The first thing you notice inside the Large Hadron Collider is the sound of humming. It is the vibrations of intricate machines as far as the eye can see, and the whoosh of processed air. Countless cables in primary shades of red, yellow and blue feel both brash and comforting, like a child’s set of plastic toys still to be assembled. While standing one hundred metres below ground, I reflect on the fact that it was here that the physical existence of a previously hypothetical particle, theHiggs boson (also known as theGod particle), was established in 2012, a discovery that won the Nobel Prize for physics.
Curiosity can open a door to another world, where the ordinary rules of society no longer apply. As anyone who has ever read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland well knows. Asking questions can be a dangerous game. Published by Lewis Carroll (the pen name of writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) in 1865, the story of a bored seven-year-old girl’s fateful tumble down a rabbit hole and into a subterranean fantasy land encapsulates the havoc that a simple question can wreak.“Who in the world am I?” Alice famously enquires. “Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
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