atom
electron
}
nucleus
proton
neutron
quark
P R E S E N T AT T H E C R E AT I O N
T H E P RO J E C T I N B R I E F
This is your invitation to become a partner of the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics (CERN) in its Big Bang Project - a permanent state-of-the-art discovery
centre and interactive exhibition at its site outside Geneva.
The Big Bang Experience Two Hours Out of This World
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A Cosmic Factory CERN at Work
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In Partnership with CERN Benefits to Founders
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There, in 2006, CERN will create a Big Bang easy to see and understand - and make
much else of particle physics intelligible and memorable as well.
A Prime Site Room to Expand
It will be the first time anywhere that advanced physics is made an intuitive experience to be lived and enjoyed, rather than witnessed and learned.
For this cultural challenge CERN seeks partners.
They are to endow and manage a foundation in joint ownership with the Laboratory. The Foundation, in turn, will run and merchandise the centre, to be named,
Big Bang.
V I S I T TO B I G BA N G
Your own distinguished alliance is cordially invited.
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Afloat in the Cosmos To begin the Great Voyage
10-11
The Nature of Everything At large in the Small World
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The Big World From the First Split Second
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The World of CERN Monumental Enterprise
16-17
Beyond Human Perception Pedalling a Bicycle
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Virtual Travel Agency To Hypothetical Universes
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B I G BA N G P RO J E C T
Business Plan at a Glance
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The Big Bang Experience
Two Hours Out of This World
W
ould it not be exciting to witness the first instant
of Creation? See the Universe expand? And realize that the particles colliding in a
physicist’s accelerator are actually reproducing what happened a billionth of a second
after the beginning of time in the Big Bang of Creation itself?
Nature spans an incredibly large range of dimensions in space and time, from the tiny
constituents hidden deep inside the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei, through
to the threadlike strings in which the galaxies hang together. Perched on a fragile
rung of a vast ladder, peering down at atoms and gazing up at stars, mankind now
begins to understand the strangeness and beauty of its own cosmic origin.
The Big Bang Experience is a live voyage through those dimensions, in which the
visitor perceives the unity and the links between them and sees himself as part of the
live, still expanding Universe.
CERN will combine the efforts of the world’s top scientists, educationalists and
entertainment experts to offer the layman a highly personal voyage of discovery
that roves far out of this world. He won't look at life the same way. For some, the
shock will be equivalent to hearing from Newton that the Moon obeys the same
laws of gravity as a falling apple.
The second half of this booklet describes this amazing voyage in more detail.
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A Cosmic Factory
C E R N a t wo rk
T
he particles which CERN studies are so minute that
the energy they carry is only about one thousand millionth of a calorie. And yet particle
collisions within an accelerator concentrate this energy into such tiny space that they
actually mimick the Big Bang. Concentrated energy produces new particles, the reason
the work of the Laboratory is likened to a cosmic factory.
Huge detectors unravel the forces acting between particles, and researchers figure out, 15
billion years after the Big Bang of Creation, how matter actually was born. Why is this
important? Because we do not know what we do not know.
The quest for knowledge goes back as far as civilization itself. A century ago, scientists
had just discovered all kinds of mysterious rays: X-rays, cathode rays, alpha and beta rays.
Their research changed our daily lives, giving us, along the way, television, transistors,
medical imaging devices and computers. CERN’s own research, which began in 1954 as
one of Europe’s first joint ventures, opens new domains to this fascinating quest, involving today more than half the world’s particle physicists at the front edge of research.
A worldwide powerhouse owned by 20 European nations, CERN’s comprehensive range
of training schemes and fellowships attracts student physicists and engineers who go on
to careers in industry where their experience of working in a high-tech and multi national
environment is highly valuable. And it was to enable all 7000 associated or staff researchers to collaborate fluently, that CERN invented the World-Wide-Web!
Duty-bound to spend its entire budget for fundamental research exclusively, and to make
all of its results public, CERN now embarks on a public experiment to make its long and
patient voyage of discovery an adventure anyone can share. What was previously thought
by many to be incomprehensible will be made as riveting as Star Wars.
The Big Bang discovery centre and interactive exhibition will open to the public at the
same time its new “cosmic factory” LHC goes to work to pluck another secret from the
Universe’s infinity of mystery.
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In Partnership with CERN
B e n e f i t s to Fo u n d e r s
A
re particle physics and astrophysics beyond ordinary perception? It would seem so. A million atoms do fit across the width of a hair,
and they are huge compared to the particles CERN is studying. Is this difficult to understand?
