FAPPAF Bucket

The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built.

inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s

If this new collider doesn’t produce groundbreaking discoveries, particle physics will have reached a dead end for a generation or more. The theorists would keep theorizing. But without hard experimental data pouring out of the L.H.C., says Jim Virdee, a Kenyan-born British-Indian physicist with the L.H.C., then “particle physics, the whole thing, becomes metaphysics.”

The history of particle physics is like a Russian nested doll, with each new generation of physicists prying open the next, smaller doll. First, a century ago, they opened up the atom and found the most obvious particles, the nucleus and its orbiting electrons. Then they opened up the nucleus and found the protons and neutrons. Inside these they found quarks and gluons. And so on.

physicists now say that all the visible matter in the universe—galaxies, stars, asteroids, comets, gases, planets, you, this magazine—amounts to just 4 percent of the total, and that the remaining 96 percent consists of “dark energy” (about three quarters) and “dark matter” (about one quarter).

Some physicists think the reason gravity is comparatively weak is that it gets diluted as it courses in and out of other, unseen dimensions. If extra dimensions are indeed found at the L.H.C., then string theory—already the leading candidate to become the unified Theory of Everything—would suddenly seem a lot more real. [*what could it even mean for there to be more than 3 spatial dimensions?]

The L.H.C. is the largest machine and, after the Manhattan Project, the most elaborate scientific enterprise of all time, but it’s also, to my postmodern eyes, the largest art project ever built, as well as a quasi-religious undertaking. All sorts of people make pilgrimages to the L.H.C. simply in order to be awestruck, the way they visit Stonehenge or Machu Picchu or the pyramids. On one of the days I toured the L.H.C., I was joined by the art collector Francesca von Habsburg and her 12-year-old son, Archduke Ferdinand; the Icelandic pop musician Einar Örn Benediktsson, formerly of the Sugarcubes; and ex–Sex Pistol Glen Matlock. A quarter-century in the making, the L.H.C. is a 21st-century cathedral of science, where thousands of passionately devoted, hardworking physicists—monks by any other name—have gathered to experience epiphany and revelation, and continue writing Genesis 2.0.

Richard Holmes’s new book, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science