The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to open this May at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility near Geneva. This follows last November’s cancelled opening due to magnets fracturing under pressure tests. The LHC will be the world’s biggest and most expensive scientific machine ever built, clocking in at 27 kilometres in radius and roughly $8 billion in construction costs. Canada is in for $30 million, mostly through particle detection equipment and staffing costs through TRIUMF, the substantially smaller nuclear particle accelerator tucked in quietly among the trees at the south end of the UBC campus.

The main difference between the big new CERN particle collider and all others like Vancouver’s is the amount of energy available to speed protons at each other at 99.999999% of the speed of light. The protons will be circulated in opposite directions around the massive sub-mountain ring in bunches of billions for hours at a time, during which they will produce an estimated 600 million collisions per second at four different collision zones. The collider is expected to produce 15 petabytes (or 15 million gigabytes) of data annually. As Clive Cookson of the Financial Times put it, the LHC “will give thousands of physicists around the world a cornucopia of data with which to create and refine theories.”

Indeed it will, and therein lies its real function: CERN’s LHC is a massive and lucrative make-work project. Over two thousands scientists from thirty-four countries are already involved just in the construction of the facility. Hundreds will be directly employed to operate the machine once it opens in May and tens of thousands will be indirectly employed at research institutes around the world that will receive the endless reams of data the machine produces. The global economy that the CERN LHC generates directly and in spin-offs will be in the neighbourhood of tens of billions of dollars annually, some of it landing in Vancouver at TRIUMF.

That is a massive weight of invested interests to move if the central idea behind the particle collider turns out to be wrong. And that central idea may well be wrong.

The big idea behind this and other particle colliders is that the origins of the universe is in subatomic particles that came together in the moments after the big bang to form the more familiar and ubiquitous protons. Colliders like TRIUMF and the LHC are intended to smash protons apart to reveal what all those subatomic particles are.

But it’s possible, one may even say likely, that protons are the original particles of the universe, and the mere fact that they can be smashed into smaller particles may be no evidence at all that the smaller particles came first.

One could, to reach for a metaphor, inquire into the constituent parts of a tea cup by smashing a hammer through it and studying all the resulting fragments, gathering data about their size, how far they flew, and what curvature they possess. And then one could smash tea cup after tea cup and hire thousands of technicians to work for several years trying to catalogue all the resulting fragments by categories of sizes and curvatures and distances achieved.

But in the end, knowing every possible fragment of smashed tea cup and every possible property of those fragments won’t tell the technicians anything about how the tea cup was actually made. Just because a tea cup can be smashed into a million fragments doesn’t mean a tea cup is made by creating a million tea cup fragments and somehow gluing them all together.

Likewise, just because a proton can be smashed into countless subatomic particles at the CERN LHC facility doesn’t mean protons were ever formed by those particles having first been created and then somehow stuck together in the imagined high-energy plasma of the first milliseconds following the big bang. But with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of scientists employed in the insane asylum-like act of smashing countless tea cups and gathering up the data about the resulting fragments all over the floor, it’s highly unlikely anyone in the world who imagines a different cosmology will ever get a chair or a grant. Just consider all the home mortgages, the car payments, the club fees and the professional statures of all those scientists, who are humans first after all, that would be put in jeopardy if someone were to persuasively argue that the CERN LHC is nothing more than a make-work welfare program for mad-house residents.

The similarly deep invested interests who kept the medieval cosmology of a God-spun world going for hundreds of years through thousands of comfortable and secure jobs at hundreds of monasteries and universities around Europe required the body-blow of an entirely different, and far superior, cultural science to knock it off its well-nailed pedestal. If Arabic science weren’t forced on Europe through prodigious translations in Moorish Spain, there would have been no Renaissance and the leading scientists of our day would still be extolling the virtues of a mystical God-ordered and run universe.

The power that money has over science hasn’t diminished one iota in the intervening five hundred years. It took the Italian Medici family-run commercial enterprise to outspend and out-hire the Church to finally get some European scientists to take the Spanish translations of Arabic science seriously. In our time, there is no yet more wealthy group forming on the horizon able to buy away converts from the moneyed powers that currently finance most science and comfortably employ most scientists. And worse still, there is no well-formed and further advanced body of science in any other culture whose documents might be sufficient to knock the current body of science off its perch as there was for the vast body of deeply stuck European medieval science.

We may have already got ourselves stuck for hundreds of years again with an equally moribund science, but with CERN’s massive LHC facility nearly up and running, with major upgrades to it already scheduled in 2016, and with plans for an even more massive and even more expensive International Linear Collider (ILC) scheduled for the late 2020s, we seem destined to be stuck with this current and very poor cosmological model for virtually ever. For all the ILC will do is smash to bits the fragments of tea cups already smashed to smithereens, and put to work still more thousands of monks in still more hundreds of monasteries carefully examining the mess all over the floor, none of them ever the wiser about how a tea cup is actually made.

This may be fine. The last time cosmologists got something right, we ended up with big smoking holes where Hiroshima and Nagasaki used to be. The world may be safer if all cosmological scientists are kept busy in the endless and useless task of making for themselves countless new sub-atomic particles to study and catalogue. After all, the last good and useful science was produced in the cafés of the soukes of Meknes and Algiers, not to mention the public libraries of Timbuktu. It’s in similar places today where any new good and useful science will be produced, far away from the monasteries of money at UBC and Geneva.