Brian Cox interviewed for
The Times Magazine. by Alan Franks
We have seen the future and it short-circuited. The mighty Hadron Collider buried deep beneath Switzerland should have been up and running by now but there was a bad join between two magnets and it started heating up. Like a railway laid low by engineering works, it should be back on track by the spring, setting up crashes between proton beams at a rate of 600 million per second. Dr. Brian Cox, the British physicist who helped design the thing, says breezily that in 27 kilometres of machine, you would expect there to be a fuse, and this was it.
If there is an individual better framed for optimism than Dr. Cox, this planet has yet to disclose him. He has just turned 40 but looks a decade less. He resembles some potential Dr. Who of the distant future, or else a pop star of the less distant past. Which is what he was as keyboard player with D-Ream, the band that gave us, and the first Blair campaign, that anthem of general improvement, “Things Can Only Get Better.”
He talks of impossibly difficult subjects in a way that lets the layman in, and it is to this skill that he owes his newer, more solidly stellar role. As well as presenting TV science programmes, he made a great impact on BBC Newsnight earlier this year when he explained the problems of the Collider. He is a grounded young man from Oldham and a member of the High Energy Physics group at Manchester University.
The year 2009 will be a good one for him and his work if the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) does what is expected of it; that is, gets up to top speed and shows how sub-atomic particles behave when smashed together at these velocities. This, he says, should start to happen some time in the middle of the year; May or June perhaps, but no later than August. He and his colleagues at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, know the Collider has the capacity; it has done the top speed, but not yet with the particles on board. Like a car being test-driven but with no passengers in it.
“Particle physics is often misunderstood,” says Cox, “because it is seen as being a search for new particles, whereas what you really want to know is what these particles do when they collide – basically, how the universe was built at those energies. It’s not a matter of going up to high energy for the sake of it; what we have found over the hundred years since Ernest Rutherford (father of nuclear physics and professor at Manchester in 1907) is that the universe looks simpler as you go to higher energies. So you are gradually uncovering the underlying structure. We know exactly the point at which our understanding fails, and that point is at ten times less energy than the LHC has got. We know that something interesting happens there, and we know that it is related to mass.”
At a crude level this is the most tantalising of detective mysteries, with the Higgs boson or “God Particle” lurking somewhere in time and space. “The thing about the LHC is that it is a new energy regime,” says Cox, “so anything that we see is interesting. But if there is a Higgs particle, then that is really quite tricky to see and you would need to get the machine going well to do that.”
So he has never seen one himself? He gives a patient, pedagogic smile and says “No. Never. No-one has.”
And it is unlikely that it will become visible in the course of 2009? “Oh yes! Unless…unless it’s something with a very dramatic signature, something that we hadn’t expected at all. So, one example, which is right on the edge of plausibility, would be extra dimensions in the universe. They would give you very vivid signatures, and that could remove the need for a Higgs. That would be new physics, completely new physics.”