In detail perhaps, but not its overall purpose. It is more a question of communication
techniques creatively used to explain the unfamiliar. The fascination and excitement
of the Big Bang Experience can be shared by anybody.
It will set a landmark because it will never have been done on this scale. CERN intends a model breakthrough in the understanding of science by showing particle
physics as a subject as apt for school children as for entertainment of the broad public.
But bringing its research to life for general fascination depends not on CERN alone,
nor its specialist consultants, but on the support of farsighted sponsors: businessmen,
institutions and industrial companies who join the Laboratory as partners in the Big
Bang Foundation.
They are the source of the additional CHF 60,4 million needed to finance the Project on top of the CHF 9,5 million provided by the Laboratory to get it started.
They are expected also to play an active and visible role, as they wish, in the creation
of the Big Bang interactive exhibition and discovery centre and in its subsequent,
long-term operation.
The Foundation will appoint management to run the discovery centre and to license reproduction and use elsewhere of its exhibits and identity.
The Sponsors of Big Bang will be identified by name and logo. They will also be entitled to dedicated facilities in which to receive customers, organize seminars, social
gatherings, shows and temporary exhibitions.
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A Prime Site
Ro o m to E x p a n d
T
he entrance to the Big Bang discovery centre and
interactive exhibition will face the headquarters of CERN in Meyrin on the FrancoSwiss border at the western outskirts of Geneva. The centre is designed to comfortably entertain 500 visitors at a time, with a yearly target of 250’000. Construction
will begin in 2003, to be completed in 4 years.
For the Capital Phase of its development, CERN will provide various in-kind
contributions amounting to CHF 9.5 million:
A prime site with easy access on a 50,000 m2 lot facing a main thoroughfare in
and out of Geneva, 20 minutes from the centre of the city, three kilometres from
Cointrin International Airport, and adjacent to exits from both the Lyon-Zurich
and the Milano-Paris autoroutes.
Its scientific and technical expertise, to originate thematic content of the displays
to occupy 7,500 m2 of new floor space, with a further 14,000 m2 featuring parking for 300 visitor cars and buses as well as access roadways, walkways, gardens,
service facilities and room for eventual expansion.
A renovated former experimental area in a cavern 40 metres underground housing an authentic, large particle detector.
Throughout its Operational Phase, the exhibit will benefit from an annual contribution by the Laboratory. It pledges to provide scientists and engineers seconded
from its staff to act as lecturers and guides, a revolving review of the displays to ensure accuracy and topicality, and active participation to refine educational relevance.
CERN will also meet all utility costs, including cleaning, security and energy.
Now let us take a tour to Big Bang itself...
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Afloat in the Cosmos
To b e g i n t h e G re a t Voya ge
T
o prepare for his voyage through dimensions in the
CERN discovery centre, the visitor enters a large dome-like hall that uses mirrors and
projection techniques to make him feel afloat in cosmic space.
“Science has found not only that the Universe is accessible to human understanding, but also
that we are a part of the Cosmos, born from it, our fate deeply connected with it. The most
basic human events and the most trivial trace back to the Universe and its origins. The
Cosmos is all that is or ever was, or ever will be.” (Carl Sagan)
Just so. And for the first time, at a stroke of surprised, personal recognition, he knows
it. Spark chambers revealing cosmic ray showers surround him. He sees the Solar
System from outside. He has been eased painlessly away from his daily reality – and
from its petty, earthly proportions of size and scale. He floats among comets and
flashing stars whose reality, he finds, is appropriate to his own. So that as he approaches the greatest of all mysteries, he has been equipped by a change of perception.
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The Nature of Everything
At L a r ge i n t h e S m a l l Wo rl d
“To see a World in a
Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild
Flower, Hold Infinity in the
palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
O
nly recently have physicists corroborated William
Blake’s poetic vision. The first voyage of discovery will lead the visitor into matter - a
grain of sand, a cell, an atom - the stuff he is made of. And when he arrives at the
smallest dimensions of space and time, he will realise that the key to the secret of the
Universe lies inside of us.
“At Large in the Small World” is a sequence of landscapes spiralling down into
smaller and smaller worlds magnified for the visitor. At each level he seems to shrink
to a thousandth of his previous size and progressively discovers worlds too small to
be visible. Biology, medicine, chemistry and physics appear in turn, only at a different degree of structure.
Reduced to an apparent size of 1 millimetre, he arrives in the Milli-World, the realm
of biology, bacteria, and cells. A human hair has taken on the dimensions of a piece
of rope sturdy enough to tie up a yacht. Integrated circuits, the head of a DVD-player,
the structures on the surface of a compact disc have his size and reveal intricate and
surprising details.
