A question of everything

Any day now, engineers at Cern's Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator 100 metres under the city of Geneva (and under a few villages in France as well), will press a button and begin to push a volley of subatomic matter to 0.999999991 times the speed of light and then smash it into another salvo of protons coming the other way at the same speed. The idea is to recreate the heat and dust that must have existed in the universe when it was about as big as a beach ball, in the first trillionth of a second of creation.

This stupendous match of science and engineering won't answer any questions in a trillionth of a second (the timetable for the experiment is about seven years and the machine may not get up to full tilt until 2009) so the rest of us have time to reflect on the astonishing speed of the great adventure.

Start with 1964, the year Harold Wilson became prime minister, the year BBC2 switched on, the year Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1964, it was possible to ask the world's greatest scientists a straight question - did the universe start from nothing, or was it always there? - and get a blank stare.

It was a question that was as old as religion, as old as inquiry itself and there wasn't an answer. By 1965, two radio astronomers at Bell telephone laboratories had unintentionally checked a series of predictions by a set of maverick physicists - among them a Russian called George Gamow - and delivered an unequivocal response: yes, the universe began in a fireball some time in the last 20 billion years. In the course of the next 43 years - hardly half a lifetime, at present western European expectations - physicists revised the hot big bang theory over and over again but still kept coming up with the same big answer: yes, there had been a beginning to everything that we can detect, and so, logically, there could be a theory of everything.

The Large Hadron Collider experiment at Cern is however only one instance of the astonishing pace of science in the last 44 years. In 1964, biologists knew about DNA, and they certainly knew that the sequence of chemical bases in that enormous string of biological information must provide some sort of code (George Gamow was involved in that, too) but nobody knew how to use the information; nobody expected to be able to "read" the patterns of inheritance and nobody believed that this knowledge could have any practical application.

It is now more than a decade since a British scientist took the DNA from a dead sheep, injected it into the empty egg from a live ewe, and cloned Dolly, the sheep that shook the world. In 1964 there were certainly space missions, and communications satellites, but the idea of sustained space voyaging seemed like a dangerous fantasy. Within a decade, 12 men had walked on the moon, and there were spacecraft heading towards the farthest reaches of the solar system. Within four decades, a European lander was preparing to touch down on one of the moons of Saturn.

This extraordinary adventure in long-distance travel was matched by a set of astounding discoveries on the surface of planet Earth. In 1964, many geologists and geophysicists believed that the ocean floor would be older than the continents that rested on it – stands to reason, doesn't it? – and that it was pure co-incidence that the shape of west Africa looked like a piece of jigsaw cut to fit around the coast of Brazil. By 1965, a paper by two British geologists had begun a revolution in earth sciences that explained why there was copper on Cyprus, mountains in the Andes, coral in the Pennines, volcanoes in the Caribbean, why earthquakes simply had to happen, and why the some of the youngest rocks on the planet were ocean basalt.

These great adventures were accompanied at every stage by technological mastery at a speed far beyond any science fiction fantasy. In 1964, the computers that drove the space effort were huge, clumsy bits of kit with less calculating capacity than the average 2004 washing machine, and that depended on reel-to-reel tape recorders to store their data. In 1964, there were western European children whose lungs were scarred by tuberculosis, whose faces were pitted with smallpox, whose limbs were withered by polio. In 1964, there were still doctors who thought smoking might be good for you, who prescribed black pudding for anaemia and Guinness for a condition called "nerves" and who had no idea how or why aspirin worked.

And, to get back to where we started, in 1964 Cern certainly existed in Geneva, and certainly accelerated matter. But discoveries there were limited by the problems of detection on scales far smaller than an atom and at speeds far faster than anything other than light itself. In 1968, a French scientist called Georges Charpak devised the first modern particle detector and now Cern's latest machine is equipped with four massive detectors capable of automatically sifting data from particle collisions 600 million times every second.

It is manned by 7,000 physicists and engineers, more than half of whom were not born in 1964 but who expect in the next seven years to be able to answer some of the biggest questions of all: about the advent not just of matter, but of matter's apparent birth-partners, space and time. They may not get the answers they hope for. They may get answers so puzzling it could take another four decades to understand them. Or they may simply find more questions. Whatever they find, or don't find, the adventure will have been worth it: just think of the journey, and the colossal scientific rewards of the last four decades, and marvel.