Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider
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The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing protons at record energy levels never created by scientists before, and it will reach even higher levels by 2013. Its superconducting magnets guide two beams of protons in opposite directions around the track. After accelerating the beams to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, it collides the protons head-on, annihilating them in a flash of energy sufficient—in accordance with Einstein’s elegant statement of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2—to coalesce into a shower of particles and phenomena that have not existed since the first moments of creation. Within the LHC’s detectors, scientists hope to see empirical confirmation of key theories in physics and cosmology.In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated experiment in the history of science, Amir D. Aczel takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC—and with the same clarity and depth of knowledge he demonstrated in the bestselling Fermat’s Last Theorem—Aczel enriches all of us with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will need to appreciate the discoveries that will almost certainly spring forth when the full power of this great machine is finally unleashed.Will the Higgs boson make its breathlessly awaited appearance, confirming at last the Standard Model of particles and their interactions that is among the great theoretical achievements of twentieth-century physics? Will the hidden dimensions posited by string theory be revealed? Will we at last identify the nature of the dark matter that makes up more than 90 percent of the cosmos? With Present at the Creation, written by one of today’s finest popular interpreters of basic science, we can all follow the progress of an experiment that promises to greatly satisfy the curiosity of anyone who ever concurred with Einstein when he said, “I want to know God’s thoughts—the rest is details.” Publishers Weekly Dan Brown fans and science buffs alike will be familiar with CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), where scientists probe the origins of our universe using the largest and most powerful machine ever created, the Large Hadron Collider. In the hands of Aczel (The Cave and the Cathedral), a research fellow at Boston University, truth is more compelling than fiction. He describes CERN's ongoing research to find "the last particle needed to confirm the validity of Standard Model of particle physics" and discover the answer to how the universe got its mass. The LHC can accelerate protons up to the very edge of the speed of light; by smashing two beams of accelerated protons together, scientists hope to solve the mystery of what happened in the first "five thousand-trillionths of a second" after the creation of the universe. Aczel brings the non-scientist reader up to speed with a clear description of theoretical and experimental scientific advances over past century and the development of accelerator technology. An exciting, true scientific adventure. Illus. (Oct.)
AcknowledgmentsChapter 1 The Exploding Protons 1Chapter 2 The LHC and Our Age-Old Quest to Understand the Structure of the Universe 23Chapter 3 A Place Called CERN 43Chapter 4 Building the Greatest Machine in History 62Chapter 5 LHCb and the Mystery of the Missing Antimatter 81Chapter 6 Richard Feynman and a Prelude to the Standard Model 98Chapter 7 "Who Ordered That?:"---The Discoveries of Leaping Leptons 114Chapter 8 Symmetries of Nature, Yang-Mills Theory, and Quarks 126Chapter 9 Hunting the Higgs 147Chapter 10 How the Higgs Sprang Alive Inside a Red Camaro (And Gave Birth to Three Bosons) 163Chapter 11 Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Fate of the Universe 183Chapter 12 Looking for Strings and Hidden Dimensions 196Chapter 13 Will CERN Create a Black Hole? 204Chapter 14 The LHC and the Future of Physics 215Afterword 223Appendix A How Does an LHC Detector Work? 229Appendix B Particles, Forces, and the Standard Model 233Appendix C The Key Physics Principles Used in this Book 237Notes 239Bibliography 253Photo Credits 257Index 259
