The Gates (2009) Read Free

was quite hard for most people to get too excited about them.
    The Large Hadron Collider was, as its name suggested, very big. It was, in fact, 17 miles long, and stretched inside a ring-shaped tunnel burrowed through rock, near Geneva, in Switzerland. The LHC was a particle accelerator, the largest ever constructed: a device for smashing protons together in a vacuum, consisting of 1,600 electromagnets chilled to -271 degrees Celcius (or, to you and me, “Crumbs, that’s
really
cold! Anybody got a sweater I can borrow?”), producing a powerful electromagnetic field. Basically, two beams of hydrogen ions,atoms that have been stripped of their electrons, would whiz around the ring in opposite directions at about 186,000 miles per second, or close to the speed of light, and then collide. When they met, each beam would have the energy of a big car traveling at 1,000 miles per hour.
    You don’t want to be in a car traveling at 1,000 miles per hour that crashes into another car traveling at the same speed. That would not be good.
    When the beams collided, enormous amounts of energy would be released from all of the protons they contained, and that was where things got really interesting. The reason scientists had built the LHC was in order to study the aftermath of that collision, which would produce very small particles: smaller than atoms, and atoms are already so small that it would take ten million of them laid end to end to cover the period at the end of this sentence. Ultimately, they hoped to discover the Higgs boson, sometimes called the “God particle,” the most basic component of everything in the material world.
    Take our two cars traveling at 1,000 miles per hour before pounding into each other. After the crash, there isn’t likely to be much of the cars left. In fact, there will probably be only very small pieces of car (and possibly very small pieces of anyone who was unfortunate enough to be inside the cars at the time) scattered all over the place. What the scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, hoped was that the colliding beams would leave behind lots of little patches of energy resembling those that existed seconds after the Big Bang, when the dot of which we spoke at the start exploded, and among them might be the Higgs boson. The Higgs bosonwould stick out because it would actually be bigger than the two colliding protons that created it, but it wouldn’t hang about for very long, as it would vanish almost instantly, so the scientists would have to be quick to spot it. It would be as though our two colliding cars had come together and formed a truck, which then immediately collapsed.
    In other words, the scientists hoped to understand just how the universe came into being, which is a big question that is a lot easier to ask than to answer. You see, scientists—even the very clever ones—understand only about 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe, which accounts for the stuff we can see around us: mountains, lakes, bears, artichokes, that kind of thing. 3 That leaves them scratching their heads over the remaining 96 percent, which is a lot of scratching. To save time, and prevent unnecessary head injuries, the scientists decided that about 23 percent of what remained should be called “dark matter.” Although they couldn’t see it, they knew that it existed because it bent starlight.
    But if dark matter was interesting to them, whatever accounted for the remaining 73 percent of everything in the universe was more interesting still. It was known as “dark energy,” and it was invisible, entirely hidden. Nobody knew where it came from, but they had a pretty good idea of what it was doing. It was driving galaxies farther and farther apart,causing the universe to expand. This would lead to two things. The first thing was that human beings, if they didn’t start inventing fast ways to move somewhere else, would eventually find themselves entirely alone, as all