How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch
Page 1
Copyright © 2021 by Harry Cliff
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Illustration credits: Mel Northover
Cover images: (apple) Alexander Maksimenko; (leaf) arda savasciogullari; (particles collision) vchal; (stellar nursery) NASA; all Shutterstock
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cliff, Harry (Harry Victor), author.
Title: How to make an apple pie from scratch : in search of the recipe for our universe-from the origins of atoms to the big bang / Harry Cliff.
Description: New York : Doubleday, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047429 (print) | LCCN 2020047430 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385545655 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385545662 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Particles (Nuclear physics)—Popular works.
Classification: LCC QC793.26 .C57 2021 (print) | LCC QC793.26 (ebook) | DDC 523.01/97—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047429
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047430
Ebook ISBN 9780385545662
ep_prh_5.7.1_c0_r0
For Vicky and Robert. Thank you.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
—Carl Sagan
Contents
Prologue
1 Elementary Cooking
2 The Smallest Slice
3 The Ingredients of Atoms
4 Smashed Nuclei
5 Thermonuclear Ovens
6 Starstuff
7 The Ultimate Cosmic Cooker
8 How to Cook a Proton
9 What Is a Particle, Really?
10 The Final Ingredient
11 The Recipe for Everything
12 The Missing Ingredients
13 Invent the Universe
14 The End?
How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Prologue
On a frosty morning in March 2010 I pulled up outside a fenced compound on the outskirts of the French commune of Ferney-Voltaire. A sign bolted to the steel security gates announced
CERN SITE 8
ACCÈS RÉSERVÉ AUX PERSONNES AUTORISÉES
Leaning awkwardly across to reach through the passenger window of my right-hand-drive car, I swiped my security badge against the reader. The gates remained closed. Hmmm…had my access request not gone through? Noticing a queue of cars beginning to form behind me, I gave the reader a series of increasingly anxious swipes. Nothing. I was just about to get out to attempt to negotiate with the security guard in my halting high-school French when, to my relief, the gates began to creak open.
I parked behind the main experimental hall, facing the chain-link fence that marks the boundary of Geneva Airport’s runway. Outside, my breath misted in the cold air, which carried a now familiar sickly sweet smell from a perfume factory in the nearby Swiss town of Meyrin. Pushing my hands into my coat pockets I made for the prosaically named Building 3894, a single-story portacabin used for the early morning run meetings.
Inside, most of the participants were already crowded around the long table waiting for the meeting to start. Some chatted with their neighbors in English, French, German, Italian; others sipped coffees or sat hunched over laptops. I took my seat a row back from the table itself, hoping that I wouldn’t be called upon.
A hundred meters beneath our feet in a concrete tunnel so long it could encircle a city, the largest and most powerful machine ever built was being coaxed into life: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In just a few days, this ring-shaped particle accelerator would slam subatomic particles into one another with such incredible violence that it would briefly recreate conditions that existed during the first instant after the big bang.
These tiny cataclysms would be recorded by four giant particle detectors, housed in cathedral-sized underground caverns, spaced several kilometers apart around the LHC ring. One of these detectors was directly below us—the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment—6,000 tons of steel, iron, aluminum, silicon, and fiber-optic cables, poised like a sprinter in the blocks, waiting for its moment to arrive.
It had been a long wait. Some of my colleagues had spent their entire careers building toward this moment. Twenty years of planning, funding bids, scrupulous design, testing, and engineering had resulted in one of the most advanced particle detectors ever built. In the next few days all that work would finally be put to the test, as engineers on the LHC prepared to collide particles inside the detector for the first time.
I was twenty-four years old, a second-year PhD student, having arrived in Geneva for the first of two three-month stints a few weeks earlier. My new home was CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the largest and most advanced particle physics lab in the world. Over the past few weeks I had slowly learned to find my way around the labyrinth of office buildings, workshops, and laboratories that make up the sprawling CERN site, battled through February snowstorms, and discovered that flushing your toilet after ten p.m. in Switzerland will get you a stern telling-off from your neighbors. I was also coming to grips with my new duties on LHCb, including responsibility for one of its numerous subsystems, each of which would have to function flawlessly. If one failed, then the long-awaited data could end up being unusable.
I had first come face-to-face with LHCb a year and a half earlier. My supervisor, Uli, a German postdoctoral researcher who was based at CERN full-time, had guided me through the complex set of procedures required to access the detector. Donning a badge that would monitor my radiation exposure during my trip below ground, I first had to persuade a rather temperamental iris-scanner to let me through a set of bright green, airlock-style security doors. Then a small metal lift shuddered its way 105 meters beneath the earth, down into what is rather ominously known as “the pit.”
