Over the last few days I have seen several posters at TPM comment that they're getting burnt out on all election news, all the time, and a couple people have commented they'd even be interested in hearing about something other than politics for once.

The obvious solution to this, as I see it, is to talk about GIANT SCIENCE LASERS.

So let's do that for a minute. This is actually the perfect time to talk about giant science lasers, because we are very close to the completion of something called the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous science experiment that thousands of people have been working on for years and which finally-- after years of delays-- appears to be on track to get the "on" switch flipped sometime in July. 

The experiment works like this: Dig a 17-mile-long circular concrete tunnel under a mountain in Switzerland. Pump all the air out and freeze the insides to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero, colder than deep space. Then, put two giant particle beams inside, and fire them at each other. 

Why on earth are they doing this? Well, the LHC is a kind of experiment called a "particle accelerator", which works on the principle of blowing things up and seeing what comes out. This isn't a very accurate way of describing how it works, but: you know that "E = MC^2" equation, the one that explains energy and mass are really the same thing? Well, the basic idea is that if you put enough energy in one place, that energy can slosh over to the right side of the equation and turn into matter. A slightly more accurate way of putting this is that everything in the universe-- matter, light, everything-- is made of particles, and each particle has a certain energy (which is the same thing as mass) associated with it. When you put a bunch of energy in one place, this energy turns into a collection of randomly picked particles, whose combined energies are equal to the energy you put in. 

This is incredibly useful for physicists, because it means that if you want to know what kinds of particles exist in the universe, all you have to do is do something that releases a bunch of energy, and you'll get a randomly selected batch of particles flying out of nowhere. Then all you have to do is catch the particles and see what they were. This simple trick has basically been the driving force behind particle physics for seventy years: the experimentalists keep building more powerful particle accelerators, giving them the ability to see particles with higher energies than they could before; then the theorists try to come up with a theory that explains why that set of particles exists; and the theories they come up with usually wind up predicting other particles, particles that haven't been seen yet, which means the experimentalists have to go back and build another particle accelerator to look for them. This game of experimentalist/theorist leapfrog has become so central to physics that physicists barely know what to do without it-- so much so that after the particle accelerator that was supposed to have been built in the 90s, the Superconducting Supercollider, got cancelled, the theorists all started getting cabin fever and raving about "11-dimensional membranes" and "the anthropic multiverse".

But now we've got the Large Hadron Collider, so that's okay. The LHC has about 7 times more energy than the last particle accelerator to get built (the "Tevatron" in Illinois, finished in the early 80s) and about 100 times the "luminosity". The LHC makes its energy by taking protons-- which, by the way, are "Hadrons", large ones-- accelerating them to incredible speed, and then smashing them into each other; so here "energy" refers to how much energy released is in each collision, and "luminosity" refers to how often the collisions occur. Luminosity is important because the higher your luminosity the more quickly you can gather lots of data. 

And you need lots of data, because the collisions in particle accelerator don't necessarily spit out the particles you want to see: the particles that come out are, again, random. Worse, you don't actually get to look at the particles themselves, because most of the interesting particles are horribly unstable and only exist for incredibly short amounts of time before falling apart or turning into something else (which kind of makes sense, because if the particles were stable and long-lived they'd just be hanging out all over the place and you wouldn't need a particle accelerator to look for them, right?). So the particle detectors that analyze the aftermath of the collisions don't actually get to look at the particles that were generated, just their aftermath-- the unstable interesting particles instantly fall apart into slightly less interesting but still unstable particles,  which then fall apart into boring stable particles. The detectors then pick up the shotgun spray of thirdhand boring particles that are left over.

So let's say that you get this spray of particles, and the spray of particles is consistent with the spray of particles you'd get from the decay of, I don't know, a top quark. You're then left with the question: Is this the aftermath of a top quark? Or is it just a random spray of particles, noise that coincidentally happens to look like the remnants of an exploding top quark? You can't really tell. The only way to figure out what you're looking at is to gather lots and lots of these little particle sprays and do statistical model fitting to shake the coincidences out.

The main thing the LHC is hoping to detect in its statistical model fitting is something called the "Higgs Boson". The Higgs Boson is the one outstanding item in the physicists' eternal game of leapfrog, the very last thing that the theorists are certain exists but the experimentalists have never found. The Higgs is part of what's called the "Standard Model", which is a collection of different known "fields" that show up in nature and are what particles are made out of-- like there's a field for electrons, and a field for each kind of neutrino and quark. There's one field, though, the Higgs field, that doesn't normally make particles-- instead it's just kind of this flat ocean of Higgsness, identical everywhere. Although the Higgs field doesn't ever do anything itself, though, the fact it's there has a huge impact on things-- particles would act completely different, and in fact wouldn't even have mass, if it wasn't for the Higgs field permeating everything and interfering with how all the particle fields operate.

Although the Higgs field doesn't normally form particles, one of the possible outcomes of a particle collider collision is that the collision could cause a ripple in the normally flat ocean that is the Higgs field, and that ripple would look just like a particle. This ripple is the "Higgs Boson" physicists at the LHC want to find, and if they can trap the Higgs Boson and measure what it's like then a lot of stuff about the Standard Model will start to make a lot more sense. There's also some other, speculative stuff that people are hoping the LHC might find-- like "supersymmetric superpartners" (don't ask) or "WiMPs" (which are the particles that a lot of people think are the cause of "dark matter"). But nobody's sure whether the other stuff even exists, so the Higgs is target #1.

All this LHC stuff is being done by CERN, who are incidentally the people who invented the World Wide Web (which just in case the giant concrete fortress under a mountain in switzerland didn't tip you off, that should prove-- yes, they are supervillains).

So, when's all this going to happen? Well, everything's actually ready to go already except the particle beams. The detectors have actually been running since the end of last year; since there aren't any collisions going on, they've just been sitting there measuring the cosmic rays from outer space that sometimes pass through the LHC's mountain. (Incidentally, if you hear anyone in the news claiming the LHC might somehow create tiny black holes or strangelets or something and destroy the earth, this is how you know to ignore them-- cosmic ray collisions are actually more energetic than the LHC, and those happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. If anything that could happen at the LHC was capable of destroying the earth, it would have happened millions and millions of years ago.)

The particle beam, according to the most recent reports I'm aware of, is set to switch on for the first time in early July; but once they turn it on, the first few months are going to be spent just testing it. So the assumption would be that the first "physics collisions" will be happening in September; again though they have to gather a lot of data before they can actually understand what any of it means, so we probably shouldn't expect published results for at least a year after the data starts coming in, probably even longer. But, nevertheless, after years of waiting, the collisions themselves are not far away.

So as the marathon primary finally winds to a close and the general election begins in earnest, as the election itself approaches and we move deeper and deeper into "silly season", remember this, and perhaps it will provide some comfort: Somewhere on the France-Switzerland border, underneath a mountain, things are blowing up.

FURTHER READING: IF ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY INTERESTED YOU, YOU MAY WANT TO TRY FOLLOWING THESE:

The USLHC blog -- This is a group blog where the U.S. contingent among the scientists at the LHC intermittently post about their experiences there

Not Even Wrong -- This blog normally exists just for this guy who works at Columbia University to complain about String Theory, but sometimes he gets distracted and writes startlingly in-depth analyses of up-to-the-minute science news instead

Dorigo -- This is actually a blog by a scientist working at the Tevatron, the LHC's predecessor in Illinois. Although it's not about the LHC, the author's experience with the particle accelerator he works for often allows him to give useful (although perhaps a bit pessimistic) insight into what to expect of the LHC