Shrinking still further, he enters the Micro-World, the realm of molecular biology
and medicine. There, he strolls through the complex factory of the human cell:
jammed with molecules of all sizes and shapes, it includes the very long and thin
DNA double helix in its nucleus and shows the busyness of life in all its magnificence.
The Nano-World unveils the secrets of atomic physics and chemistry. The DNA
double-helix is now the size of an enormous staircase. The visitor is small enough to
explore the inside of an atom.
The following Pico-World - at 1/100 of the size of a hydrogen atom - is a surprise:
there all matter mainly consists of empty space. But on entering the Femto-World,
the visitor sees suddenly the complex structure of its nucleus. This is the world of particle physics, displaying the breakthrough discoveries of the last century: all matter in
the Universe, from the Big Bang to now, has been made from only twelve basic types
of particles.
The Big Bang World is the ultimate frontier of this astonishing walk – a place of eerie
silence where the secrets of space and time wait to be explored. It is here, at this climax of his journey into matter, that he becomes aware that the Big Bang started from
a point smaller than this. Every atom of our body contains the secret of Creation.
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The Big World
F r o m t h e F i r st S p l i t S e c o n d
T
he visitor enters a planetarium and takes a seat for
a trip to the beginning of Space and Time. Accelerating away from this familiar
world, he leaves behind not only CERN, Geneva, Europe, the Earth, but the entire
Solar System. Only when he has got beyond our giant, spiralling Milky Way – into
which our Sun has receded, now out of sight amid the brightness of 100’000 million
other stars – does he realise that the direction of time has been reversed: the Universe
is contracting. As he approaches the beginning of Space and Time it becomes hotter
and much smaller in size. Still further, 15 billion years back to the Big Bang itself, the
whole cosmos is smaller than the point of a needle.
The traveller manoeuvres through the Big Bang. The arrow of time reverses again
and he watches the Universe evolving from its tiny beginning. Faster than the blink
of an eye, a series of events defines its destiny: energy condenses into particles and following a prescription by the brand new Laws of Nature - atoms build up from
quarks and electrons. Analogous to the sharp change that occurs when water turns
into ice, each snowflake acquiring its own, unmistakable symmetry among an infinite
number of possibilities, atomic matter in the rapidly cooling cosmos begins to assemble our Universe.
Now watching the Universe expand, the traveller is present at the birth and death of
the first stars. Negotiating a hazardous path through exploding supernovae and narrowly missing black holes, he observes the creation of the ingredients of life. Zigzagging through squalls of collapsing matter, he arrives in time for an appointment with
the birth of our own Sun. From the cosmic debris around it, the young Earth accretes
its treasures.
Returning to this small island of life in the vastness of space, the traveller knows the
Universe is still expanding, and at a furious rate. That he himself speeds through
space and time. That every particle in his body is 15 billion years old, a direct descendant of the very first event. And that given one tiny change in the events happening during the first split second, he and this living world would not exist.
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The World of CERN
M o n u m e n t a l E n te r p r i s e
T
o give visitors an authentic sense of the look and
feel of the Laboratory’s working tools, the World of CERN invites them 40 metres
underground for a walk through a mock-up of a particle accelerator and a large detector. Later, standing close to a model of the most powerful instrument on Earth the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – staff scientists explain its role in their most advanced enterprise to date, allowing them to recreate the conditions existing only one
trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.
The visitor feels overwhelmed. But he is told: The functioning of an accelerator and
a detector may be slightly disorienting ideas, but only on first encounter. With better
acquaintance, they gain much in charm. To prove his point, the guide invites his
guests to sit for a simulated ride as an accelerated particle. After all, shouldn’t physics
be great fun?
Within seconds, the visitor is being propelled out of the chain of CERN accelerators and into the huge LHC ring at almost the speed of light. Another boost and he
finds himself on a collision course with billions of particles coming the other way –
and in clusters. In the inevitable (and blazing) head-on collision, he is transformed
into matter last seen inside the Big Bang itself.
Back in the real world, a stroll through the section on CERN technology reveals
some of the many applications of fundamental research in physics, notably television,
lasers, computers and the World-Wide-Web. A history section offers stories and
portraits of the people behind the most extraordinary discoveries of the last centuries.
And finally, in a high-tech facility for virtual reality, the visitor is given free rein – or
help – to explore ideas that have caught his own imagination.
