I visited Auschwitz, scene of much of the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as scene for Hollywood productions, each one trying to recapture the emotions that run through the place. Back in August 2007, the overriding sensation was one of bleakness, which on first impressions stems from the sheer size of the camp – it is vast – but, after a few minutes of contemplation, it becomes obvious that the grim mood is caused by the numbness that overcomes you when you go there; the enormous loss of life still weighs heavy on the shoulders of the visitors, however disconnected they might be from the events of World War Two.

With its monumental entrance gate, never-ending barbed wire and parallel train tracks that split the largest part of the camp in two, the next feeling creeps in: the realisation of function. The whole place is designed to be efficient. After all, it was built for one purpose alone, but it is nonetheless disconcerting to see it all in its horrific glory. The dark train lines are a symbol when looked at from the high watchtower of the main gate, look what went on here, they underline, yet up close they are faded and cracked, unmaintained by the Polish government to try and preserve their authenticity.

Almost predictably, the weather when I visited was grey and overcast, though some chinks of light were still managing to escape through the cheerless sky. The grass was green and brown, burned in some places from the summer sun, yet on Holocaust Remembrance Day it will be covered with deep snow, when temperatures are below freezing. To see the tourists wandering round the camp, in groups, pairs or alone, adds another strange sensation to the place; being there alone would be frightening, but in company somehow reduces its imposing nature. Hundreds visit every day in summer, but we all went earnestly, perhaps from a sense of duty rather than attraction, and although every visitor was a stranger to each other, there remained a feeling of community; we all visited on the same day to ensure that the last large community to pass through the gate is not forgotten: to ensure that it couldn’t happen again.

Some buildings in the camp are set closely together, and even the barbed wire is arranged in double rows, making escape impossible. We saw the paths trod by Nazi guards, and rooms filled with bunk beds, where prisoners slept in threes or more. While I explored this area I came across a large, desolate courtyard with a concrete wall at its furthermost end, where wreaths and flowers had been laid. On close inspection the concrete wall was pockmarked from bullet holes – this was the ‘wall of death’, where some inmates were executed by firing squad. Others were not even provided with this dignity, and guides told us that many were shot in the lanes between the buildings, or behind the latrines.

This barrack-like section of the camp was where the gas chambers were, and as I wandered into one of the ‘shower’ rooms, a group of young Jews were lighting candles underneath a vent, where more than 60 years before their ancestors would have been rained on by deadly Zyklon B pellets. Many of them were in tears, and, suddenly, they broke into a hymn that was so touching and personal, that we were asked to leave by the guide. On the way out we had to pass by the furnaces where bodies were burned, and it was difficult not to feel the oppression of death again. Once outside, the heavens opened. Prisoners of Auschwitz were exposed to rain, snow and the ash of their friends and families, and on that day it seemed almost scripted that it should rain on us immediately after exiting the gas chambers.

That night in nearby Kraków, there was a beautiful sunset of orange, purple and red that surely would have been seen over Auschwitz too. Like the rays of light that crept through the dismal cloud earlier in the day, the sunset led me to think once more of the inmates, and how beauty and destruction can coexist. Would it have given them hope, or would they have seen it as another of God’s great ironies?

So what are these – at present – unknown entities? Metaphysics, for one, although arguably there is nothing to understand there, just a continuous debate. Secondly, the deep sea; perhaps the only place left on earth which we know relatively little about, due to the immense difficulties in exploring it. However, the most mysterious of all, and also the most vast, is the universe.

The universe has always inspired wonder and amazement, for even though it is ever-present, it remains a fascinating mystery. The more we learn about it, the more questions are thrown at it. It is infinite; unreachable and seemingly unconquerable. What we think we know about it is the result of theories and models – though space is being explored through satellites and probes, the exploration is focused on gathering information about planets, stars, and other physical entities. The universe, though, encompasses much more than this. It includes space, time, energy, momentum and, perhaps most importantly, matter.

It is matter that is being investigated in the world’s biggest ever science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, which lies around 100 metres beneath the border of France and Switzerland, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). The LHC is a 27 kilometre long circular tunnel that accelerates particles to close to the speed of light, before colliding them and analysing the resulting debris. 8,000 particle physicists, about half the total number in the world today, are working at CERN. Grand designs then, for an experiment that has an anticipated cost of €6.4 billion, has been referred to as a ‘Big Bang Machine’, and is reputedly in search of a ‘God particle’. So, what is the purpose of the experiment?

Well, like all good stories, the LHC begins at the beginning. The beginning, in this case, of the universe. The start of time, the Big Bang; events that everyone has heard about and carries a vague understanding of, but, as I’ve already mentioned, lead usually to more questions than answers. And these are the questions that the scientists working at CERN hope to answer – questions including, for example: why do particles have mass?

