What’s the point of it?

In short, the CERN scientists are trying to discover more about the basic building blocks of the universe. Theoretical physicist Dr Subodh Patil uses this culinary analogy to explain it in layman’s terms: ‘Imagine you have some really exquisite quiche and you want to find the recipe, except that the person who made it won’t tell you a thing. So you throw it around the room against other stuff, like fruit or custard pies, and hope that the crap that flies out gives you some hint of the fine herbs and spices used.’ Over the past few decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has been developed to explain many of the observable features and interactions of the universe. It identifies twelve types of sub-atomic particle out of which all matter is made; six quarks (the up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom quark) and six leptons (the ?-neutrino, electron, ?-neutrino, muon, ?-neutrino and tau particle). It also recognises the effects of three fundamental forces (the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces) on these particles, resulting from the exchange of force carrier particles called bosons (gluons, photons and W and Z bosons).

However, the Standard Model is incomplete, because it fails to reconcile the theory of general relativity (Einstein’s theory of gravity, which phrases gravity as nothing more than the effects of matter and energy curving spacetime to make us feel gravitational forces) with quantum theory, which is used to describe goings-on at a sub-atomic level. Recreating the conditions just after the Big Bang should give scientists a more coherent idea about the universe’s workings as well as providing insights into such mysteries as: the origins of mass (why some particles weigh more than others, and why some particles seem to have no mass at all), the nature of antimatter, dark matter, dark energy and the ‘primordial soup’ that the universe consisted of immediately after the Big Bang (quark-gluon plasma, apparently), and whether multiple dimensions exist beyond the four that we currently know about.