Page 195 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

CHAPTER NINE

The Temple of CERN

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of
the glass God is waiting for you.
— Werner Heisenberg

The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become mega-stable at energies
above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). This could mean that the universe could undergo
catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.
— Stephen Hawking, preface to Starmus

CERN is an acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, the European
Organization for Nuclear Research. The site housing the massive particle accelerator known as
1
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built (1998–2008) near Lake Geneva (Lac Léman). Two
1,000-ton superconducting magnets hang suspended down three-hundred-foot shafts into a
cavern through which an underground river once ran until frozen with liquid nitrogen. The
magnets are arranged like boxcars around the five-story, sixteen-mile (twenty-seven-kilometer)
“ring” circling the cavern. Two detectors are built into the loop, the Compact Muon Solenoid
(CMS) and A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS (ATLAS). Designed to detect tiny subatomic particles
like Z bosons, pi mesons, strangelets (quarks bound by gluon), etc., the LHC “ring” is in search
of “clues to the fabric of the universe”:

[Dan Green, project manager:] “We expect to see things which will change the way we view the universe”. . .No one
really knows what the machine will give birth to. But the equations suggest that some weird stuff could be just around
the corner— maybe “dark matter,” the invisible stuff that seems to hang around galaxies.” 2

The phrase “No one really knows what the machine will give birth to” is reminiscent of what
D-Wave’s Geordie Rose says later in this chapter. Haunting.
CERN’s massive superconducting electromagnets enhance and magnify the sustained reach
of the Space Fence throughout our now-ionized atmosphere all the way to the magnetosphere.
Certainly, CERN and other particle accelerators have been recalibrated to synchronize with the
rest of the Space Fence infrastructure. CERN’s two-year shutdown corresponded with HAARP’s
shutdown, and its restart on April 5, 2015 was just four months before HAARP (“UAF Gakona”)