A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [80]
Finding particles takes a certain amount of concentration. They are not just tiny and swift but also often tantalizingly evanescent. Particles can come into being and be gone again in as little as 0.000000000000000000000001 second (10-24). Even the most sluggish of unstable particles hang around for no more than 0.0000001 second (10-7).
Some particles are almost ludicrously slippery. Every second the Earth is visited by 10,000 trillion trillion tiny, all but massless neutrinos (mostly shot out by the nuclear broilings of the Sun), and virtually all of them pass right through the planet and everything that is on it, including you and me, as if it weren't there. To trap just a few of them, scientists need tanks holding up to 12.5 million gallons of heavy water (that is, water with a relative abundance of deuterium in it) in underground chambers (old mines usually) where they can't be interfered with by other types of radiation.
Very occasionally, a passing neutrino will bang into one of the atomic nuclei in the water and produce a little puff of energy. Scientists count the puffs and by such means take us very slightly closer to understanding the fundamental properties of the universe. In 1998, Japanese observers reported that neutrinos do have mass, but not a great deal—about one ten-millionth that of an electron.
What it really takes to find particles these days is money and lots of it. There is a curious inverse relationship in modern physics between the tininess of the thing being sought and the scale of facilities required to do the searching. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is like a little city. Straddling the border of France and Switzerland, it employs three thousand people and occupies a site that is measured in square miles. CERN boasts a string of magnets that weigh more than the Eiffel Tower and an underground tunnel over sixteen miles around.
Breaking up atoms, as James Trefil has noted, is easy; you do it each time you switch on a fluorescent light. Breaking up atomic nuclei, however, requires quite a lot of money and a generous supply of electricity. Getting down to the level of quarks—the particles that make up particles—requires still more: trillions of volts of electricity and the budget of a small Central American nation. CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operations in 2005, will achieve fourteen trillion volts of energy and cost something over $1.5 billion to construct.*25
But these numbers are as nothing compared with what could have been achieved by, and spent upon, the vast and now unfortunately never-to-be Superconducting Supercollider, which began being constructed near Waxahachie, Texas, in the 1980s, before experiencing a supercollision of its own with the United States Congress. The intention of the collider was to let scientists probe “the ultimate nature of matter,” as it is always put, by re-creating as nearly as possible the conditions in the universe during its first ten thousand billionths of a second. The plan was to fling particles through a tunnel fifty-two miles long, achieving a truly staggering ninety-nine trillion volts of energy. It was a grand scheme, but would also have cost $8 billion to build (a figure that eventually rose to $10 billion) and hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run.
In perhaps the finest example in history of pouring money into a hole in the ground, Congress spent $2 billion on the project, then canceled it in 1993 after fourteen miles of tunnel had been dug. So Texas now boasts the most expensive hole in the universe. The site is,