Brian Cox
Vincent Connare MONTEREY, California -- Experimental physicist Brian Cox is about to embark on the most exciting research of his career this spring when CERN's Large Hadron Collider -- the world's most powerful atom smasher -- is turned on for the first time.
But Cox began his career as a keyboardist with the rock band Dare, which made two albums and toured with Jimmy Page before they got into a fight in a Berlin bar and broke up.
That's when Cox, then 23, says he contacted Manchester University to see if he might have a second go at a career in science. He joined another band while at university called D:ream, whose club hit "Things Can Only Get Better" became the anthem for former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Labour Party.
But although rock stardom has had its appeal, particles have been Cox's real passion for more than a decade.
Splitting his time between the University of Manchester and the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside Geneva, Switzerland, Cox is one of more than 5,000 scientists from numerous countries who will be running experiments at the LHC.
The LHC is a 17-mile ring built 300 feet underground that crosses the French-Swiss border more than once. The collider will crash protons up to 30 million times a second in an effort to view particles in the state they would have been in less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang occurred. Scientists hope to find evidence of the elusive Higgs boson particle, and support for several theories of the universe, including string theory, which posits that there are 10 dimensions in the universe.
Cox was in Monterey to talk about the LHC at the TED conference. Wired.com spoke with him about mixing wine with particle physics, how the United Nations can learn from CERN scientists about getting along with others, and why physicists secretly hope the CERN collider will fail to prove current theories about the universe.
Wired: The LHC has encountered a number of delays due to cost overruns. Is it still on track to launch in May?
Brian Cox: The delays (lately) haven't actually been caused by cost overruns. The (problem) at the moment is that we're cooling it down. The thing runs at less than minus-271 degrees, so it's really very cold. To give you some example, space is about minus-270 degrees centigrade in between the galaxies. So it's colder than the space in between the galaxies. And there are 27 kilometers of (the collider). So getting it down to that temperature is a really difficult thing to do. It takes about a month to cool an eighth (of it) -- we do it in eight pieces. And if, when you're doing that, you find something that you need to fix -- and you always do because it’s miles of plumbing -- then it takes about a month to warm it up again (to fix the problem).... I think we've got about a quarter to half of it cold at the moment. So if all of that continues to go as planned, then summer '08 is the time.
Wired: The Higgs boson particle is supposed to appear only once in every trillion events. So how long should it take to detect one?
Cox: The reason it only occurs occasionally is that ... if you bang two protons together exactly the same way over and over again, different things will happen every time you do it.... So you've just got to bang lots of them together.... The other thing to say is that most of the Higgses you miss because they decay into things that are just too difficult to see. So it's only the very occasional Higgs that decays into something really dramatic and really easy to see.... It could take years to actually see a really definitive (one).
Wired: Do the CERN scientists ever discuss the possibility of failure or is everyone confident that you'll find the Higgs and prove the Standard Model theory?
Cox: The Standard Model that we've got (for describing the universe), if you take the Higgs out of it ... it just doesn't work.... So the Higgs is the minimum (that we need to see) ... otherwise (our theory) makes no sense at all.
It could be that the mechanism for generating mass is actually not the Higgs (but something else) and that would actually please a lot of scientists. Because what scientists really want to do is see something that they don't understand. They don't really want theorists to predict something and then they go and find it. Really what they want is to be confused. It's kind of a profession of always finding something that you can't explain or you don't understand. It's like being an explorer: You want to go somewhere that you've never seen before and that shakes and excites you.
Wired: CERN has about 5,600 scientists from dozens of countries running the experiments. How does this mini United Nations get along? Had any bar fights yet?
Cox: No, it's a miracle. It's one of the great things about CERN, when you see what strange bedfellows it's created. We've got Iran and Pakistan and the U.S. and Israel. List any two counties that you think wouldn't be able to get along and they're at CERN, getting along. I think it's one of the great achievements at CERN; and CERN is very proud of it. They're very insistent, for example, that the U.S. has to sign papers with Iranian scientists. In general, the U.S. doesn't sign papers with scientists from particular countries. That ethos is very strong at CERN; that there's one CERN in the world and it's part of the world and everybody who wants to work at CERN is allowed to work at CERN.
Wired: Are there any dangers in running the collider? Any dangers from protons getting out of control?
Cox: There's a danger of the beams getting out of control but no one would notice except us, because it would punch a hole in our machine. These beams have got the energy of an aircraft carrier traveling at 30 miles an hour. But they're compressed in less than the size of a dime. So if you lose that, then it punches a hole in the machine and it will go a bit into the rocks. But it's 100 meters below the surface. So it isn't really a threat to anyone other than itself.
Wired: How long after it's turned on will you have the first results?
Cox: There are some scenarios where you see things almost immediately, within months. One of them is extra dimensions in the universe.... But I would think that it would be months to see some of the really dramatic (results). The most difficult ones are these Higgs type models, which could take a few years.
Wired: What do the CERN scientists do in their downtime when they're not talking particles? Is it all physics all the time?
Cox: No, it's a great place. All the ski resorts are about an hour from CERN. Great restaurants all over the place because it's France and Geneva.... So you eat and drink and ski.
Wired: I've heard they serve wine in the afternoon at CERN. It sounds very civilized but also a bit risky around all that machinery. Do you have to take a breathalyzer before you operate the equipment?
Cox: It's France, so the only breathalyzer they'd have is to check if you'd drunk wine, and they'd throw you out of the country if you hadn't had it for lunch, I think. (Laughs) I suspect there's some regulation for the guys that are working on the construction -- that they shouldn't drink more than a half a bottle at lunchtime. I must admit I don't like drinking wine for lunch because I'll fall asleep.
Wired: I imagine that the anticipation you guys are feeling must be similar to what the astronauts were feeling before the first manned Apollo launch to the moon. Is there tension?
__Cox:__There is, definitely. I think the Apollo program is a good analogy, actually, because in terms of being a leap into the unknown, the LCH is the biggest leap into the unknown in this kind of fundamental physics that there's ever been.
Wired: Why did you become a physicist?
Cox: I've always been into astronomy, certainly as far back as I remember. And I remember growing up with Apollo. I was born in '68 so I grew up in a house where my dad used to watch it all the time ... because in the late '60s and early '70s that was what everybody was into. I think that's one of the important offshoots actually of doing things like this. Doing these inspiring things is what brings kids into science. So it’s another argument for doing it. There's the simple argument that we want to know how things work, and there are also technology offshoots. But also there is this inspirational value.
Wired: You went to university only after your band broke up. What would have happened if your band had stayed together?
Cox: The thing about music, what I found is that in your early 20s and late teens it's fantastic. But I don’t know many people who enjoy it in their 30s. It just gets more and more difficult. So I'm very glad that I got out of it when I did, actually, and got into physics.
Wired: You participated in a panel discussion with the Rev. Victor Stock, dean of Guildford Cathedral, on the subject "Is Physics the New Religion?" Afterward, you said you felt that you and he had a lot in common. What do physics and religion have in common?
Cox: I think that they have the same motivation, which is that you notice that there's something worth explaining about the universe. It's an emotional reaction to it -- like, this is beautiful, I want to understand how it works. If you would ask me who would I prefer to talk to -- someone who didn’t notice that the universe is beautiful or someone that did, I would say, the people that do notice.
Also ... he talks about his view of a cathedral: that it's supposed to be a place that people go to and are shaken out of their everyday complacency and inspired to think about something else, to think about bigger things. I also think that's what physics does.
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