Particle Cathedrals

In a world that is coming to an end (though it might not be, but certainly feels that way; and in fact, upon close examination, and depending on one’s definition of “world”, many worlds are indeed coming to their ends) my husband (the Ranting Economist who no longer rants, since what’s the point) and I watched a new NOVA episode yesterday on the CERN Large Hadron Collider; or what I learned everyone calls the LHC (hmmm).  We watched as the program described the experimental data and teams that “confirmed” the existence of the Higgs Boson. 

We then we watched the LHC close down for improvements that will eventually allow protons to be accelerated to four times the speed used to tease out the Higgs from the particle soup that emerges momentarily when protons are collided at the speeds possible when the event was filmed (in 2012).  The "new and improved” collider will reopen in 2015 (this year); and apparently “we” will now be looking for particles that might prove something called Supersymmetry, which might explain (or illuminate if you will) the invisible “dark matter” (tuhn tuhn tuhn!) in the visible universe; which to this artist made sense only when I thought of it as some kind of parallel universe we can’t see, but hey, I’m just an artist, and these days most everything sounds like some kind of parallel universe I can’t see....   

Anyway, it was interesting to see how NOVA used cute little graphics to take us through a process we could not see and most mortals do not understand.  And it was nice to see a bunch of physicists get really excited; and to empathize with Higgs, as tears came to his eyes when the existence of a particle proving his theory of a mass field necessary for the formation of the universe was announced at CERN, where, ironically, his first paper about all this was rejected.   Irony I understand.

At the end of the show, when the LHC was being closed down for improvements, The Ranting Economist mused, “That’s it (?)  They spend all that money, find the Higgs and now they shut down....”   The Ranting Economist feeling deflated after a program about physics was surprising to me, since at heart he is a physicist (and a photographer and a guitar player).  His comment prompted me to do a cursory search on the cost of the LHC and I found out that it cost 13.5 billion dollars (or $13.500,000,000) to “find the Higgs” (though if Higgs is correct, and current experiments seem to confirm that he is, the Higgs was always here “in plain sight” in the form of the visible universe...).

Well, in the Middle Ages we built cathedrals; now we build particle accelerators.   People just seem to have to believe in something....