DisCERNing the origins of the universe

The question of how everything came to be is one that isn’t written about much in the news because, obviously, there’s a dearth of new news. Perfectly logical people subscribe to both the Book of Genesis and Richard Dawkin’s “The Blind Watchmaker” because both texts have yet to be empirically disproved. In our short lifetimes, we’ve yet to see a headline that legitimately moves forward the discussion about creation.

By “legitimately moves forward,” I mean provides new information about the origins of the universe that can be subjected to the scientific method and reproduced experimentally. The back and forth about whether the earth revolved around the sun, for instance, effectively swung in the direction of a heliocentric universe after Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and a string of others mathematically formalized the idea. F.W. Bessel’s observation in 1838 of a trigonometric parallax (formally, “the apparent displacement of an object as seen from two different points that are not on a line with the object) for the two stars of 61 Cygni provided empirical confirmation that the earth did in fact orbit the sun. If you so desired, you could reproduce Bessel’s work and come to the same heliocentric conclusion.

Theories about the beginning of everything—be it Big Bang Theory or Intelligent Design—lack the neat proofs of heliocentrism, which, again, is presumably why they’re not covered in major media.

From about 2 to 3 a.m. our time March 30, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, successfully demolished its own record for high energy collisions between proton beams using the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva (known by most as that huge apparatus that creates dark matter in Ron Howard’s “Angels and Demons”). These collisions matter in the where-did-it-all-start debate because researchers regard Tuesday morning as an important preliminary victory in eventually reproducing the early conditions of the universe immediately after the Big Bang. The human-created proton collisions may additionally prove extremely useful in studying enigmatic phenomena in physics, like antimatter, Higgs boson (better known as God’s particle), black holes and the expansion of the universe.  

In the next decade (and I preface this by saying I have no real background in the sciences other than AP biology and struggling through the abridged version of Bill Bryson’s “A Brief History of Nearly Everything”), science is more likely now than ever to produce knowledge that will shatter our perceptions about existence. Of course, this thesis has probably been true for a while now, but what CERN is doing in Geneva is completely unprecedented. No one has ever come even remotely close to reproducing the Big Bang or finding a particle that gives mass to stars and planets: CERN is openly voicing the possibility that these goals may yet be achieved. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director-general of CERN, told ABC News, “Our Large Hadron Collider could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe. We are opening the door to New Physics, to a discovery period. If we can detect and understand dark matter, our knowledge will expand to encompass 30 percent of the universe.”

Strangely, a stunningly small percentage of the world seems to care that CERN is steadily getting closer to simultaneously discovering the origins of the universe and potentially destroying the planet (there are actual, albeit unfounded, concerns that proton collisions could create a black hole that would end human existence). Tuesday’s landmark collision of subatomic particles was overshadowed this week by two rather unsurprising pieces of news: President Obama’s call for new sanctions against Iran and Ricky Martin’s coming out party. CERN has a shade over 100,000 followers on Twitter (“Beams are now accelerating to 3.5 TeV, the highest energy! Preparing for collisions now!”); Ashton Kutcher has over four million (“It Saturday sushi night. Did u know fish have no eye lids?”). CERN’s lack of buzz is likely because it has yet to produce anything the public can appreciate, unlike Kutcher’s “Dude Where’s My Car.”

With good reason, CERN has its skeptics. The Large Hadron Collider has cost north of $10 billion and its construction spanned almost a quarter of a century. Last year an unexpected explosion severed magnetic connections in the collider and cost millions to fix. The organization hasn’t produced any Nobel-Prize winning break-throughs just yet: “If you see nothing, in some sense then, we theorists have been talking rubbish for the last 35 years,” admits CERN theoretical physicist John Ellis. It’s possible my unabashed plugging of CERN is the equivalent of hyping up a theory that has no backbone.

Then again, people weren’t always sold on Copernicus either.

Ben Brostoff is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Friday and runs today as an online exclusive.