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.”
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