Skip to main content
Accelerators and detectors

Accelerators and detectors

Beauty and the beast

31 Oct 2008 Robert P Crease

In his 100th column for Physics World, Robert P Crease examines the Large Hadron Collider — the biggest physics experiment of all time — and wonders whether we can call it “beautiful”

Defining beauty

She sounded sceptical. “Beautiful?”

The reporter had asked about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in preparation for a radio interview. I had mentioned that CERN was hosting an official inauguration event on 21 October to include an art exhibition, concert and thousands of guests. She expressed surprise that the celebration was so elaborate. I tried to explain why a machine that is huge, complicated and buried underground — and already so damaged by last month’s severe accident that it will not be operational again until at least the spring (see p7, print version only) — nevertheless generated enough excitement to warrant the partying. Off-handedly, I remarked that the LHC might turn out to be beautiful. That puzzled the reporter.

She had only another minute, and I did not have time for a lengthy explanation. But readers who have followed my previous 99 columns can predict what I might have said.

Experiments as performances

A scientific instrument is not an appliance like a toaster or microwave that we build to make something specific happen. A scientific instrument is more like a stage. On it, we mount performances to help answer our questions about nature, the outcomes of which cannot be predicted. Whatever happens reveals more than we already know; we get back more knowledge than we put in (see “Critical Point: The Newton-Beethoven analogy”). Experiments are thus creative acts with similarities to dramatic performances. One similarity is that they have to be carefully planned, executed and analysed. Another is that their outcome is enthralling — cause for curiosity, excitement and wonder (Physics World November 2002 p19; April 2005 p17; print versions only).

Occasionally, what happens in experiments deepens and transforms our understanding of the world in a way that we call beautiful. Examples include Eratosthenes’ measurement of the circumference of the Earth, Galileo’s falling-body experiments and Newton’s decomposition of sunlight with prisms. These three experiments, indeed, were among the winners of a poll I conducted among readers of Physics World to find the most beautiful experiment (see “Critical Point: The most beautiful experiment…”; “Critical Point: The most beautiful experiment – the result”).

Beautiful performances

So is the LHC beautiful? Certainly the images of particle collisions, real or computer-reconstructed, are pleasing to the eye. The collider’s two main detectors ATLAS and CMS are majestic, colourful and symmetric. And the LHC is conceptually neat and easy to explain — it makes two counter-rotating beams of protons collide and tracks the resulting debris. But these are superficial aspects, not reasons to call the machine beautiful.

In certain columns and the book that grew out of them — The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (2003 Random House) — I discussed the reasons why we call things beautiful. For thousands of years, formal and systematic accounts by philosophers and artists have tended to emphasize three criteria. One is that a beautiful entity satisfies us; it convinces us that this is what we were looking for. Another involves the composition of the beautiful object; its symmetry and the fact that each element is necessary to the whole with nothing superfluous. The third criterion is that a beautiful thing points beyond itself to fundamental things: the true and the good. Could the LHC possibly meet these criteria?

Why not? The results from ATLAS and CMS may well provide conclusive answers to questions about the origin of mass and the existence of extra dimensions. And although the LHC was not cheap — cost over-runs lifted its price tag to €6.3bn — years of reviews have tended to cut anything superfluous and make sure that nothing extraneous was added. Finally, few issues in high-energy physics today are more fundamental than the origin of mass and the existence of other dimensions. The LHC, I would claim, has a chance of meeting the three criteria of beauty.

We do not yet know what will happen. But any great performance involves risk. By risk, I mean more than technical glitches, such as the electrical fault in September that resulted in as many as 29 superconducting magnets being damaged, details of which the laboratory was slow to disclose. Even this injury, grave as it is, only affects the props. By risk, I mean the possibility that the Higgs will not be found, and that the results turn into a theoretical mess involving complex statistical arguments.

An experimental result, like a beautiful object, has the aura of the gratuitous about it, as if it were a gift from the beyond, for the universe could have been different than it is. If things could not have been different, then we would not have needed to do the experiment. If the Higgs does appear at the LHC — and perhaps even if it does not and something else appears instead — we will be quite justified in calling it a beautiful moment in science.

The critical point

I did not have time to say all this to this reporter. Instead, I said something like “When human beings build something as ambitious as the LHC, whose actions have such an awesome scope — linking infinitesimally small particle collisions and cosmic quantities of mass, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the infinite and the finite — that’s the kind of thing we appropriately call beautiful.”

In saying that, I was describing activities of science from a different perspective than scientists themselves are accustomed to adopting, describing how the reporter’s ordinary experience of beauty might be transformed into the context of scientific research. I was, in short, trying to bring about a kind of conceptual phase transition that you might call a critical point.

Related events

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors