I am probably the only person to look round a particle accelerator in two-inch peep-toe sandals.
It was my first visit to Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), and I had come to Geneva to see the world's largest particle collider as it prepares to go live. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a circular tunnel built 100 metres under the suburbs of Geneva, overlooked by the Jura mountains, a limestone wave about to break on the valley below. Soon, this 27km-long tunnel will be used to fire two beams of protons at each other, reaching 99.999999 per cent the speed of light. The beams will create up to 600m collisions per second and create showers of new particles, some of which have not existed since the big bang. Detectors will record their tracks as they smash off each other. It is hoped that, among other things, this will prove the existence of the Higgs boson, an entirely theoretical entity.
The Higgs particle matters hugely to physicists because it might explain why bodies have mass and open a window on the earliest moments of the universe. It became a kind of holy grail for experimental physics after it was christened the "God particle" by Leon Lederman in 1994. It is believed that a Higgs-like mechanism could have played an important role in the early universe, contributing to the structure of the world we see today.
The LHC makes sensational headlines: "Is this the answer to God, the universe and all that?" (Guardian, August 2004). And the experiment kindles some basic fears about science: "Killer plasma ready to devour the earth" was the headline to an article by a physicist (Telegraph, September 2001) speculating that a particle collider such as the LHC could produce an exotic particle called a "strangelet," which "would eat our planet from the inside out… killing us all in the process."
A common misconception about the LHC is that its colliding beams risk creating a black hole. Black holes happen when stars with diameters hundreds of times that of the earth collapse. Some of the densities to be created at the LHC are similar, but with infinitesimal pieces of matter—fragments of protons. In any case, cosmic rays have been hitting the earth for millions of years at higher energies than those to be produced by the LHC without leading to a catastrophe.
At the luggage carousel of Geneva airport, I watched a small woman pick up a lurid orange bag and drag it towards her trolley. She was like an atom that had shed an electron in Bristol, only to pick it up again in Geneva. The wheel on the orange lady's trolley squeaked as she leant into its weight, only to shed the electron again into the back of a taxi.
Dan Brown set the beginning of Angels and Demons, his thriller about antimatter, at Cern. He describes his hero, Robert Langdon, visiting the director at his office in a building called the Glass Cathedral. His Cern is like a military base for the nuclear age, with supermarkets and a free-fall machine in which tired physicists can relax. Even though Brown thanked Cern in his credits, nobody recalls him visiting. In reality, the site looks like a huge university campus, more hippie than military in atmosphere. I'd expected litter-free, hyperreal neatness, but the verges needed weeding. I learned later that mowing had been delayed until a rare bee orchid on site had flowered.
I was deposited at the exterior reception and had to carry my awkward luggage through the security gate and towards the visitors' hostel. I looked at my security pass with the Cern logo—two superimposed particle accelerator rings—and was reassured that "This visitor card guarantees that you are authorised to reach the domain." I was looking forward to reaching the domain: it sounded like a superior level in a virtual reality game.
I immediately became lost. Now my luggage was really bothering me. I went down an avenue called Hubble and crossed a road called Einstein, passing a crowd of young men in T-shirts playing frisbee. Why is it that scientists are always playing frisbee? I've never known a gang of poets spontaneously burst into a frisbee session: they're more likely to go out and get drunk. Playing frisbee doesn't require a common language, so it might be an arcane bonding ritual in the scientific world. Perhaps they enjoy the shape of the toy, like an elliptical galaxy.
Even once I'd checked in to the hostel, the ordeal with my bags was not over. The lift to the third floor was not working. "You'd think that in a place with so many first-class engineers that they'd be able to get the lift to go," I said to a bearded man in a T-shirt. He replied: "They have someone out to it every other day, and they still can't find the fault."
I noted that T-shirts—worn with a semi-formal jacket on top—seemed to be the fashion of choice here, along with trainers: physicist chic. I'm not a T-shirt woman, preferring a more tailored look to hide lumps and bumps, but it is an interesting look if the T-shirt logo is cool enough. My bearded friend was wearing a Cassini shirt, from the latest probe to Titan, like the badge of a medieval guild. Even better, the shirt was spattered with paint, suggesting either that he was such an eminent physicist that he didn't need to take care of such T-shirts, or that he had personally painted the rocket.
I was sweating by the time I'd climbed three sets of stairs and deposited my luggage in the room. I drew back the net curtain and was surprised to see a large statue of Shiva below me. Having showered, I went down to take a closer look. On the pedestal was written: "O Omnipresent, the embodiment of all virtues, the creator of this cosmic universe, the king of dancers, who dances the Ananda Tandava in the twilight, I salute thee (Verse 56, Shivanandalahari by Sri Adi Sankara).
