Lords of the Ring

Alom Shaha Hub of the Universe: Brian Cox (left) and Jon Butterworth outside the CERN cafe

An earlier generation of accelerators has already answered many questions about the nature of matter, giving us a much greater understanding of the Universe. Along the way, the answers have changed our daily lives, giving us televisions, transistors, medical imaging and a host of other new technologies. Most famously, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. However, many people still question science of this scale and ask whether it's really worth all the time, effort and money.

This is a question that Jon has clearly had to deal with before: "This is frontier research, there's no new drug going to come from this directly, and certainly not a new bomb", he told me, referring to the suggestion made in Dan Brown's blockbuster Angels & Demons, which is set partly at CERN.

"You get attacked so often. I think it's important to make clear that we're not doing this for the spin offs or the benefits, we're doing it for the curiosity. It's curiosity-driven science, and to my mind that's one of the defining qualities of civilization. There's a certain limit to the expenditure that the public will put up - and this is what you get for it."

According to Brian, it's the only thing we can do if we want to find out how the Universe works: "If you could, what you'd like to do is to go back to the Big Bang, and see what's happening. But we can't do that because you can't travel back in time. So you recreate the conditions as closely as you can. We're creating a little bit of the Big Bang, sticking it in a high precision detector and having a look as closely as we can - to see what happens".

CERN Work in progress: part of the Atlas detector is lowered 90 metres into the ground

With so many delicate components that need to come together, and so much potential for error, the science community is waiting with bated breath for the Large Hadron Collider to be completed. Once switched on, the race will be on to analyse the data and find the answers they've all been waiting for. Hopefully, sometime in 2007, there'll be an announcement that will change the way we think about the Universe forever.

More…

- about CERN

- about Jon Butterworth and Brian Cox

- a short film featuring Brian

- the history of international collaboration in particle physics