Time to make your peace

Home } Blinded by science } Time to make your peace

Approximately 48 hours ago, the CERN Large Hadron Collider broke a record for high-energy particle collisions, with proton beams colliding with a remarkable combined energy of 7 tera-electron volts. Yes, I know, “collison,” “colliding,” sloppy writing, hopeless repetition. But I’m having a hard time finding the motivation to craft clean, crisp journalistic prose.

Excuse me. I’ve got to compose myself.

A lot of us joked about the LHC bringing on the end of the world — mechanism usually being the creation of an Earth-consuming black hole. Cute in-joke because those of us in-the-know were well aware that a microscopic black hole would evaporate before it ever got out of the collider’s vacuum chamber. Funny us. Too bad our apocalyptic scenarios were limited by a distinct failure of imagination.

First some background. The fine structure constant, Î±, numerical value roughly 1/137, is (per Wikipedia) “a fundamental physical constant, namely the coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction.” One way of measuring Î± is with the Quantum Hall effect, which specifies among other things that electrical resistance in a supercooled wire is precisely quantized. Supercolliders rely heavily on supercooling, of course, so alterations of the Quantum Hall effect — if such a thing were possible — would show up as anomalous readings by the LHC’s internal circuitry.

For the rest of the story, I’ll quote from today’s interview of CERN spokesman Jurgen Schukraft by PBS reporter Dwayne Myers:

JS: Something was playing havoc with our oscilloscopes. A simple AC sinusoid looked slanted as if blown by a stiff wind. At first we thought of magnetic leakage. Anyone who has held a strong magnet near a cathode ray tube — a television, for example — knows what it can do to an electron beam. This was quickly ruled out, yet we had no explanation for our oscilloscopes.

DM: I understand [California Institute of Technology Professor of Physics] Curtis Schramm was the first to check Hall effect readings from your liquid helium cables.

JS: Yes, with the finding that they were off. Way off, close to 6%, but systematically deviant. And since the quantized resistance values were consistently aberrant, it was a simple matter to discern that [fine structure constant] alpha was off by the same degree.

DM: So the fine structure constant, one of the fundamental constants of the universe, had somehow shifted within the central cavity of the collider.

JS: And subsequent measurements at our remote sites first in Sadigny, then in Le Cannelet, indicate the change is propagating outward.

DM: Like a wave?

JS: Sadly, no. The change moves outward radially from CERN, but it’s picking up speed and magnitude. This morning, [Professor of Nuclear Physics] Bartolomeo Galvez at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid recorded the alteration of alpha as the “wave,” as you call it, propagated through his laboratory. The change had increased to just over 6%.

DM: So physicists around the world will soon have to alter many of their textbooks.

JS: This would be true, if it were worth the effort.

DM: Excuse me?

JS: At the present rate, when the “wave” reaches our sun in 2012, alpha will measure 0.121. At that value, stellar fusion will be quite impossible.

DM: So our sun will —

JS: Snuff it, yes.