I noted that the statue had been given to Cern by the Indian government's department of atomic energy. I looked more closely. Shiva, the creator, the sustainer and the destroyer of life, had one leg raised in the dance of the universe. He appeared to be wearing cycling shorts and was standing on a depiction of illusion. In his four arms, Shiva held snakes and cymbals. A nearby plaque told me that this dance symbolised "Shakti," or the life force. This particular statue showed Shiva "dancing the universe into existence, sustaining it with His rhythm and dancing it to extinction." If anybody was slow to see the connection, a quotation from physicist Fritjof Capra spelt it out: "For the modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter."
My Cern quest had started in an unlikely fashion at a party in Cardiff. There I met a man with a mass of curly hair and asked him what he did. He replied that he was an astronomer. I said that I'd been looking for an astronomer for ages. What did I do? I was a poet. Good, said the astronomer, I've been looking for a poet. Mike Edmunds, it turned out, was a professor at Cardiff University's department of physics and astronomy. We struck a bargain. He would give me tutorials in astrophysics if I would write a poem for him about the stars, to be used in publicity material.
So, despite having struggled very hard with O-level maths in school, I became a poet-in-residence at a department of astronomy. Soon Mike had me doing quadratic equations and roughly calculating the size of the earth and the sun. This involved remembering some formulae to do with pi and logarithms, ways of multiplying numbers into huge amounts without having to write out pages of noughts. We calculated that the speed of light was 3x108? metres per second, and that it takes light eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. Later he taught me about the life cycles of stars and about the electromagnetic spectrum, including black body radiation. I quite liked the idea of myself as an emotional black body, able to emit as much radiation as I could absorb. Then we went on a quick Cook's tour of the universe which, I learned, is expanding and cooling.
As a poet, I could say anything I like, however fanciful, but it matters to me that the language I use should reflect reality. The discipline of physics values verbal precision as much as accurate knowledge of what the physical world is like. At a quantum level, that world is so bizarre that physicists themselves have to use metaphor to describe it. Take, for example, the word "particle." By now it's a truism that light can behave like particles or like waves but, when you push a physicist, he has to admit that even the image of tiny billiard balls doesn't quite catch reality. Matter is a form of energy, but it? doesn't exist neatly in little points. In fact, it's impossible to say accurately where a so-called particle is. You can only give a probability for where it might be, so a quark is more like a smudge than a billiard ball. At a quantum level, atoms behave in ways totally different to how we expect.
Back at Cern, by the time I had changed for the evening, it was raining. I tried to find my way back to the exterior reception again through bewildering halls and film-set buildings. I shivered in my thin linen dress and high heels as a rumble of thunder sounded. I'd carried my dressy sandals all the way to Geneva and I was damned if I wasn't going to get any wear out of them. But in the quickening rain, I was beginning to have doubts about their practicality. Lightning flashed and I could feel it chiming with the aura of an incipient migraine. I began to run under the tall lime trees, getting gradually soaked as the rain pelted down, a more robust echo of the cosmic showers in which, unknowingly, we live.
Fortunately, the downpour had also delayed my taxi, and I made it to the Alice (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) centre to meet David Evans, a British scientist working on the experiment. Huge gates slid apart for us, revealing the detector site, out in the Geneva countryside, to be deserted, because it was the May holiday. David looked in dismay at my sandals—the safety rules require closed shoes with no heels. With James Gillies, head of communications at Cern, we donned hard hats and made our way through the educational display above the shaft which led, 150 metres down, to the particle collider itself.
Under a colourful representation of the big bang, David explained that Alice is designed to give physicists an insight into the very earliest moments after the big bang, between 10-12 and 10-20 seconds after some superforce had created the universe from a singularity. This means being able to travel back much further than the oldest of the stars and galaxies which we can see today, to a time when the universe was opaque and consisted of a quark and gluon plasma, too dense to allow light to escape through it.
By carrying out head-on collisions of heavy ions (the nuclei of lead atoms) accelerated by the LHC to a speed close to that of light, physicists anticipate the brief recreation of this plasma, in the form of very hot drops of primordial matter, or tiny fire balls. This material will be as dense as the pyramids crushed to the size of a pinhead. The temperatures involved are 100,000 times that at the centre of the sun, hot enough to melt protons and neutrons, like ice in hot water. This matter only lasts for a fraction of a second. The scientists can't see the event itself in their detectors, but they can see what happens to it in terms of the particles which it creates and into which it decays. "It's like throwing two strawberries together and seeing fruit cocktail coming out. Most of the time there will be apples and pears but every now and then, you'll produce the mango that signals new physics," said James.
