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PETER KRIEGER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: I think almost everyone who works on this project - maybe you have to if you've been... I've been working on this for a decade now, so you sort of have to belief that we're going to see something new and exciting. There's lots of theoretical reasons for believing that, at this energy scale, something new has to happen. Not necessarily what we expect, but something new.
(VIDEO: LHC TUNNEL)
KRIEGER: The LHC is... the acronym stands for Large Hadron Collider. It's a proton-proton collider that's been built in an existing tunnel, underground, near the French-Swiss border at CERN which is the European... well it used to be called the European Centre for Nuclear Physics - really what they do now is particle physics. And it has been built to allow us to investigate the structure of matter at smaller distance scales than we've been able to in the past, by colliding small subatomic particles and seeing what comes out of those collisions.
TEXT:
March 2008
Retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho file a lawsuit against CERN and several of its American collaborators.
...
The federal suit claimed that the LHC may produce catastrophic black holes amongst other potential risks.
DAMIAN POPE, PHYSICIST AND OUTREACH COORDINATOR, PERIMETER INSTITUTE: Well I guess my first reaction was: a little bit shocked, kind of a little bit sort of worried because I'd heard that, for example, there were two people in Hawaii who had actually filed a court case against CERN - and were actually trying to stop the LHC. And I was a bit worried because, kind of as a scientist, I knew that their claims were just baseless.
JAY INGRAM, AUTHOR AND BROADCASTER, HOST OF TV'S DAILY PLANET: And when it comes to the LHC, there have been serious considerations of all the possible risks. And so there are things like "mini black holes"... "vacuum bubbles" where the idea would be that what we think is a vacuum is not really the most fundamental vacuum and if you created a fundamental vacuum it could create a bubble and spread and annihilate everything. There are particles called "strangelets" that could.. possibly be.. small possibility.. be produced. And magnetic, sort of "one pole" magnetic particles.
And a lot of it has to do with, well, "given certain scenarios and certain energies here's the evidence we have." And the evidence is pretty scant because nobody's run an accelerator of this power.
(VIDEO: YOUTUBE VIDEO OF A BLACK HOLE DESTROYING THE LHC)
TEXT:
Animations depicting a black hole at CERN began to circulate in the Summer of 2008.
(VIDEO: "WHAT'S THE MATTER AT CERN: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE LHC")
KRIEGER: So you can think of any collider as kind of like a giant microscope. But you can only look at things that are very small, using light, at things that are at least as large as the wavelength of the light. And as soon as you get smaller than the wavelength of the light that you use to look at things, then you no longer resolve any detail.
The higher the energy of the particle, the smaller it's wavelength, and the smaller the features that it can resolve. So if you take two very high-energy particles and you smashed them together, that's how you access the very smallest distance scales that we can see, experimentally, and that's what any collider does, any particle physics collider does.
And when they're going at the energy at which we will collide them, they're going around this 27-kilometre circumference ring about 11,000 times a second...
TEXT:
The proton beams travel at 99.999999% the speed of light... or 1,079,252,839 kilometres per hour.
KRIEGER: ...and the LHC is just the next generation of collider that'll take us up to an energy scale that we haven't been able to observe before.
Canada's involvement has been both with the accelerator itself, the LHC machine, and with the ATLAS detector.
TEXT:
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus)
Designed to observe phenomena beyond the Standard Model.
KRIEGER: In the group in this department, we built part of the calorimeter called the "forward calorimeter". The ones that we made here were made primarily out of tungsten, and tungsten is a very difficult material to machine. We had to basically make a solid matrix of tungsten, into which we put some tubular-shaped electrodes and the only way to do this was to have little tungsten pellets made with a certain shape, and there's about 800,000 of them in each of the things that we built.
(VIDEO: DIAGRAM OF ATLAS DETECTOR, HIGHLIGHTING FORWARD CALORIMETER)
And in principle, that can be a very important part of the ATLAS detector, because there are certain ways of looking for the Higgs particle, which as you know, is one of the sort of "Holy Grails" of modern particle physics.
POPE: That's the only particle we haven't seen. Because, to see it, you need incredibly high energies.
(VIDEO: DIAGRAM OF STANDARD MODEL)
And we've seen every single particle in that model - except for one - and that's this Higgs Boson which is this weird particle that, well, basically I mean, it's weird but it's very important because if it wasn't there, then we wouldn't have mass, anything wouldn't have mass or weight, so it's pretty important.
