Armageddon Science (2 page)

It’s the same spirit that sent the pioneers out to the American West, that
Star Trek
urge to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” Inevitably, such exploration can take us into danger. We do our best to keep that danger to a minimum, but we can’t make the risk entirely go away. Science will always involve an element of danger, just as being human always involves an element of danger. And as our science gets deeper, more fundamental, then the potential scale of that danger grows.

This is why in 2008 a group tried to get a court injunction to prevent the turning on of the biggest machine human beings have ever contemplated building. The group was convinced that throwing that switch would do nothing less than destroy the world. It would, they believed, not just kill off the human race, but threaten the whole existence of reality as we know it.

When radio astronomer Martin Rees made the comments at the top of the page in 1988, suggesting that we would never be able to produce dramatic enough conditions on the Earth to reach the extremes required for some experiments in subatomic physics, it was a fair comment. But over twenty years later, the capabilities of our particle colliders have greatly advanced beyond anything possible back then. We can’t create cosmic chaos on the scale of the big bang—which is probably just as well—but locally the conditions will be approaching the extremes of creation. And that’s a worry. Because there’s something about experimental particle physics that brings out the mad scientist in anyone.

It’s not really surprising that particle physics and the image of the mad scientist go well together. We are combining the most childish form of science with far and away the most expensive toys around—it’s hardly a shock that the effect can be terrifying. Why childish? Because the way children often get a handle on reality is by hitting things and seeing what happens. What can be more childish than attempting to discover how something works by breaking it? To be clear about this, let’s re-create the thought experiment of eighteenth-century philosopher William Paley.

Paley imagined discovering a pocket watch when out on a walk on the English heath. Suppose, he said, you had never seen a time-piece before. By carefully examining the watch, by exploring the complexity of its manufacture and guessing at its function and how it was constructed, it would be reasonable to deduce that this wasn’t a natural phenomenon like a rock, or even a heather plant. You would realize that this was surely a designed object. And for something to be designed, it requires a designer. We can use inductive reasoning to say that the watch implies the existence of a designer.

For Paley, this was an analogy that could be extended to life on Earth, which in his mind also required a designer. He commented:

The mechanisms behind modern evolutionary theory, including natural selection, have proved Paley wrong in drawing conclusions about life from the model of the watch on the heath. But the approach generally taken by science would still be to carefully analyze how the watch works so that we can determine just what it is and how it functions. This is not the approach taken by particle physics. To make this a particle-physics analogy, scientists would take a sledgehammer and smash the watch as hard as they could, taking high-speed photographs as they did so to capture the trajectories of the gears, springs, and other components that flew out of it. From these photographs they would attempt to work out just what had been going on in the watch.

Modern particle physics is all about finding bigger and better ways to smash particles together. There is no careful attempt to analyze the nature of the particles—this is not like the work of, say, an archaeologist, painstakingly brushing away fragments of dirt. If a particle physicist were an archaeologist she would excavate a site with dynamite. These scientists accelerate particles mercilessly until they are traveling at nearly the speed of light, then slam them into one another in head-on collisions. It’s like the ultimate dream of every small child who has smashed one toy car into another, combined with a teenage enthusiasm for vast machines and underground laboratories—a particle accelerator would make an ideal James Bond movie set.

To see the potential for mad science at its most deadly, we have to travel to an out-of-the-way country location near Geneva, Switzerland. It’s there that the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) is located. CERN is a vast international research organization that has built the biggest machine ever envisaged by human beings: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). “Large” is a totally inadequate adjective. The LHC is immense. Not that it’s obvious to the passerby. In best Bond villain style, the scientists behind this vast mechanism have constructed it deep underground.

Imagine a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long circular tunnel, easily large enough to drive a car through at over 3.8 meters (twelve feet) wide. Through the center of the tunnel runs an immense metal tube, straddling the border between Switzerland and France. The travelers that journey through this tube would baffle immigration officials, switching from country to country thousands of times a second. This is a nightmare carousel where charged particles are given repeated pushes by vast electromagnets the size of houses. This machine requires the kind of power supply that is needed to run an entire city. Time after time, the particles fly around the circuit, their route carefully controlled by computer until they are brought into head-on collisions in one of the building-sized particle detectors.

CERN had already become well known before the LHC was planned to go online in 2008. One of CERN’s staff, the British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, had thought of a different way to use the then new Internet to share information among geographically remote laboratories. He called his invention—rather grandiosely, since it was accessible at only a few sites to begin with—the World Wide Web. But how right this anything-but-mad scientist was with the tongue-in-cheek name he gave to his invention.

And then there’s another, more recent contribution to CERN’s fame, which has come from a surprising source: the novelist Dan Brown. One of Brown’s novels,
Angels and Demons
(made into a movie in 2009), is partly set in CERN. At the heart of the novel is a possible source of terrible destruction, antimatter. Although many of us first met antimatter as a power source on
Star Trek,
it’s a real enough concept. Antimatter is the same as ordinary matter, but the particles that make it up have the opposite electrical charge of those in conventional matter.

Where, for example, an electron has a negative charge, the antimatter equivalent, the antielectron (usually called a positron), has a positive charge. There are similar, antimatter equivalents of all the particles. When two opposite-charged antimatter particles—an electron and a positron, for example—are brought together, they are attracted, smash into each other, and are destroyed.

The particles’ mass is converted into energy, and though particles, like electrons, are very light, Einstein’s famous equation E = mc
²
tells us that the energy produced will be equal to the mass of the particles multiplied by the square of the speed of light. That’s a big number. A pound of antimatter wiping out a pound of normal matter would produce about as much energy as a typical power station pumps out during six years of running.

