HADRON COLLIDER IN CERN AND HIGGS BOSON

The Hadron Collider in CERN,                          Susan Thomas

Oxford Mail, September 2008                                     

                                                                             Oxford

                                                                            

Sir,

Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to the Government, criticised the Large Hadron Collider initiative (Oxford Mail, September 11).

 He felt that the billions of pounds spent could have been invested in a more worthy project.

 I agree with him for the following reasons:

 1. The project is using a phenomenal amount of electricity, enough to power a large city at a time when we are all being encouraged to reduce our energy consumption.

 2. I met three of the leading scientists working on the project at a forum in Oxford. They struck me as youthfully irresponsible and even had a rap song to commemorate the switching on of the collider. During the question and answer session, they did not answer my scientific questions very satisfactorily. This did not inspire my confidence in the venture.

 3. The project has already malfunctioned and having met the leading scientists, this does not surprise me.

 4. The project’s aim to find the “God Particle (Higgs Boson)” strikes me as somewhat irreverent. Although I am not overtly religious, I believe that the ultimate origin of the Universe and the mind of God should remain ineffable and mysterious to man.

 5. If the project did succeed in creating another Big Bang, our Universe will certainly come to an end and a new one will be born.

 Do we really want that?

 For all of these reasons and many more, I sincerely hope that the plug will be pulled on the British investment of 17 per cent towards this project, as it is a considerable waste of taxpayer’s money.

Postscript (December 2009):

Two scientists in agreement with myself have recently proposed a theory that the Large Hadron Collider is doomed to permanently malfunction. Why is this so one may ask? Apparently they posit that the Higgs Boson particle is anathema to mother nature. Therefore were the Collider to create a Higgs Boson the particle would travel back in time to stop the machine from creating it in the first place.

 An analogy is the situation where a grandson travels back in time to kill his grandfather to prevent himself from being born.

 The machine has been switched off yet again on the 18^th December, 2009, for further work on making the magnets safe. This follows on from a whole year spent making magnets safe from September 2008 to November 2009. One wonders if this is a viable venture.