The LHC is designed to replicate the conditions immediately after the Big Bang. It will achieve this by accelerating protons, subatomic particles (the smallest particles known to man), up to 99% of the speed of light. This is so fast that the protons will travel around the 27km ring 11,000 times every second. They are guided through the tunnel by approximately 2,000 huge magnets, cooled to -270ºC, which keep the beams in specifically calculated paths. Groups of these protons are circulated in opposite directions, then, once they reach maximum speed, they are forced to collide. Several detectors are set up around the ring to examine the results of these collisions; massive digital cameras that not only take pictures, but are also able to detect momentum, charge and spin. There are four main detectors, three of which have sufficiently scientific-sounding acronyms – ATLAS, CMS and LHCb – and one which doesn’t – ALICE – though the latter stands for A Large Ion Collider Experiment, which is surely scientific enough.

What will the detectors find? Nobody really knows. It’s not quite needle-in-a-haystack stuff, but it isn’t too far off. The theory is that the LHC will discover a particle known as the Higgs Boson, a mysterious ‘missing link’ particle named after British physicist Peter Higgs, nicknamed ‘the God particle’.

The science behind the Higgs Boson is complicated and requires some imagination to understand it. All objects are made up of lots of smaller particles that make up the whole – atoms – and even smaller particles that make up these particles. So, if you can, imagine these ‘even smaller particles’ – protons and neutrons – are orbited by electrons, in the same way that moons might orbit a planet. How big these orbits are depend on the mass of the electron, so if we can understand the mass of electrons then we can understand the size of their orbits. If we can understand the size of these orbits, we will also be able to understand the size – and a lot else besides – of everything else around us. Over time, particle physicists have developed a theory that explains the interaction between all these tiny particles, but, says Professor Roger Cashmore of Oxford University, an expert on Experimental physics and the Higgs, “it requires all the masses of the particles to be zero”.

Everyone knows that everything has mass, regardless of how small it is, so a new theory was developed by Peter Higgs, who said that there is an invisible field in space that particles move through which gives them mass. To simplify this, do some more imagining. When you wade through water it’s harder than just walking on the street: your legs seem heavier. The same concept applies to particles and this field: as they move through it, they appear to be given mass. The field is invisible, but it is everywhere. What Higgs said was that this field is linked to, and can therefore be investigated through, a particle. Quite modestly, he called this particle the Higgs Boson.

Cashmore was one of five winners of a competition set in 1993 by the then British Science Minister William Waldegrave that challenged physicists to produce a one page answer to the question: ‘what is the Higgs, and why do we want to find it?’ The complexity of the replies is testament to the difficulty of the concept, and Cashmore echoed the consensus of physicists when he wrote that “finding the Higgs [Boson] is the key to discovering whether the Higgs field does exist and whether our best hypothesis for the origin of mass is correct”.

The particle has not yet been discovered; it is still purely theoritical. If the LHC finds it the likelihood is that the Higgs Boson will explain why elementary particles found in nature are not massless. “This is significant because this is the largest remaining problem with the current theory of particle physics, which is called the Standard Model”, says the UK spokesperson for CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the detectors on the LHC), Professor Geoff Hall. He’s been working on the project in various forms since 1989, and so is well-placed to explain why the Higgs Boson has caused such a fuss. Though it might not seem relevant, or important, to our everyday life, he assured me that it represents a huge gap in our theory of particle physics. I asked him where the nickname of ‘God particle’ came from, a strange name given that the particle doesn’t actually ‘create’ anything. “It originates in a book by Leon Lederman [a Nobel Laureate], who is a witty and whimsical character… I think he is referring to the fact that the Higgs particle ‘gives’ mass to the other particles in the theory, which is an otherwise unsolved riddle”. Some further probing into Lederman’s account of things provides more of an explanation. “The boson is so central to the state of physics … yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God Particle.” Why? “Our publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that would be more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing.”

So there we have it; a theory, an evasive particle, and now a huge machine to find it. Some readers might have caught the intense media storm surrounding CERN and the LHC on ‘Big Bang Day’, September 10th of this year. This was the culmination of months of preparation – the building of the machine was actually finished several months ago, but it then had to be cooled to incredibly low temperatures before it could start operating – when the first particles were accelerated around the ring. They weren’t made to collide, but ‘injected’ into the machine and steadily given more energy until they reached the maximum speed. A few warm-up laps if you like, as Professor Hall puts it, “test out the experiment, check it all works and also to test our ability to distribute worldwide the large volumes of data we accumulate… we are still finding little things to check further and improve, and we’ve also been testing out all the software.”

