When Worlds Collide
Meet Nima Arkani-Hamed. A super-young, super-brilliant faculty member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, Arkani-Hamed was profiled today on CNN. He is one of the thousands of scientists and particle physicists collaborating on the multi-billion dollar super-gadget called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When completed and run, it may answer some of the most nagging questions in physics, jolt science forward in a way it hasn’t since Albert Einstein’s days, and, according to some scientists, may even open up a black hole that will devour the Earth. But no matter! Arkani-Hamed can barely wait to flip the LHC’s switch. What kind of things is he hoping to find out? An explanation of why Einstein’s theory of relativity works, for one thing. “It makes it extremely mysterious that the electron, or indeed, everything else that we know and love and are made of, isn’t incredibly more massive than it is,” says Arkani-Hamadi.
Harvard particle physicist — and Arkani-Hamed’s former colleague — Lisa Randall explains just why the LHC is keeping scientists up at night in the very best way.
