I’ve just written once again about the wondrous recent developments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), you know that big machine buried under Switzerland that’s going to find the so-called “God particle”, the Higgs boson, explain the origins of mass, and suck life, the universe and everything into a microscopic black hole.

I was chatting about its potential (pardon the pun) to a physicist friend in Cambridge, who is less than enamoured of the whole money-sucking enterprise.

He reckons the LHC is not only one of the biggest scientific experiments but one of the biggest gambles ever. Its creators have managed to justify the enormous expense with the following assumptions, he says:

1. If the Higgs exists…
2. …and if the mass is within the reachable energy…
3. …and if the detectors can see it, which depends if they’ve got the decay modes right and know what the resulting particle shower looks like…
4. …and if they can keep it going for long enough…
5. …and if…

…then it might tell us something about the universe.

In the end, if the LHC scientists don’t detect the elusive Higgs boson, which is at the heart of a 1960s theory about how particle physics works and the origins of the universe, then, my physicist friend believes, CERN will probably use item 2 in the above list as an excuse to justify even more money to build an upgraded an even bigger machine.

It seems too much of a coincidence that each upgrade particle accelerator upgrade over the years always costs about five to ten times CERN’s annual budget and occurs every five to ten years. More worrying though is that the teraelectronvolt energies (1 TeV is the equivalent to the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito, roughly) are rather meek, even on the sub-atomic particle scale at speeds approaching the speed of light, because equivalent collisions in the upper atmosphere release much more energy than the LHC.

So, my friend asks, wouldn’t it be better to pour money into cosmic ray detectors than yet another upgrade to CERN? After all, it was effectively that kind of engineering approach that led to the discovery of neutrino oscillations by Raymond Davis with tanks of dry-cleaning fluid, perchloroethylene, and a supply of bubbly helium in a mine in the USA.

Think about it, by analogy, a single photovoltaic solar panel on the roof of your home could produce more useful energy on a single cloudy day than has been generated by a fusion reactor. Often a simple, pragmatic approach will yield a big answer without the hanging science over a pork barrel.

Large hardon news

• Large Hadron Collider reaches an initial energy milestone (scientificamerican.com)
• Cern Collider makes fast progress (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Geneva’s Atom Smasher Beats Record (usnews.com)
• What price the secrets of the universe? (guardian.co.uk)