KRIEGER: One of the reasons for building the LHC, just to go back to that question, is that although the Standard Model of particle physics is a gloriously successful theory, there are various reasons that we know that it can't be valid up to arbitrarily high energies. And the energy scale at which, we believe, it has to start breaking down, is the energy scale that will be explored the Large Hadron Collider.
(VIDEO: CERN EMPLOYEES LOOKING UP AT LARGE DETECTOR)
POPE: The people at CERN are very careful. And if any of them thought there was, you know, any kind of remote chance of their experiment - the LHC - destroying the world, or anything close to that, by black holes, they just wouldn't be involved.
KRIEGER: Was it Oscar Wilde who said: "the only worse thing than being talked about is not being talked about"? Or George Bernard Shaw? I can never remember... But it's a famous quote, and while lots of us were quite horrified when this began, in the press... It is true, to some extent, that bad press is better than no press at all. And many people have been working on this project for decades, and I think seeing any mention in the news has been gratifying for most of them.
If the energy scale of gravity is actually a lot lower than we thought it was, and it's down near the energy scale that we'll actually explore at the LHC, then in principle you can produce one of these microscopic black holes... Everyone speaks of this as if this would just be a disaster, but for many people it would be thrilling, right? You really... as far as we know you can't produce one these things unless there are extra dimensions, and that would be an incredible discovery.
POPE: One of the most exciting things, for me, is something called "dark matter". And the strange thing is: we've recently found out that when you look up at the sky at night, and you look at all the stars everything out there, you're only - even if you had a perfect telescope - you'd only ever see about a tiny fraction of the universe. And that's because most of the universe is invisible. CERN, at the LHC, might actually be able to have high enough energies, large enough energies, that can actually create dark matter particles in the LHC.
INGRAM: You start to see that these arguments make - these arguments that it's safe make a lot of sense. All of them suffer from the same problem: that cosmic rays, high-energy cosmic rays have been bombarding the Earth, the Moon, the planets, the stars and the galaxies - in the case of the solar system - for four and a half billion years. So Earth has been bombarded with these high-energy cosmic rays - higher energy than you're ever going to get out of the LHC... and nothing has happened!
KRIEGER: Everything we know about quantum theory tell us that these microscopic black holes will just evaporate, and you know, they'll produce a spray of particles, but they don't sit somewhere and accrete matter and destroy worlds.
You know, you could have lots of theorists write down complicated expressions that explain to you why this can't happen, but it's already happened millions and billions and billions and billions of times.
I've never been fond of presenting the LHC as something which is recreating the conditions just after the Big Bang. It's not really how people in the community view it. It's something which is said to the general public, I guess because people think it will capture their imagination.
What you are doing is creating conditions that existed some minute fraction of a second after the Big Bang. What you have is a sea of particles which have such a high energy that they don't coalesce to make matter of any kind. It's basically just a plasma of whatever the fundamental particles are. You can think of it almost as just temperature.
POPE: And, I mean, as with all of these big particle accelerator experiments, they have committees and they look at - they really number crunch, and actually look at possible scenarios and basically they'd rule out that there's an incredibly, incredibly, incredibly... I mean, you're a million times more likely to win the lotto tomorrow than, you know, the entire universe of the Earth being destroyed by a black hole.
KRIEGER: You know, the people that launched this lawsuit are scientists. I will say as well that they launched a similar lawsuit ten years ago at the start-up of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Labs in the US. They failed then and we're still here.
Was it irresponsible of them to say that? I don't know. I don't... I think they're wrong, but if they genuinely believe that, for whatever reason, then perhaps it would have been irresponsible for them not to say it - I mean, I don't judge them in that respect.
INGRAM: Most people in society don't understand the kind of mathematics that's being used in high-energy physics - so there's a huge barrier there. But the second factor, which I think may be even more important is: are they even willing to listen to arguments?
KRIEGER: Particle physicists and the general public probably have a different idea on what 'certainty' is. You know, at a very fundamental, quantum mechanical level, everything is uncertain at some level. So, if I tell the general public: "Well, it's almost certainly true that the LHC is absolutely safe." - they'll think "Woah. If there's even a small chance, then we shouldn't run it." But you know, a "small chance" to a particle physicist might be a chance which is so small that it wouldn't happen in 10 to the 10 lifetimes of the universe. It's still not zero, but it's impractically small.
INGRAM: I don't think it's very surprising. You know, I've sort of learned to live with this, right? That dramatic changes in science are never taken up by the general public immediately, if ever. I mean, go back to 1953 and Watson and Crick figuring out the structure of DNA - it was not only not really picked up by the media, it wasn't even appreciated by most scientists at the time.
