Forget all the news distracting grown-ups lately – my kid is very worried about what some mad scientists have been up to.
My reply? They’re Swiss, they won’t blow up the world, they couldn’t make any money on it!!
This did not prove comforting.
I do not know Stephen Hawking personally (though he nearly ran me over one night as he raced from the Fort St. George to Midsummer House) but luckily I do know many other Cambridge trained physicists.
I wrote and asked Paul for a synposis to soothe my worried son. After explaining the experiment (which you all understand, right?) this was his answer:
They’re hoping to find something called the Higgs boson – the ‘God’ particle that supposedly pervades the universe and gives matter the property of mass. Personally, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree with that one – it sounds rather like phlogiston and the aether theory of the 19th century. I don’t think there need be anything that gives particles the property of mass, as I don’t think it can be separated from the fact that the presence of matter in space-time distorts it, thus creating the necessary reconstruction of the universe itself that registers the presence of matter. This explains gravity quite easily, and I thought Einstein had it right in this sense. Physicists have failed to unify gravity with the three other forces in the universe and I think the reason is that it’s not a force.
So, to conclude, I think it’s very unlikely that the machines will produce anything untoward, and potentially even anything all that interesting. If the latter is the case, then they’ll build a far bigger one, of course, and the debate will reopen, although I would venture the same opinions again.
Now you know.