The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN,
has its offices on the outskirts of Geneva, in an area once devoted to
dairy farms and now given over to sprawl. The offices occupy several
dozen buildings, some of them in Switzerland and the remainder, a few
hundred yards away, in France. The buildings are reachable by roads
with names like Route Bohr, Route Schrödinger, and Route Curie. By the
entrance to the complex, there is a museum—nearly empty the day I
visited—that attempts to make particle physics comprehensible to the
general public. Behind that there is a park where bits of old
cyclotrons are displayed, like playground equipment from Mars.
If
you think of the sciences as a tower, with one field resting on another
until you reach, say, botany or physiology, then particle physics
represents the bottommost floor. The first key experiment was conducted
in 1909, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford. When Rutherford shot
alpha particles at a wafer-thin sheet of gold foil, a small proportion
of the particles bounced right back, a phenomenon that he described as
“almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece
of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.” Rutherford’s work led to
the realization that most of an atom’s mass was concentrated in a tiny
area, the nucleus. “All science is either physics or stamp-collecting,”
he is supposed to have said.
Since Rutherford’s discovery, particle physics has provided one
extraordinary—if increasingly implausible-sounding—revelation after
another: first protons and neutrons, then antimatter, gluons,
neutrinos, and quarks. In 1967, the existence of particles to mediate
the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, was
theorized; in 1983, at CERN, these
particles—the W and the Z—were observed and their properties measured.
In 1977, the existence of what became known as the “top” quark was
predicted; in 1995, at Fermilab, in Illinois, it, too, was found.
And yet, for all its triumphs, the field has been haunted by
failure. The more physicists have learned about the way matter behaves
at its most fundamental level, the more acutely they have become aware
that something—a big something—is missing from their accounts. Among
the many possibilities proposed for what’s often called “new physics”
is that the universe actually consists of tiny strands (or strings) of
energy; that it contains several dimensions beyond those that we
perceive; that it is full of mysterious particles—“sparticles”—that
have yet to be detected; that it is not a universe at all but a
multiverse; and that it began not with a bang but with a splat.
Sometime in the next few months, physicists at CERN
will finish preparations for the most ambitious particle-physics
experiment ever, which will be conducted in an apparatus modestly
referred to as the Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C. The L.H.C. fills a
circular tunnel seventeen miles in circumference. To get from one side
of it to the other, it is necessary to drive through several towns, and
then descend three hundred feet in an elevator. Alternatively, it is
possible to ride through the tunnel in one of the dozens of bicycles CERN provides for its staff, but in that case a supply of emergency oxygen is required.
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