC, has taken nine billion dollars and fourteen years to come to fruition, and occupied the work of 6,000 scientists from 55 countries during that time.  Aiming to plug the gaps in our present-day understanding of the universe, it has been described as the Apollo Programme of physics.

In spite of claims by nay-sayers (who have gone to court to try and stop the machine’s operation), the world is unlikely to end via the creation of a mini-black hole once the LHC operates at full power. It has energy to create one in theory, but so too do the many cosmic rays that hit the earth on a regular basis. 

The LHC is much more likely to transform present understandings of physics, by closing the gaps in the so-called ‘Standard Model’ developed in the 1970s -- and perhaps transforming it entirely. The device will allow for progress in experimental physics after a lull of a decade or so (arising from lack of sufficiently powerful kit), including the hoped-for discovery of the ‘God Particle’, or Higgs Boson -- which the Standard Model predicts but which current particle accelerators have not been able to find. The particle has aroused the most attention (it allows mass to exist; it has an exciting name) but other results from the machine will be as stimulating, perhaps helping to explain the nature of ‘dark matter’ which is thought to make up the majority of matter in the universe.

Such profound developments in theoretical physics are important for their own sake. But the creation of the LHC once again illustrates the challenges of running large scientific projects across countries. While the LHC came in close to its budget, it did so five years after its planned start date, and most such efforts are unluckier still:

• The ITER fusion reactor, conceived in 1985, took until 2001 to plan. Arguments between the seven eventual participants (including over where to site the reactor) delayed a final agreement on construction until 2006.

• Grander but less useful, the International Space Station has seen its budget and construction time balloon over its lifespan. To cut costs, some of the more ambitious scientific modules have been cut from the design altogether. The US Government Accountability Office estimates its final cost at 100 billion dollars, not helped by diplomatic haggling over re-supply flights to the station arranged between Russia and the United States.

The LHC partly benefited from its apparent uselessness (no-one has worked out how to make money, or a weapon, from the Higgs Boson), and the collapse of the rival Superconducting Super Collider, a (relatively) primitive first attempt to do the same work. Disputes about costs and technical problems can be silenced by the scientific advances such projects allow -- the troubled Hubble Space Telescope is now regarded as a triumph. But as the costs of such projects rise, the risk of failure grows, and future scientific work risks cancellation. The LHC has a lot to live up to.