Big Science

The CERN Large Hadron Collider went live this morning outside Geneva, Switzerland. If you follow science, this is pretty exciting news. This particle accelerator hopefully has the ability to prove – or disprove – some of the many theories surrounding the world of physics right now. In particular, they’re hoping to discover a particle called a Higgs boson, a particle that’s predicted by a lot of theories but so far has remained undetected. Theoretically, the Higgs boson is the particle that makes up and gives other particles mass. It would be a big discovery.

The sad part of all this is that the United States was set to build an even larger, more powerful particle accelerator in Texas called the Superconducting Supercollider. Congress killed it because of its budget in 1993. It would have been a truly impressive machine. With the Iraq War costing $12 billion dollars a month, it’s hard not to be a bit wistful about the uses that money could be going towards. I’ve always been a huge fan of “big science” projects like particle accelerators and space probes. I can understand people who think there are better uses for that money, and they may be right: education, transit infrastructure, poverty, medical research. All that stuff is important.

But it’s just not as cool as slamming particles together at seven trillion electron volts.