Coursework The Great Experiment

Feynman leaned back in his expensive vintage leather chair brought over from his home in Huston Texas. He knew it had been an indulgence even mildly pompous but he was about to solve the question of life and he figured he could afford some indulgence. He looked over his left shoulder out through a huge custom built glass screen along the whole left wall of his office at his magnificent baby. This was no ordinary baby. His baby had taken 20 years and 4. 5 billion dollars to come into life and yesterday it had.

It had been with great pride that he had finally thrown the switch that had started its working life. A lot of critics and flat earthers had expressed deep set opposition to the world’s greatest and most expensive experiment. But Feynman himself had no doubts whatsoever; he had won a Nobel Prize for the theory behind the experiment and had managed its construction from the start. If there was a problem he would have known and he had every confidence in not only his own work but also the combined intellect of thousands of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

The project had attracted the cri??me de la cri??me of the world’s best. He looked again through his panoramic glass wall at the machine itself, In fact he was only looking at one critical part of the machine. Alice was the name given to the huge Atlas detector that was the heart of the machine and the project. Its purpose was nothing less than to answer the question why do we have mass? It would finally prove there was no God. The only God Feynman believed in was Physics and higher maths. His 46 meter seven thousand ton Alice was to him a beautiful construction.

The collider itself of which Alice was merely only a part stretched out over 26 kilometres running in a circle underneath the border between Switzerland and France at a depth of 100 meters. Like a giant hidden crop circle the machine was the biggest of its kind anywhere in the world. The complexity of the machine was incredible, millions of wires each vital stretched into the distance, thousands of components melded together in this creation of all creations. But it was mans creation, Feynman’s creation. His very own version of intelligent design. The concept that the creationists had for so long held onto.

Feynman looked down at the first data reserved for his eyes only. He was the only man that knew , he would have to tell them. His heart rate quickened, he began to sweat, he began to feel a rising bile, he began to realise what he had done, what they had done. There had always been a theoretical possibility of course but it always had seemed so ridiculous. The maths just didn’t work. Feynman and his team had laughed about it over the years but it was no laughing matter now. The popular press had called their search, the search for the God particle.

They had found that sure enough. But it was no loving God, this god wasn’t going to solve our problems, answer our questions offer an everlasting afterlife. Feynman knew the tiny subatomic black hole would grow from something so small, so infinitesimally tiny it couldn’t be seen with a microscope to something that, in time would devour everything. Every forest, every house, every school, man woman and child would all go. Every particle that made this world this existence, this life would go. Not now, not tomorrow but in time and it was starting now. He had to tell them.