KRIEGER: This 27-kilometre circumference tunnel that the LHC is housed in, you know, it goes under little French towns, and out in the countryside. And I believe at some point, CERN at least made the effort to go and have public discussions in these villages just to make sure that no one there was concerned that they were living a hundred metres above a proton-proton collider.
INGRAM: I do think scientists are responsible for communicating, to whatever audience will listen to them, what they're doing. I mean, after all, they're using our money. And I do think that they have a duty to communicate what they're doing, or to justify why they're doing it.
TEXT:
October 18th, 2008
Dr. Krieger gave a public lecture and Q&A on the LHC at the Rivoli Cafe in Toronto.
KRIEGER:
...called synchrotron radiation. This is the basis of synchrotron light sources. We have a synchrotron light source in Saskatchewan now that uses electron beams to produce...
DONNA FRANCIS, RESEARCHER / PROGRAMMER, ONTARIO SCIENCE CENTER: So basically what we do is we try to take interesting science and translate it for the public in some way that is meaningful, and that can be a new exhibit, or it could be something like this, which is a kind of an outreach. It's outside the doors of the Science Center and it's an opportunity to learn a little bit more about a particular subject.
KRIEGER: It's my first talk to the general public. I've spoken about high-energy physics to other physicists who are not experts in the field, so you talk at a different level then than you would talk at a high-energy physics conference.
MAN FROM AUDIENCE: Does the conservation of mass-energy imply that there had to be something prior to the Big Bang?
KRIEGER (in response): My father was a professor of theology and I think that's actually a religious question.
MAX TOUZEL, GRADUATE STUDENT (PHYSICS), UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: The way the science is done now, at least in fundamental physics with these projects, is very different from anything that's ever been done. I mean, just in terms of looking at it from a historical standpoint, not only in science, but in any human endeavour - I mean, maybe the building of the pyramids and stuff, would've been something comparable in terms of manpower.
POPE: Oh, there was a real buzz. Because people here knew what was going on, what they're doing, just how much work some of the people put in. And here at Perimeter Institute, we've had - I mean, we have a number of scientists that have varying levels of involvement in CERN.
INGRAM: It's not like, where there's like one event and you can concentrate on it. It's not like the Super Bowl - you know, at the end of the day you know the result. Because the... first of all it's going to take months to get the beam up and running, and secondly the crucial experiments are going to happen in years... in subsequent years, not right away.
KRIEGER: So, almost certainly it will open up new questions. I think that's part of its point. It'll answer questions like whether or not some of the theories that we've come up with so far are correct... kind of correct... on the right track... completely wrong...
INGRAM: Then I think there's a concern. I mean, if five years from now, you look back and you say "Well, the LHC showed us that we have to rewrite our understanding of physics" - I think sceptics are going to say "so like, when is this going to end?"
KRIEGER: You know, there was a time when people didn't realize that electricity and magnetism were the same - were manifestations of the same underlying force. There was even a time, before that, when people didn't necessarily understand that the laws that govern the "motion of the heavens" - as they called it back then - was the same force as what we experience as terrestrial gravity.
POPE: As far as civilization goes, it is one of the most complex and advanced - arguably THE most advanced scientific accomplishment that our civilization has achieved to date.
INGRAM: I think there are many risks that are much greater than some experiment going wrong. But the other point is - and I think it's a more important point - that it's governments that do risky stuff or it's the military belonging to governments that do risky things. It's not the scientists. So, you know - Einstein came up with e=mc^2, but it was the Manhattan Project that turned it into a bomb.
KRIEGER: And you get beyond the issue of the black hole, and now people know what it is and they know that experiments are going on. And maybe, a year from now, they'll be interested in hearing what we've found. Whereas, if this had not happened, we wouldn't be in the consciousness of so many people and people would be less interested.
And it's harder to sell a pure, scientific result that isn't - you know - very sensational like maybe destroying the Earth. But now that people are aware of us, maybe they'll be more receptive to that kind of announcement in the future.
TEXT (END CREDITS):
Directed by
Christopher Butcher
Edited by
Christopher Butcher
Assistant Camera
Jonathan Balazs
Music
"2/2" by Brian Eno (1978)
All footage of the LHC and ATLAS used with permission of CERN
Thanks to
Peter Krieger, Damian Pope, Jay Ingram, Donna Francis, Max Touzel and Neil Mills
bambupictures.com (c) 2008