The initial tests went well, perhaps a little too well for those in the science community, who have seen the project struck by countless small suspensions and technical hitches over the months and years. Lo and behold, about ten days later a magnet failure caused the experiment to be shut down until serious repairs can be made, delaying the experiment well into 2009. But considering the delays experienced in the past (the project was once in doubt when it emerged that the tunnel passed through an underground glacier), those at CERN are putting a bravely optimistic face on the latest setback. A spokesperson told the BBC: “we’ve been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process.” Professor Hall says that the delay “gives us longer to improve our understanding of this very complex object, and a bit of frustration in awaiting data”.

What if the worst were to happen, and the LHC, after it gets going again, doesn’t find anything at all? Tom Whyntie, who works on the CMS detector at CERN on behalf of Imperial College, doesn’t see this as an option. “The physics we’ve got at the moment basically says there has to be something we can see with the LHC, so physicists are pretty optimistic that something will be found”. Optimism aside though, what if the project really discovers nothing? “A null result from the LHC would present irrefutable evidence that we really need to go back to the drawing board and fundamentally change the way we do physics and think about the universe we’re in – which one could argue would be the most exciting result of all.”

The LHC seems to become more astonishing with every revelation. The most exciting result would be… nothing? Whyntie explains that this has happened before in the history of physics, and it simply forces us to rethink our theories until we get them right. “At the turn of the last century, people believed that light had to be transmitted through a medium, but an experiment put together famously found nothing at all. Fortunately, a little-known German physicist called Albert Einstein had an idea that explained the result… a fundamental change in the way we look at the universe”. In other words, the current theory used to explain interactions between tiny particles – known as the Standard Model – might have to be totally scrapped if the Higgs remains undiscovered. Speaking to these physicists as a layperson, it is difficult to grasp the full magnitude of both the Higgs and the Standard Model. I suppose for the science community it would be the equivalent of someone telling you that it’s not actually gravity that pulls things to earth, but some previously undiscovered particle or force that affects all objects. Years and years of what we thought we were sure about would have to be cast aside as another endeavour in the ‘trial and error’ theory of natural forces; in this same way the Standard Model would need to be drastically reworked, or possibly even replaced.

It seems a little disappointing to hear that the experiment, which has been so highly publicised recently, could end up throwing out nothing. But, as they say, every cloud has a silver lining – and the silver lining of the LHC will remain whether it finds anything or not. CERN has been at the forefront of technological discoveries and developments since it opened in 1954. Their method? “Get a shitload of very clever people together in one place with one common, unifying goal, give them an almost infinite supply of coffee, and stand back”, says Whyntie. The most important of the creations at CERN so far as our everyday lives are concerned is probably the World Wide Web, which has “paid for CERN many times over by the contribution of e-commerce and industry to the global economy”. Now, media attention is closely following GRID, what could be described as ‘Internet mark two’. In the same way that the Web was originally designed at CERN for sharing physics data, the GRID shares central processing power, allowing lots of computers to perform very large tasks by working in parallel.

Another offshoot of the LHC is for treating cancer. Particle accelerators can now be used to fire proton beams at tumours, and the magnets made for the experiment at CERN are the same as those now being used in the battle against the disease. Those sceptical about the relevance of CERN and the LHC should remember that these inventions are given away free to the world. Given the recent financial turmoil, and the immense figures that have been spewed out by media concerning monetary gambling and waste, the few billion Euros spent on the experiment seem well spent.

Surely, though, for all this good there must be some bad? ‘Big Bang Day’ took place on September 10th, which some readers might recall as the day the more hysterical arms of the media declared that the world was supposed to be swallowed up by ‘micro black holes’. Particle physicist Dr. Brian Cox of Manchester University (and self proclaimed media oracle of CERN) address such bloggers and columnists with the exasperated riposte that “anyone who believes the LHC will destroy the earth is a twat”.

The national media latched onto this apocalyptic theory some weeks before the experiment began, but given the apocalypse-free start up, almost all well-known scientists have now given their backing to the LHC. There has been little plausible criticism of the experiment. The main opposition to the LHC is from amateur scientists. Several years ago CERN mandated an independent panel of scientists to review safety, which concluded there was no conceivable threat, but the micro black holes theory still gained media attention when Walter Wagner, a Hawaiian botanist, filed a lawsuit against CERN, hoping to have the experiment shut down. The case was dismissed before coming to trial.

It seems more appropriate to end this article on a more positive note, one which celebrates the achievements of mankind against the unknown, and looks ahead to the momentous discoveries we hope to find. Tom Whyntie summed it up nicely when he said to me: “it’s important to remember that we don’t do research like this for the spin-offs. We do it because of the physics. We do it for the same reason we landed on the moon and the same reason we want to get to Mars. We do it to find out what’s next in humankind’s exploration – not of space, but of the universe at the smallest possible scales. The LHC represents one of the most exciting paths on this journey, and we are all very much looking forward to the necessary repairs being made to the phenomenal machine that will ultimately make this possible”.