A trip to CERN, where smashing atoms and creating antimatter is all in a day’s work
- The scientists at CERN in Switzerland, which opened in 1954, are at the absolute cutting edge of particle physics
- From the World Wide Web’s creation to the Large Hadron Collider and studying antimatter, CERN is truly mind-boggling. Its Data Centre reminds you of a film set
To visit CERN is to go down a rabbit hole.
This is not because to reach the organisation’s atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in a ring-shaped tunnel 27km in circumference below the Swiss-French border, requires burrowing down at least 80 metres.
Nor is it because visiting one of the most complex machines ever built, using technology that’s at the limits of invention, involves a short trip from Geneva by quaint, lo-tech tram.
To accept CERN’s invitation to turn away from mundane everyday concerns to look at fundamental questions – such as what there is and where it came from, and why it exists at all – is to encounter the unexpected and counter-intuitive. Just as we look out at the night sky into mostly empty space, so if we look inward there’s mostly empty space there, too.
“I know it sounds terrible,” says particle physicist Steven Goldfarb, who is taking me underground to visit his ATLAS experiment. “But our universe is like that.”
The scientists at CERN are using their machines to provide us with ever more detailed knowledge about just how little we know, and their findings are often helping us to reach ever higher levels of ignorance.