Speaking at the Idea Festival on Saturday, theoretical physicist and string field theory co-founder Michio Kaku described building a rudimentary atom smasher in his parents' garage. Powerful enough to blow their home's fuse box, with electromagnetic coils that could pull fillings out of teeth, it was a small, primitive member -- an insect to an elephant -- of a class of machines that will find their ultimate expression in the Large Hadron Collider.
For anyone who hopes that string theory will lead to time travel and brand new universes, the Large Hadron Collider is pretty awesome. But with repeated operational delays and an $8 billion price tag, the LHC is an easy target for people who think that physicists could do far more with all that time and money than test some weirdo hypotheses. (You mean it might not even find anything?) This, of course, is an eternal refrain in every branch of science: the public wants practicality, tangible benefits, better blenders and bigger TVs -- never mind that boundary-pushing basic science has to come first.
How to soften up the public, then? Kaku -- a master of popularizing science -- refers to the Large Hadron Collider as an atom smasher. So listen up, physicists! Enough with "large" and "collider," and who cares about
"hadrons." It's an atom smasher. A giant atom smasher. Start calling it that, and you're golden. Smash stuff together and see what happens -- that's eternal! We dig that, we spent much of our childhoods doing that. Boyhoods, anyways. And for the ladies, skip all the string theory details and go straight to, "someday we'd like to make a new universe, and the atom smasher can't do this, but maybe it can help show us how." That's right, the experiments under Geneva are like Lamaze classes for baby universes.
And there. Eight billion dollars to smash atoms really hard and raise a healthy universe? Hell, take some more.
Earlier Wired coverage of the Giant Atom Smasher: Lots of it. Here's the latest from WiSci, more on the experiments, even moreon the experiments, and a bunch of really cool pictures. Michio Kaku writes about time travel here.*
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Image: John Borland*
