Lisa Randall: The Technological Sublime

In 2008 a rap video by Kate McAlpine went viral (nearly eight million views at present). Not your typical rap video, it takes place in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider and on the grounds 100 feet above. During the performance, the computer-generated voice of Stephen Hawking chimes in as part of a periodic call and response. Throughout, the lyrics are replete with technical terms like “protons,” “lead ions,” “antimatter,” “black holes,” “dark matter,” “Higgs boson,” “Standard Model,” “graviton,” “top quark,” and acronyms like “ALICE,” “ATLAS,” and “CMS.” Here is the central refrain: . . . The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head. The Higgs boson, that’s the one that everybody talks about And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out. . . . McAlpine’s was a prophesy that proved right on target. In 2016, François Englert and Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize in physics for a conjecture they had made over a half century earlier, a mathematically driven leap of faith that became a scientific fact when the Higgs boson was detected—a hitherto mysterious but absolutely central member of the particle zoo. It was a discovery that confirmed the otherwise highly confirmed Standard Model, the explanatory centerpiece of the quantum world. At five billion dollars, the detector of the Higgs, the Large Hadron Collider, is the most expensive scientific apparatus ever built. It is a Mount Everest of machines, the apotheosis of the technological sublime. This form of sublimity is near the center of Lisa Randall’s professional life, the only means by which her deepest conjectures about the universe can be demonstrated. Hers is a flight into the scientific stratosphere tethered to events that she hopes will be observed by two incarnations of the technological sublime: the Large Hadron Collider or the GAIA satellite. When the UK funding for the Large Hadron Collider was still in question, Science Minister William Waldegrave challenged British physicists, telling them “that if anyone could explain what all the fuss was about, in plain English, on one sheet of paper, then he would reward that person with a bottle of vintage champagne.”