Science is vital if Britain is to prosper – make sure your MP knows that
Last week, I stood 100 metres directly above a spot colder than the deepest realms of the cosmos. I was chatting to two British physicists, Kay Graham and Jaime Norman, deployed from their bases at the universities of Birmingham and Liverpool to the Large Hadron Collider, straddling the Swiss-French border. There they are studying the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe. Below our feet, protons were circumnavigating the 27km ring, and smashing into one another at more than 99% the speed of light. The superconducting magnets that accelerate them are cooled to -271C, just 2C above absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible. Deep space is around 3C above absolute zero.
The LHC is the most complex machine ever built. Why would we build such a thing? Well, for lots of reasons. But the main one is because throughout our history we have extended our reach beyond our grasp. We are explorers - the land beneath our feet, the seas ahead of us, the space above, and nowadays, the subatomic world within. The LHC is truly the most impressive experiment I've ever seen, and testament to how, if we put our collective minds to it, we can accomplish anything.
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