The doors opened on a strange subterranean world of whirring machinery, metal gantries painted in primary colors, and concrete tunnels threaded with miles of cables and ducts. Another set of security doors, this time bright yellow and emblazoned with radiation warning signs, and then a narrow passage snaking its way through a 12-meter-thick shield wall before abruptly opening into a soaring concrete cavern.
The first thing that strikes you is its sheer size. LHCb is big: 10 meters high and 21 meters long, spanning the entire width of the cavern. At first glance it can be hard to figure out what you’re looking at; the view is dominated by staircases, steel platforms, and scaffolding, painted in green and yellow, whose job is to support and allow access to the sensitive elements of the detector, which are mostly hidden from view. Crisscrossing the walls of the cavern are reams of cables taking power to the detector and carrying away the torrent of data produced by millions of tiny, precision-engineered sensors. LHCb is capable of measuring the paths of thousands of individual subatomic particles as they tear out from the collisions at a whisker below the speed of li
ght with a precision of a few thousandths of a millimeter. And it can do this a million times every second.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about LHCb is the way it was built. Like all four of the large LHC experiments, it is a modern-day Tower of Babel, with each component designed and assembled by an international collaboration of physicists and engineers based at dozens of universities spread across the globe, from Rio de Janeiro to Novosibirsk. Brought together in this giant hole in the ground just outside Geneva they form a single, mind-meltingly complex instrument. The fact that any of this works at all still seems kind of miraculous to me.
My colleagues in Cambridge had spent the last decade designing, building, and testing the electronics that would read out data from the subdetector whose job is to tell different types of particle from one another. My small part in all this was to make sure that the software used to control and monitor the electronics worked without crashing or otherwise causing problems when the moment came. I was a small cog in a huge machine, but still, I was acutely aware that two decades of effort by hundreds of physicists from seventy countries and an investment of €65 million from more than a dozen national funding agencies depended on me doing my small job properly. I did not want to be the person who fucked up at the last minute.
The chatter in the room ceased abruptly as the run chief called the meeting to order. I glanced around the room at my colleagues, many of whom looked as though they hadn’t had much sleep in the past few days, aware that this was the beginning of the most important phase of my career so far. The first item was a report detailing overnight work on the LHC, which people at CERN colloquially refer to as “the Machine.” It was this machine that we were all now waiting for.
More than three decades in the making, the LHC is a scientific project on an unprecedented scale. Almost everything about it is extreme. It’s the largest scientific instrument ever built, by some measures the largest machine ever built: 27 kilometers in circumference, so large that it crosses the border between France and Switzerland four times (there are actually flags marking the border painted on the tunnel walls). The beam pipes that carry the particles are emptier than interstellar space, while the thousands of superconducting magnets that steer the particles around the ring operate at the staggeringly low temperature of -271.3 degrees Celsius, less than 2 degrees above absolute zero. To achieve this requires the world’s biggest cryogenic facility, which uses 10,000 metric tons of liquid nitrogen and as much electricity as a large town to produce over 120 metric tons of superfluid liquid helium, which is then pumped intravenously through the LHC’s magnets. Within a few days, this giant machine would start accelerating subatomic particles called protons to 99.999996 percent of the speed of light, before firing them headlong into one another at four points around the ring, including inside LHCb, creating forms of matter not seen in large quantities since a trillionth of a second after the universe began.
All of this, the years of design work and funding negotiations, the mobilization of a global community of thousands of physicists, the civil engineering (which included digging through an underground river that had been frozen using liquid nitrogen), not to mention manufacturing, testing, and installing millions of individual components, from 35-metric-ton magnets to the tiniest silicon sensors, was to serve one cause: curiosity. Despite what some tabloids might try to tell you—for instance the UK’s Daily Express never seems to tire of suggesting that CERN is using the LHC for nefarious purposes, including opening a portal to another “sinister” dimension (perhaps that gateway to “the Upside Down” in Stranger Things was really CERN’s fault), or, my all-time favorite, “to summon God”—the LHC exists only to answer fundamental questions about the most basic building blocks of our world and how our universe came into being.
And there are some really big questions that we need answers to. Our current theory of what the world is made from down at the fundamental level is known as the “standard model” of particle physics—a deceptively boring name for one of humankind’s greatest intellectual achievements. Developed over decades through the combined efforts of thousands of theorists and experimentalists, the standard model says that everything we see around us—galaxies, stars, planets, and people—is made of just a few different types of particles, which are bound together inside atoms and molecules by a small number of fundamental forces. It’s a theory that explains everything from why the Sun shines to what light is and why stuff has mass. What’s more, it’s passed every experimental test we’ve been able to throw at it for almost half a century. It is, without a doubt, the most successful scientific theory ever written down.
