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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 10, 2008
Geneva, Switzerland
18 years ago
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which circulated its first proton beam on September 10, 2008, becoming the most powerful particle accelerator ever built.
On the morning of September 10, 2008, engineers at CERN on the French and Swiss border guided a beam of protons all the way around a twenty-seven kilometer ring buried about a hundred metres underground. It took less than an hour. The Large Hadron Collider, which had been under construction for over a decade at a cost of several billion Swiss francs, was working. Physicists in the control room applauded, and the event was carried live around the world.
The machine had been designed to accelerate protons to very close to the speed of light in opposite directions and smash them together inside enormous detectors, recreating conditions that had not existed since a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Its primary target was the Higgs boson, a particle predicted in the 1960s as the explanation for why other particles have mass, and the last missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Higgs boson, the particle predicted in 1964 to explain the origin of mass, whose discovery at the Large Hadron Collider was announced in July 2012.
The startup attracted an unusual amount of public attention, much of it driven by claims that the collider might create a black hole capable of consuming the Earth, or a hypothetical form of matter that would convert the planet into something else. Lawsuits were filed. CERN published safety reviews pointing out that cosmic rays strike the atmosphere with far higher energies constantly, and have done so for billions of years without incident. The Earth was still there on September 11.
The machine was not, however, in good shape. Nine days after the first beam, a faulty electrical connection between two magnets caused a catastrophic failure. Helium coolant vented into the tunnel, and dozens of superconducting magnets were damaged or knocked out of alignment. Repairs and additional safety systems took more than a year, and the collider did not resume operation until November 2009, running at reduced energy while engineers worked out how to make it safe at full power.
The payoff came on July 4, 2012, when the two main experiments, ATLAS and CMS, jointly announced the observation of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson. Peter Higgs and François Englert received the Nobel Prize in Physics the following year, forty-eight years after their predictions. The collider has since run at higher energies, produced thousands of research papers, and pushed the Standard Model into corners where it might break, so far without finding the new physics many hoped for. The web itself came out of CERN two decades earlier, a reminder that the useful side effects of fundamental research are difficult to predict.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It confirmed the last missing piece of the Standard Model. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 completed the theoretical framework that describes the known particles and forces, and vindicated a prediction made nearly half a century earlier.
It is one of the largest international scientific collaborations ever assembled. Thousands of physicists and engineers from more than a hundred countries built and operate the machine, an example of scientific cooperation on a scale few political institutions have matched.
The doomsday panic around it is a case study in risk communication. Lawsuits and media speculation about black holes swallowing the Earth ran well ahead of the physics, and the episode is still cited in discussions of how scientists should explain unfamiliar risks to the public.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On September 10, 2008, a beam of protons went around a twenty-seven kilometer ring under the Swiss and French countryside for the first time. Predictions that the machine would destroy the planet did not come true. A faulty electrical connection nearly wrecked it nine days later, and four years after that it found the Higgs boson.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“It is a machine that lets us look at the universe as it was a fraction of a second after it began.”
— A common description of the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Large Hadron Collider, its first beam in 2008, the accident that followed, the Higgs boson discovery, and the public panic about black holes?