This kind of explosive interaction doesn’t happen when a negative electron orbits a positive proton in an atom, because there are nuclear forces in place to prevent annihilation, but no such force protects matter and antimatter. We don’t generally see antimatter on the Earth, because it would disappear in an instant, taking out an equivalent amount of matter and producing a dramatic explosion. But it can be manufactured in the laboratory—and it has been at CERN.

In Dan Brown’s
Angels and Demons,
antimatter produced at CERN is used to make a devastating bomb, which fanatics plan to use to blow up the Vatican. We are told in the novel that just one gram of antimatter, little more than a pinch of the material, will produce an explosion equivalent to the twenty-kiloton atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.

If anything, this underestimates the devastating power of antimatter. It would take less than half a gram to have that effect. Remember, when antimatter collides with normal matter, the mass of every atom is converted into energy according to E = mc
²
, and that’s a lot of energy. To make the concept of antimatter as a weapon even more remarkable, it has been claimed that an antimatter bomb is a clean bomb that destroys without producing the radioactive devastation that accompanies a nuclear weapon, particularly a hydrogen bomb. This seems to have been enough to get some members of the U.S. Air Force excited, and in the early years of the twenty-first century, rumors started to spread that the Air Force was building an antimatter weapon.

On March 24, 2004, attendees at an otherwise conventionally tedious conference were suddenly jerked upright in their seats by what they heard. Speaking at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts conference in Arlington, Virginia, Kenneth Edwards, director of the Air Force’s revolutionary munitions team, was about to explain just how dangerous antimatter was.

He told his audience of the potentially devastating power of this substance—even if only tiny amounts were present. As a graphic example, he considered the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that had left 168 dead. To produce the same devastation, he said, would take just 50
millionths
of a gram of antimatter in the form of positrons. Like Timothy McVeigh’s bomb, it would produce an equivalent blast to over two tons of TNT.

There was an immediate press uproar. Four months later, Edwards’s team was still pushing antimatter, saying everyone was “very excited about the technology”—and then came silence that has continued to the present day. Were devastating weapons that could destroy silently with a tiny power source about to be unleashed? Was this an
X-Files
–style conspiracy in which everyone who knew about this potentially devastating weapon had been silenced? It’s unlikely. Instead, what had happened was the sober realization that the antimatter bomb was a pipe dream. A fantasy.

Dan Brown’s book
Angels and Demons
may well have had something to do with the sudden upsurge of interest in antimatter as weaponry. Interest in the story, which features the same protagonist as Brown’s sequel,
The Da Vinci Code,
surged with that book’s massive success. Something similar happened in 2009 with the release of the
Angels and Demons
movie. And that’s unfortunate, because though a lot of the plot is typical puzzle- and action-driven hokum, there is a fair amount of “science” in the book that is simply wrong.

We can allow Brown some carelessness with the truth in the novel—it is fiction, after all—but up front in the book is a section labeled “FACT” sadly, even this is well adrift of the truth. CERN, we are told, “recently succeeded in producing the first particles of antimatter.” Well, no, that happened way back in 1932 when American scientist Carl D. Anderson discovered positrons—antimatter electrons. What Brown might have meant was that CERN has recently (in 1995, five years before
Angels and Demons
was published) created antihydrogen, antimatter
atoms,
as opposed to the more controllable charged antimatter particles like positrons.

Antimatter, we are told by Brown, is “the most powerful energy source known to man.” That’s okay as far as it goes. “A single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb—the size of the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima.” Half right—this is the energy you’d get if you converted one gram of antimatter into pure energy. But that’s not how it works. You have to combine that gram of antimatter with a gram of matter, getting twice the amount of energy out. Is it coincidental that Kenneth Edwards made the same mistake four years later? Perhaps not.

However, there is a big assumption being made, even if you could come up with a gram of antimatter by waving a magic wand. Explosions aren’t caused solely by the amount of energy in something, but also by how fast it is released. The difference between something burning in a controlled way and something exploding is just a matter of timing. When a quantity of a substance all burns at once, we call it an explosion. But having the built-in energy doesn’t guarantee that the substance will explode.

Take a simple example: which is more explosive, TNT or gasoline? The TNT, of course. That’s why we use it to blow things up. But which has more chemical energy locked away in it? The gas. Weight for weight, gasoline delivers fifteen times as much energy as TNT. It’s just that the TNT burns a heck of a lot faster. As we’ve never combined a gram of antimatter with a gram of matter, we don’t know if it would fizzle away a particle at a time, or go up in a moment, producing that time-compacted conversion to energy that is an explosion.

Back with the “facts” in
Angels and Demons,
we’re told that (exploding) antimatter produces no pollution and no radiation, making it a clean source of energy. This is just plain wrong. Incredibly, dramatically wrong. When antimatter combines with matter it pumps out gamma rays. These are ultrahigh-energy electromagnetic radiation, far more powerful than X-rays, and will do devastating damage to living tissue. Gamma rays produce most of the lasting damage that arises from nuclear fallout.

Finally, and correctly, in his “FACT” section, Brown says, “Until recently antimatter has only been created in very small amounts,” but he goes on to say that CERN now has its new Antiproton Decelerator, “an advanced antimatter production facility that promises to create antimatter in much larger quantities.”

The Antiproton Decelerator does exist—it’s a mechanism to slow down antiprotons to make them controllable so they don’t slam into matter and wink out of existence. But it doesn’t actually create those antiprotons. More significantly, although CERN can now make considerably more antiprotons than were first produced at the site, we’re still only talking about around a million particles at a time. You would need around 100 trillion times that to come close to 50 millionths of a gram, the amount Kenneth Edwards put forward as being equivalent to the Oklahoma bomb.