Bill Bryson's Notes from a Large Hadron Collider

[n2doc]

From The Times
November 5, 2009

From Eureka, our new monthly science magazine: The bestselling author visits CERN and meets the scientists who are hoping to unlock the secrets of the Universe

In the event that it fell to you to identify the most exciting place on the planet, the likelihood is small, I imagine, that you would pack a bag and travel at once to Switzerland. Still less, I dare say, would you turn your back on Geneva and head out past its western suburbs and into the pleasant but uneventful countryside beyond. There, in a broad valley shared with France, stands a collection of buildings that look like the leftovers from a 1960s Festival of Bad Design.

This is it. You have found it. This is CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Over the next few days the people who run the place will cautiously restart the immensely large machine (almost 27 kilometres around) known as the Large Hadron Collider and begin swooshing particles around it in a way that will, when it is fully humming, recreate conditions as they were in the Universe one millionth of a millionth of a second after the beginning of the big bang.

Imagine the moment before that moment, when there was no space, no time, no matter, nothing. It is not easy to conceive such a nothingness, but that is what there was. Then, in a moment of unimaginable majesty and abruptness, there came into being the spacious, mysterious void in which we float, and all the matter therein and much else besides. Everything there is — light, matter, the laws of physics — traces back to that moment of creation. Now, for the first time in 13½ billion years, the circumstances of that event can be replicated, but with the crucial difference that this time some of the smartest people on Earth can draw up chairs and watch. It is this that may soon make CERN the most exciting place on Earth, or possibly anywhere.

more:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/eureka/article6899505.ece

[applegrove]

1. He makes everything sound so interesting. I'll flag this article for later when I have the time to

read it.

[unhappycamper]

2. Bryson is a wonderful author.

The first book of his I ever read was "A Short History of Nearly Everything".