All that said, we know that the standard model is wrong, or at the very least seriously incomplete. When it comes to the deepest mysteries facing modern physics, the standard model simply shrugs or offers up a bunch of contradictions instead of answers. Take this for starters. After decades of painstakingly peering into the heavens, astronomers and cosmologists are pretty well convinced that 95 percent of the universe is made of two invisible substances known as “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Whatever they are—and to be clear we haven’t got much of a clue about either of them—they’re definitely not made from any of the particles in the standard model. And as if missing 95 percent of everything wasn’t bad enough, the standard model also makes the rather startling assertion that all the matter in existence should have been wiped out in a cataclysmic annihilation with antimatter in the first microsecond of the big bang, leaving a universe with no stars, no planets, and no us.
So it’s pretty obvious that we are missing something big, most likely in the form of some as-yet-undiscovered fundamental particles that could help explain why the universe is the way it is.
Enter the Large Hadron Collider. As we sat gathered around that meeting table in March 2010, there was huge optimism that we’d soon spy something altogether new or unexpected come flying out from the collisions produced by the LHC. If that happened, then it would be the start of a process that could help unravel some of the biggest mysteries in science.
When I signed up for my PhD in early 2008, I knew that I’d be starting out in particle physics just as the LHC switched on for the first time. I was thrilled by the idea of being among the very first students to see data from a machine that had been in development since the late 1970s and had cost more than €12 billion. On September 10, 2008, just a few days before I arrived at my new lab in Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the LHC was launched in a blaze of publicity. Under the glare of the world’s media, protons were sent around the 27-kilometer ring for the first time. Champagne bottles popped as physicists and engineers celebrated one of the greatest scientific feats in history, and particle physics was briefly headline news.
A few days later, the LHC was back in the news for a different reason. At around midday on September 19, during final tests of the collider’s electromagnets, something catastrophic happened. Engineers in the LHC Control Centre, CERN’s equivalent of NASA’s Mission Control, watched in disbelief as screen after screen all around the huge room turned lurid red. An engineer I spoke to later told me that at first there were so many alarms going off that they thought there must be something wrong with the software used to monitor the accelerator. Hours later, when they finally made it down into the tunnel, he and his colleagues were confronted with a scene of devastation.
A single loose connection had caused an electrical arc that flash boiled the bath of liquid helium used to cool the magnets, creating a shockwave that sent a cascade of destruction along a 750-meter stretch of the accelerator. Fifteen-meter-long electromagnets weighing up to 35 metric tons had been torn from their moorings and shunted across the tunnel. The faulty connection itself had been vaporized, blasting black soot hundreds of meters down the ultra-clean beam pipes in both directions.
Repairs would take more than a year. Despite an initial loss of confidence, the engineering staff at CERN soon dusted
themselves off and got back to work. On November 20, 2009, fourteen months and €25 million later, they tentatively sent protons back around the LHC for the first time since what is now euphemistically referred to as “the incident.” However, that had only been a dry run, with the accelerator coasting at a small fraction of its maximum energy.
Now, in March 2010, we were finally approaching the moment when the machine would be pushed into uncharted territory, reaching collision energies that would allow us to begin to search for dark matter, the Higgs boson, microscopic black holes, and perhaps other exotic objects that no one had yet imagined. I suspect everyone sitting around the table that morning felt the weight of what we were about to do.
The run chief gave his report, pausing occasionally when he was drowned out by the roar of a passenger jet taking off from the nearby runway. Aside from a brief power failure, overnight work on the LHC had gone smoothly and we were on track to see collisions within a few days. He then moved around the table, as physicists from the Netherlands, Spain, Russia, Germany, and Italy gave updates on their subsystems in perfect English. There was a brief Eurovision moment when a French physicist launched into his report in his native tongue. Despite a bit of eye-rolling from around the table, the physicist plowed stubbornly on, not unjustified really given that French is one of the two official languages of CERN, and what’s more that we were in France. That said, almost all meetings at CERN are conducted in English and my French wasn’t quite up to the task of following what I assume was a technical discussion of some aspect of the experiment.
I could feel my heart beating a little faster as my turn approached. We had had one minor problem with the software that controlled the electronics a few days earlier, triggering a panicked rush to the control room at the crack of dawn. Eventually the problem had been fixed using the classic solution—turn it off and on again—and all had been running smoothly since. But at the back of my mind the fact that I hadn’t tracked down the root cause of the error was nagging at me.