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The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider
Crown
October 2010
On Sale: October 5, 2010
288 pages
ISBN: 0307591670
EAN: 9780307591678
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the
most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious
purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel
under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and
dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago
within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery
birth of our universe. The collider is now crashing protons
at record energy levels never created by scientists before,
and it will reach even higher levels by 2013. Its
superconducting magnets guide two beams of protons in
opposite directions around the track. After accelerating the
beams to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, it
collides the protons head-on, annihilating them in a flash
of energy sufficient—in accordance with Einstein’s elegant
statement of mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2—to coalesce into
a shower of particles and phenomena that have not existed
since the first moments of creation. Within the LHC’s
detectors, scientists hope to see empirical confirmation of
key theories in physics and cosmology. In telling the story of what is perhaps the most anticipated
experiment in the history of science, Amir D. Aczel takes us
inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an
international team of top researchers begins to discover
whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its
spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men
and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC—and with
the same clarity and depth of knowledge he demonstrated in
the bestselling Fermat’s Last Theorem—Aczel enriches all of
us with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will
need to appreciate the discoveries that will almost
certainly spring forth when the full power of this great
machine is finally unleashed. Will the Higgs boson make its breathlessly awaited
appearance, confirming at last the Standard Model of
particles and their interactions that is among the great
theoretical achievements of twentieth-century physics? Will
the hidden dimensions posited by string theory be revealed?
Will we at last identify the nature of the dark matter that
makes up more than 90 percent of the cosmos? With Present at
the Creation, written by one of today’s finest popular
interpreters of basic science, we can all follow the
progress of an experiment that promises to greatly satisfy
the curiosity of anyone who ever concurred with Einstein
when he said, “I want to know God’s thoughts—the rest is
details.”
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