LHC could be end of the world – for physics

For scientists, today is D-day: the long-awaited moment when they fire the first sub-atomic particles round the world's largest particle accelerator in search of the keys to the cosmos.

Built under the fields of Switzerland by a pan-European team of physicists at a cost of £5bn, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will recreate conditions not seen since just after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
 
Doing that requires a machine of truly awe-inspiring dimensions. The sub-atomic particles race round a huge vacuum-filled racetrack 17 miles in circumference, and then smash together at almost the speed of light inside detectors the size of five-storey office blocks.
 
It is mind-boggling stuff  - and has prompted understandable concern that scientists don't really know what they're doing, with the energies unleashed in the LHC capable of triggering the end of the world. Such fears have got short shrift from the LHC's designers, who point out that the earth is regularly hit with particles from space with energies far higher than anything attainable by the LHC.

It's a pretty good argument - and if you're reading this, one with the added merit of being true. But while the LHC may not trigger a global apocalypse, it may well bring about the end of the world for theoretical physicists. That's because today's events are likely to be the last throw of the dice in a game they've managed to keep going without success for over 20 years.
 
Since the early 1980s, they have subjected us to a steady flow of claims about how physicists are on the brink of a 'Theory of Everything' (ToE): a single, unified account of all the forces in the universe, and the particles on which they act.
 
During the 1960s, physicists claimed to have unified two of the fundamental cosmic forces: ­ electromagnetism and the so-called weak nuclear force. And in the early 1980s, physicists at the same European lab responsible for the LHC triumphantly confirmed the theory using a much smaller machine.
 
Yet despite all the high hopes, grand claims and portentous TV documentaries, the search for the ToE has been in the doldrums ever since. There has been no shortage of theories, but an abject lack of hard evidence for any of them.
 
Physicists are hoping and ­ praying ­ the LHC will give them what they crave: contact with the real world. They hope it will reveal the existence of the so-called Higgs particle, which they need to explain the existence of mass. They also hope it will confirm the existence of something called supersymmetry, a key feature of attempts to create a ToE.
 
But the smart money is on the LHC turning up something utterly unexpected, which leaves physicists more baffled than ever. And that would be game over, as the world's governments are not likely to stump up yet more billions for this kind of stuff.

After all, we need physicists to address some slightly more pressing questions than whether supersymmetry is part of God's design - like how in God's name do we save the planet from climate change?
Follow the LHC project on CERN's live webcast
Robert Matthews is Visiting Reader in Science at Aston University, Birmingham  ·