The Large Hadron Collider Pop-up Book: Voyage to the Heart of Matter

"Because it’s ridiculously fun. The whole idea of the Large Hadron Collider is this extraordinary machine with a circumference of 27 kilometres where we crash together two beams of protons—each of which is thinner than a human hair—to try and work out the underlying structure of the universe. So much of this kind of physics is three-dimensional. Depicting things on flat pieces of paper is misleading. To go back to the last choice, this is something that Feynman says in his first lecture: he bemoans the fact that he’s trying to draw the structure of ice. He apologises for showing a two-dimensional picture, but asks his audience to imagine that this is actually a three-dimensional structure. He tries desperately to depict it, but all he has is a slide. This book is enormous fun. Anyone can read it. It gets into some pretty technical details about, for example, the superconducting magnets and the structure of the detectors—especially ATLAS, which is the main focus of the book. It gives you a scale model of the depth below ground that the collider is at, and what the different layers in a modern particle detector are designed to detect, and why we have this onion structure in the detector layers. Another model shows the actual detector itself. The scale of it is astonishing. It’s a bit of a paradox that the smallest structures in the universe have to be examined by enormous detectors that are the size of a 10-storey building. You can get hours of endless fun with this book. The magnets are amazing—we have to use liquid helium. They already had the tunnel from the previous accelerator which was the LEP (Large Electron–Positron Collider). They already had the tunnel and realised that they could build this upgrade, but to get up to the kinds of energies that they needed to look for particles like the Higgs boson, the tunnel was essentially too small. They wanted a tunnel that had a much, much bigger circumference because to get particles up to a certain speed—to steer them around in a circle—you have to apply a very, very strong centripetal force. You couldn’t get that strong a steering force with the magnets of the time. So, they pretty much had to invent these new superconducting magnets that are cooled with liquid helium. They realised it was cheaper to use the old tunnel and develop a whole new magnet technology than to build a new tunnel. People say ‘they spend billions of pounds in particle physics, so why can’t we alleviate poverty?’ But fundamental research does more than broaden our horizons. There are so many practical spin-offs. Apart from the whole World Wide Web being invented by CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee, those magnets are the magnets—the very antecedents—of the ones that are used in MRI machines. This is the evolution of the universe and how we went from a hot Big Bang to the structure of the universe that we have now. This is a few hundredths of thousandths of a second after the Big Bang. What we are looking for is how the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider relate to the conditions of the early universe. How can we explain the formation of hydrogen and helium in the early universe and so on? It’s just enormous fun. It’s a beautiful but accurate overview of the biggest physics experiment in the world. Because I think it’s a terribly important book. I get sick of people nowadays saying that modern life is rubbish and the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Pollution is terrible, the population of the world is just growing and growing, and there is so much war and suffering in the world. Hello, historical myopia! You have forgotten what life used to be like. You have forgotten that war was the default state of most civilisations, that life expectancy, even 50 years ago, was 20 years less than it is now, what infant mortality rates used to be like, how people suffered and died like flies from infectious diseases, how prevalent famine was, how polluting energy generation used to be (compared to what it is now), the inefficiencies of everything—of machines, of cars. You have forgotten how difficult it was for anyone other than a white male to do anything of substance in the world. The way to counter that is to count : to track and actually look at how things have gotten better—objectively so—for the vast majority of people on the planet. It’s to examine the driving factors, and importantly, to say that what we are doing is working in some regard. We have to look carefully to see what is working and what is not, and see what we can do to make it better. Pinker picks through this process and encounters this intellectual aversion to so-called progress. He says something like, ‘intellectuals dislike progress, but intellectuals who call themselves progressives really dislike progress.’ He’s saying, actually, the changes of thought that were initiated in the Enlightenment—all the values of reason, humanism, of not taking things on faith, and daring to understand—have made the world better, and continue to make the world better. We need to defend them and laud them and say how wonderful they are, not go around saying, ‘The Industrial Revolution was such a bad idea; look at how much of a mess the world is.’ It’s exactly the opposite. He backs everything up with terribly rigorous data that’s difficult to counter. It’s stuff you might not know, too: for instance, the rate of population growth of the world peaked in 1965 or so. It’s now down to almost one per cent. It’s predicted to be zero by 2050, and then the population is predicted to decline. The world population isn’t just growing—the rate has decreased markedly. Why is that? Educating women. When women are educated and given access to contraception, they have fewer children. And the children they do have live longer and happier lives. As a result, the condition of life for whole cultures and peoples is improving. The thing is, we are so good at reporting suffering nowadays and there is a lot out there that is bad. This is something that Hans Rosling says: “Things are bad—but they have never been better.” Both can be true at once. There are—and always have been—brilliant women in physics. We need their ideas and we need the diversity of approaches and perspectives. Certainly, a lot of girls here want to do it. In Year 12, we have a third of our cohort doing physics—35 girls out of about 100. And in Year 11, we have about a quarter of the cohort taking physics for the full A-level. But we might be a bit of an exception. If you look at movies from even 10 or 15 years ago, you will have a female scientist, but there will be something wrong with her; she’ll be ‘exceptional’ in some way. She’ll be peculiar, or she’ll be obviously the token female. But increasingly, I find that people are people—purple people with yellow stripes can be physicists too. It’s become much more inclusive. The degree to which universities and research institutions realise that they have to engage with kids of this age has completely transformed since I was doing my PhD. These institutions now do a lot more to show what they are working on, and why it’s so amazing. They’re running courses, giving talks, and getting people in to do all sorts of fun stuff—even with primary school kids, because that’s when the interest starts. The interest doesn’t begin at the age when kids are asked what sort of job they’d like to do; it’s when they’re six. That’s when they say ‘look at this amazing stuff!’ The big problem, I think, is not getting girls to study physics in the first place or even to take it at degree level: it’s keeping them in the profession. The problem with an academic career or a research career is that when you get your PhD, it is still the case that you then go on to this post-doctoral position treadmill. It’ll be three years here and two years there. If you’re in a slightly niche field, your first posting will be in Brighton and your second in New York and your third in Stuttgart. Though it’s a traditionalist view, this coincides with the stage in a woman’s life where she’s expected to reproduce. So, what are you going to do? Are you going to knowingly go into this profession when you’re not going to be able to stay in one place for more than a few years at a time, with no guarantee of a permanent job at the end of it? Or are you going to take your huge raft of skills and do something similar but different, where you would effectively have a job for life? That was the decision I made."