Particle science has come a long way in the last twenty to thirty years. The understanding and theories that’s has come form recent research has helped progress the way we see the world and the universe as a whole. The biggest problem with all the theories, even though theoretically they seem viable and make sense, is that nothing can be said to be right until proven through a lot of research and experimenting with the various factors of the theory that is to be proven. The Large Hadron Collider project is one of the biggest and most revolutionary steps in particle research and could give us a huge understanding in the role of sub-elementary particles and insights into things such as the big bang theory. The project is run by the scientific company CERN, the European Organisation of Nuclear research.
The Large Hadron Collider is a big circular tunnel situated a hundred metres below the ground in Switzerland near the border to France. Inside it is a particle accelerator, which fires two beams of protons, or occasionally other particles, in opposite directions around the circular tube. The particles then collide and react creating huge amounts of energy, which should cause the protons to rip apart, leaving the sub-elementary particles, such as quarks and the hypothetical Higgs boson behind. This should allow scientists to study these difficult to find particles and answer many physics unanswered questions. Within the Collider there are four particle detectors, designed to analyse the particles as they divide into sub-elementary particles in the split seconds they exist as separate individual parts. The main particles which are being researched are protons but more specifically the smaller sub-proton particles.
Because of the complexity of the project and the way the science of splitting atoms into sub-elementary particles works, the lab requires a lot of very specialised equipment and needs a lot of time to do all the intricate aspects of the research. This therefore requires a lot of funding. The Large Hadron Collider itself cost and massive 2.6 billion pounds to build. Some people say this is a very important project as it could revolutionise science and change our understanding of everything but on the other hand some people see it as a huge waste of money as the science the project is based on and has not been proved (obviously as this is the reason for the project) so therefore potentially could just be wrong and a waste of time.
The research is funded by twenty European member states each funding a proportion of the overall cost. The UK as one of these states contributes eighty million pounds a year to fund the continuous research of the project. The UK funding this project could be seen as wasting money when we should be using it to put into public services as we are facing a time of cuts, just emerging from a recession, and overall economic downturn. However, if we were to stop funding the project, we would lose membership to CERN meaning we wouldn’t have an involvement in future projects including this current one.
This project currently has a workforce of over 10,000 people coming from research centres, universities and laboratories. To stop funding of this project now would mean that thousands of people across the world, including the UK, would lose their jobs, causing an even worse situation as we have already put so much money into the project. That means that it had to be proven at the start of the project to be a viable research experiment that will lead to us understanding and giving us hard evidence for the unanswered physics questions, which will be a force of good for the world. The main reason for the project is for finding the Higgs Boson, the ‘hypothetical’ particle, which makes up the force of the sub-elementary particles allowing mass to exist.
Therefore, it is imperative to the advancement of world science to continue the funding because it benefits the world economy, due to the paid workforce and the new understanding of information that we will have creating more jobs due to the rise of new areas in physics. Although the cost is expensive and financially draining in the beginning of the project, countries have to spend money to make money and this kind of research is important.
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