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Jon Butterworth has been handed the job of explaining how the Hadron Collider is attempting to recreate the Big Bang and the birth  of our universe, writes Dan Carrier

The large Hadron Collider hit the news in September 2008 when it was first turned on, with a fascinated public seeking to understand what exactly scientists working on the project in a 16.5 mile-long tunnel the size of the Circle line under the French-Swiss border were up to.

It was described by those involved as “the most exciting scientific adventure of the next decade... that might answer some of the fundamental questions we have about the universe we live in” – a giant machine seeking to recreate the conditions a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. 

And it has offered a generation of scientists the chance to say they were involved in the next big Eureka moment in physics. One of the leading members of the British team working on the Collider is Professor Jon Butterworth, who lives in Dartmouth Park.

Professor Butterworth, of University College London’s department of physics and astronomy, has spent the past 10 years working on a project that has been described as the search for the discipline’s Holy Grail, with quite what will be discovered still a matter of speculation. 

Jon joined UCL’s physics department in 1996 and began working on the project in 1999. He has been charged with the tricky job of explaining exactly what the machine aims to do. He has been on the stump giving lectures about the Collider since it was switched on, and has discussed what it may reveal at venues ranging from schools and colleges to tents at trendy music festivals. Further evidence of how this experiment has cemented itself in the popular imagination can be gauged by the fact it features in pulp novelist Dan Brown’s follow-up to the Da Vinci Code. His book Angels and Demons  includes a break-in and murder at the project, with the baddie stealing vital anti-matter and using it to blow up the Pope. Jon admits to reading the book – for professional curiosity, of course – and enjoying it. But he chuckles at the liberties Brown has taken with the reality of the experiment. 

“We do not wear white coats like in the film, and there is no such thing as something called the Cern Ram Jet,” he jokes. 

But Brown did get one thing right.

“He talks about anti-matter, and that is real,” says Jon. “We have it – anti-matter is not science fiction, and that means there is a nugget of reality in the story.”

But the scheme is fantastic enough without being dressed up by a novelist. 

The Collider has captured the imagination for the fact that it intends to recreate the very moment our universe was born – perhaps. Because quite what the scientists will discover as they crank the machine up – at the moment, after a disastrous and much-publicised explosion, it’s not smashing particles into one another as fast as it could – is unknown.

And that is the point, says Jon.

“Imagine the universe now,” he says. “It is always expanding. So run it backwards – it’s getting smaller and smaller. The particles are heating up because they are getting squashed. Keep going and at some point you’ll get back to the start of the universe, the Big Bang. This is what the Collider does, and by studying it, we can extrapolate what happened.”

This is a massive, multi-national project, employing 2,500 academics in 111 countries. Fourteen universities in the UK alone are working on sections of the project.

“It is also the biggest science experiment ever done,” says Jon.

“It is like a massive high-tech jigsaw. If one bit goes wrong it is patently useless.”

Next month, the team working on the Collider is due to take another important step. 

“We have just starting doing the real physics with it,” explains Jon. “We do not just turn it on and away it goes.

“Most of the experiments so far have been using a fairly low level of energy. We are studying them and learning new things. 

“In February we are planning to run higher energy through it – and that is when you may get some surprises. It is like rolling a dice – not every collision is the same. There are so many questions it may answer, like why galaxies stay together. We may find new dimensions we did not know existed, or discover why things have mass.

“It may sound like science fiction – that’s because we do not know what we may find.”