We descended in an orange 1970s-style lift to the detector, which lies astride the particle accelerator in its tunnel,? like the gem in a necklace. David, a slight red-headed man in a tweed jacket, said that he'd wanted to call this experiment Lion, rather than Alice, but that he had been overruled because it was felt that his name was too macho. I told him he'd been right, because his name suggested some of the astonishing force needed to separate quarks and gluons. Alice and her sky-blue dress didn't quite catch the savage heat of material just after the big bang.
"Nobody's ever seen a quark," James told me as we made our way past the large detector, a ring which would register the paths of the particles created by the impact of the colliding ions. Even so, quarks are widely accepted as the basic building blocks of matter. "They never exist alone. Gluons bind them together with the strong nuclear force and they're incredibly hard to pull apart."
In order to get a better look at the screens in the detector, we climbed staircases and walked along gantries made of metal sheets full of large holes. I tip-toed carefully, determined not to get my heels caught in the perforations. "We don't even know the size of a quark," continued James, "nor why they have the mass or the charges they do." As we gazed down on the detector's ring, I asked David if he ever became discouraged by how little he knew as a physicist, or when things went wrong. "No, never," he replied. "If things don't turn out the way we expect, then we'll learn something different."
This hardware had been reminding me of something and as we moved along a narrow scaffold, it came to me: Dr Who. It felt as though we were on a low-budget film set designed by somebody who was approximating what cutting-edge technology would look like. Except that this is the frontier of modern experimental physics. My disorientation was deepened momentarily when James mentioned, in passing, that John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack in the Dr Who spinoff Torchwood, had visited Cern the day before. We agreed that we were great fans of the new series, that Russell T Davies was a genius, and speculated that Captain Jack would turn out to be Dr Who's brother. (We were wrong.)
Later, we walked a short distance down the particle accelerator tunnel. The passage looked like a hospital basement, with the central heating system running through it. It was, however, a super-sophisticated cooling system, designed to create temperatures colder than those in outer space. An Italian artist had already made a film of a journey through the whole 27-km tunnel. I think it must be quite boring. The sections of piping contained the magnets which would direct the particle beams in a circle, and had been manufactured in many different countries. Here we could see two with the American flag on them, and each piece of pipe had a name: Jessica was laid alongside Katie.
Two weeks before I'd arrived, testing of the magnetic sections had been disrupted by an unexpected explosion. The machine filled with dust and helium. It turned out that Fermilab, the American suppliers of some of the magnets, had made basic errors in their engineering calculations, and the components they'd manufactured were unsafe. This meant that the opening of the LHC had to be postponed from autumn 2007 until spring 2008. As Fermilab, the national physics laboratory which built the faulty components, is Cern's main rival in the race to find the Higgs particle, many eyebrows were raised. The magnets have now been repaired and appear to be in good working order.
James had invited us to dinner with his family in his mountainside house. We ate lamb and "nuclear asparagus" from the fields next to Cern as we watched a special edition of the BBC's Horizon outlining the importance of the work being done at the LHC. The physicists present made indiscreet comments about their colleagues in between mouthfuls of crème caramel. But what the programme made clear was that this is perhaps the most exciting time since Einstein's days to be in particle physics, and that the LHC is going to open a door on to a landscape never seen before. If you're an experimental physicist, Geneva is the place to be. In comparison to what's being done in Cern, the Nasa space station engineering looks like a caravanning holiday. The true terra incognita lies in the particles which surround us but which have been invisible to us until now. LHC is the platform which will allow us to see out into our deep past, answering questions about dark matter, antimatter, super-symmetry, parallel universes, extra dimensions of time and space and, ultimately, Einstein's elusive unified theory.
As she cleared the dishes, I asked Catriona, James's wife, herself a physicist, if what I could hear outside the window were cowbells. Yes, she laughed. She told me that if you go running in the mountains during the shooting season, it's wise to wear a bell so that you're not taken for an edible creature and shot. What's being attempted at Cern is hanging a kind of bell on the Higgs boson, if it exists, so that we can see where it fits into the quantum ecosystem.
Mass, a form of stored-up energy, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics. It seems to be a force with which gravity interacts to give us weight. It's not understood how we have mass at all. The Higgs boson may be the key to this energy, which exists in a field described as the Higgs ocean. Here, then, is another form of the interaction between the basic forces of the universe, another figure in the dance of subatomic matter.
Earlier, when we arrived at James and Catriona's house, their six-year-old daughter Gemma insisted on greeting us with a formal dance. To Abba she twirled and jumped, making her pink floral dress flare out. I thought of Shiva and his subatomic dance. The LHC will change our understanding of the most basic forces in matter. I hate frilly "poetic" language. I want to write in a way that reflects accurately the awesome powers in which we live but of which we're generally unaware. I'm determined to try to understand what's happening now at Cern and to be a witness to those discoveries.
After she'd taken her bow, I promised Gemma that if I was ever lucky enough to come back to Cern, it would be my turn to dance for her.
