SAUSAGES, GREEN CHEESE AND THE BIG BANG

A simulated detection of the Higgs Boson particle

The moon, we learn, is made of green cheese - though what ‘green cheese’ might be is somehow never explained.  I suppose it is cheese that is green, but you never know.  Chinese seaweed is not seaweed at all but a kind of cabbage, or so they tell me, so green cheese might be a kind of rock.  But that aside what is everything else made of? 

When we stay at the Mill, down in the Auvergne,  it gets dark at night.  Proper dark.  Can’t see your hand in front of your face dark.  But look up and what you see are uncountable stars stretching in a dimly glowing carpet from one side of the heavens to the other.  Millions upon billions of tiny pricks of light. 

And in this vast uncountable universe what we can see is multiplied a million fold by what we can’t:  those stars in galaxies and nebulae that have travelled already too far and whose light no longer reaches us and whose presence can only be detected by radio beams.

Yet this vastness of stars and galaxies and planets and rocks represents less than one part in two- hundred-and-fifty of what is in the universe.  If, like the moon, everything we can see is made of green cheese, then that represents only what is left out upon the counter.  There remains a whole greater kitchen of comestibles locked away out of sight in cupboards and pantries.

Dark matter makes up three-quarters of the universe and dark energy a further quarter.  What are these two behemoths which take up whole store-cupboards of space?  Well, that is at least as good a question as the one about the green cheese, for no-one seems to know.  We know dark matter exists and roughly where it is, but we don’t yet know what it is. For all I know it may be made of green cheese too.  Or even blue, yellow or purple cheese.

The man who prompted these sudden reflections is Lyn Evans, who hails from just up the road in Aberdare in South Wales and is billed as the builder of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just outside Geneva. Possibly you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for it has been much in the news.  It is a giant circular tunnel 27 kilometres long through which sub-atomic particles are accelerated with the aid of magnets to impossible speeds and then crashed into each other in the hope that they will break apart and so we shall be able to learn more about what you and I (and the green cheese) are made of.

Lyn Evans was giving the Anniversary Lecture at the Welsh Centre of International Affairs in Cardiff this week.  He spoke in a listed pseudo-Egyptian monstrosity of a building known as the Temple of Peace and Health that boasts some of the worst acoustics in the world.  Still, what he was saying was so fascinating that you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.

We are not made, he told us, of sugar and spice and all things nice, but of a whole family of creatures, fabulous as unicorns, fantastical as griffins with names like gluons, muons, quarks, hadrons, neutrons, photons, variously possessing mass, energy or electrical charge and sometimes none of these at all.  Out of such energised and vibrating soup come the paintings of Leonardo, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart.

One particle however is missing: the Higgs Boson particle. Like the dark matter (or perhaps the green cheese) we know - or we think we know - it exists and that without it all the gluons and muons and photons and quarks would simply fall apart.  It has been called the ‘God’ particle because without it there could be no matter or any living thing created. Yet like God himself no-one has yet found it.  The scientists have trod the path to Mount Olympus only to find Zeus and his tribe departed.

Hence the need to build this 27 kilometre tunnel and to collide hadrons in the hope that after the bang of the collisions scientists will be able to find Higgs Boson particles among the wreckage standing by the roadside, as it were, and scratching their heads.

What Lyn Evans will do then he didn’t say.  Presumably the things will be weighed and measured and then - because we have to return whence we started to the discussion of what the universe is made of - then the boffins can get to work again on how it all began: how exactly the Big Bang.....er....banged, all that time ago.

Rather disappointingly he didn’t touch on what happened before the Big Bang - which has always seemed to me the more important question.  Something surely must have been frying in the pan before ‘sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, one went ‘bang.’’   Was our Big Bang a unique event?  Oh dear - you’ve got me worried now.