“Thanks to the U.S. blockade, Havana is as deep-frozen in time as the daiquiris the tourists drink at El Floridita.”
The Guardian, February 25, 2008
“Before one second had elapsed [after the Big Bang] the four fundamental forces that govern matter had come into being…. Scientists believe that all four forces must be aspects of one force, but they have not yet been able to create a unifying theory.”
Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (2007)
Over the years, it’s become commonplace to observe how Cuba failed to advance, economically or politically, under the regime of Fidel Castro. Since the end of the Cold War in 1990, Cuba’s stubborn adherence to Communist rule appeared even more ossified, as new democratic states sprouted across Eastern Europe, Latin America and to some extent East Asia. Now that Castro has stepped down after almost 50 years of rule, will the “Island That Time Forgot” pick up where it left off in 1959?
This depends largely on America. Let’s not forget that U.S. policy on Cuba, too, has been frozen for the past 50 years. In short, that policy consisted of three basic aims: (a) invade Cuba, (b) kill Castro and (c) enforce an economic embargo. The first aim failed spectacularly in the Bay of Pigs affair of 1961; the second failed persistently, with over 600 unsuccessful assassination attempts; and the third served only to force Cuba to become dependent on other nations, notably the Soviet Union.
Might things have been different? Had the U.S. adopted a more conciliatory approach towards the revolutionary regime from the start, might it have limited Castro’s appeal to Cubans (as a nationalist, rather than a communist) and so, by precluding Soviet aid and intervention, have forced him to work with other political parties? Or does history only flow down one channel, and no matter what Eisenhower, Kennedy et al. might or might not have done, the Cuban revolution set in motion a sequence of events that had to play out as it did? We’ll never know for sure, of course, as a trip back to 1959 to see how things might have unfolded is impossible. Or is it?
For the past 10 years, a team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations has been working for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the outskirts of Geneva to build the world’s largest, most powerful particle accelerator: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Due to begin operation in May, the LHC is designed to run six separate experiments. One of these is to re-create the conditions existing in the universe just moments after the big bang occurred, almost 14 billion years ago. However, in the process it’s just possible that the LHC might also become the world’s first functional time machine.
The LHC consists of a circular tunnel that straddles the French-Swiss border. Four metres in diameter, 27 kilometres in circumference and buried 50 to 175 metres underground, this tunnel contains two pipes enclosed within more than 9,000 large super-conducting magnets, magnets that have been cooled by liquid nitrogen and helium to a temperature of -271.3 C — colder than deep space.
Each pipe, in turns, carries a proton beam. The beams travel in opposite directions at 99.99 per cent the speed of light (completing one circuit in just a 90-millionth of a second), but at four points along the way they intersect with each other. It is at these points that the proton beams collide, generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core — hence the need for the super-cooled magnets.
What’s all this for? At the moment of the big bang, the universe was so hot that matter could not exist; instead, it consisted of a sort of “cosmic plasma” of sheer energy. Within about one 100-thousandth of a second, however, the universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently to allow quarks (the smallest known constituent of matter) to be bonded together by gluons to form protons and neutrons, the nucleus of each and every atom in the universe.
Temperatures generated by particle collisions within the LHC will, scientists hope, allow quarks to break free of their bonds with the gluons and so re-create the original “cosmic plasma.” As this cools, it should be possible to observe the process by which energy converts into matter. In doing so — and this is the underlying purpose of the LHC — scientists will advance their understanding of how the four fundamental forces of the universe (gravity, electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces) may in fact be combined into a single “Grand Unified Theory,” the holy grail of science since Einstein.
How safe is this proposal to reconstruct the big bang just miles from downtown Geneva? CERN has been quick to allay public fears, arguing that the LHC poses no greater risk than the cosmic rays generated in outer space that have bombarded the Earth throughout its history. As for the danger posed by any microscopic black holes that might result from particle collisions in the LHC, CERN counters that these would be too small and too short-lived to “generate a strong gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.”
However, two Russian scientists at Moscow’s Mathematical Institute have recently suggested that the forces generated by the LHC might be sufficient enough to distort not only space (much as gravity distorts space around the Earth) but time as well, producing “traversable wormholes” (see www.arxiv.org/abs.0710.2696). “In general relativity,” write Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich in Time Machine at the LHC, “a time-like curve in space-time will run from past to future. But in some space-times the curves can intersect themselves, giving a closed time-like curve, which is interpreted as a time machine. It suggests the possibility of time travel….”
Just maybe, then, when the Large Hadron Collider is switched on two months from now it will, inadvertently, herald the start of a new age in which time travel finally becomes more than mere fantasy. If so, perhaps we could go back to 1959 and replay endlessly the events of that year and see if Castro’s Cuba could have developed differently.
Alternatively, and despite CERN’s assurances, perhaps attempts to re-create the big bang will end up destroying the existing universe and everything in it, including ourselves. In that case, history won’t really matter.
