Hardon for Science

Hadron! I meant HADRON!

So, before I was… what I am today, I was an Engineer. A Structural Engineer. University of Calgary, 1979. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. I started out in pre-dentistry but what turned me on — really turned me on — was Math and Physics. So I dropped all that rote memorization of Organic Chemistry and entered the Physics program. But what turned me on — really turned me on — about Physics was Astrophysics.

All those particles, whizzing across the universe. Creating, destroying, splitting. Men and women, scientists, looking back in time, through telescopes, to see how the universe began. I never lost my love for Physics and Astrophysics, even when the more pragmatic part of me decided to actually make some money in Engineering. Not a year goes by without some regret for that decision.

And so it is this week, amid the familiar and depressing (and repetitive) stupidity of the U.S. elections, that the Large Hadron Collider was turned on today. (Get it, turned on?) We’re one step closer to discovering how the universe began. Too bad America’s hardon for Jesus has hobbled its own research:

Once upon a time the United States ruled particle physics. For the last two decades, Fermilab’s Tevatron, which hurls protons and their mirror opposites, anti-protons, together at energies of a trillion electron volts was the world’s largest particle machine.

By the end of the year, when the CERN collider has revved up to 5 trillion electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second. Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch back in time towards the Big Bang.

In 1993, the United States Congress canceled plans for an even bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion. That collider, its former director Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas in Austin said recently, would have been in operation around 2001.

But science (and scientists) don’t gloat about geography and politics, so let’s celebrate science’s advances:

Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass, or identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.

But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine, that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.

This is the news to watch for real thrills later this year.

Check out this nerdalicious Large Hadron Rap for illustration of just what the collider will be doing (link courtesy Your Dirty Answer):

Addendum: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?