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Beyond Human Perception
Pe d a l l i n g a B i c yc l e
A
ntimatter and matter converting into energy?
The flow of time slowing down? Fluctuations in the quantum world? What sound
like Star Trek implausibilities are daily reality at CERN. Beyond Human Perception
challenges the visitor with concepts to fire the outer limits of his fantasy: A fully interactive environment displays once-baffling phenomena which have now become for physicists - as familiar as the post-Copernican Solar System.
Two examples:
The Relativity Bicycle. In a world where the speed of light (300’000 km/sec) is
30 km/h, the visitor gets on a bicycle and pedals through a virtual three-dimensional landscape. Astonishing things happen as he approaches 30 km/h: even trying very hard, he can never reach the speed of 30 km/h because mass is increasing
instead of speed. Therefore he no longer can get his bicycle around a sharp bend.
Time slows down and familiar objects of his world change shape. When the rider
returns to his starting point, he will theoretically be younger than a twin brother
who might have waited for him.
Antimatter Annihilations. Antiprotons transported in an electromagnetic trap
from the world’s only low-energy antimatter factory at CERN, just a few hundred
metres away, are released at regular intervals of time. They are annihilated in an
imaging particle detector where their mass transforms first into energy and then
in new particles, which also leave visible tracks. It all happens in front of the visitor. In this case, the super detector is his own eye.
But then there are the new, unsolved mysteries currently preoccupying researchers at
CERN. Are we living on the surface of an 11-dimensional world? What happens inside a black hole? What is the mysterious dark matter that determines the ultimate
fate of our Universe? These are questions to inspire laymen as much as scientists, and
whet their appetites for the compelling adventure of Science made real by the Big
Bang Experience.
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Virtual Travel Agency
To H y p ot h et i c a l Un i ve r s e s
H
ow would you like a guided tour to the centre
of our galaxy? Or to the outskirts of a black hole? Does a trip into an exploding Sun
appeal? With the help of an experienced scientist, you could also play with the constants of Nature to explore the fragile balance of forces that allowed the evolution of
life in the Universe.
It is all possible with the Virtual Travel Agency - a theatre with state-of-the-art virtual reality equipment. Here, groups of visitors, in particular school classes, explore
concepts of their choice, together with a scientific guide or a teacher. They can visit
the inside of an atom and ask questions about the intriguing phenomena they encounter there. They can watch what happens inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider,
and try to track down the elusive “Higgs” boson for themselves. Or they can explore
hypothetical Universes where things might be different.
This group excursion into virtual worlds will be the last exalting moment of a voyage
through Space and Time, from the infinitely big to the infinitely small. It will provide answers to some of the many questions raised by such intense intellectual stimulation and fun.
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BIG BANG Project
Business Plan at a Glance
BIG BANG Project
Business Plan at a Glance
A comprehensive Business Plan for the Big Bang Project is attached.
OPERATION
Together, CERN and its Partners will constitute a Foundation, which in turn will appoint a manager and 50 staff to operate Big Bang.
A market assessment of the catchment area around Geneva (local population and
tourists) estimates at 295’000 per year the number of potential visitors. Admission for
single adult will cost 20 Swiss francs (averaged at 15 Swiss francs, taking family tickets, school discounts, etc. into account).
SPACE
The discovery centre and interactive exhibition will consist of a complex of buildings
offering 7 500 m2 of floor space, with a surrounding area of 14 000 m2 for access and
parking space.
Interior Spaces
Reception
Exhibitions
Conferences
(of which 290 m2 for sponsors' space)
Management/maintenance areas
Exterior Spaces
Arrivals
Public parking
Staff and services
825 m2
4 160 m2
1 180 m2
1 335 m2
1 000 m2
11 400 m2
1 600 m2
INVESTMENT
The total capital costs of the Project amount to 69,9 million Swiss francs,
- of which CERN will contribute in various ways 9,5 million,
- and seeks private and public sponsors as its partners to fund the remaining
60,4 million Swiss francs.
Capital Costs in MCHF
Construction & external work
21,8
Site (*)
6,5
Exhibition displays, movies, etc
24,0
Architecture, design, project management 8,4
Administration (*)
2,0
Scientific input (*)
1,0
General reserve, pre-opening cost
3,1
Contingency
3,1
A conservative budget for the first year of operation has been calculated on the basis
of 250’000 visitors, with a capacity on the Big Bang premises of 500 visitors at a time,
spending an average of 2-3 hours.
At that level of frequentation, operating costs are projected at 7,1 million Swiss francs
per year (of which 2/3 are for staff ).
They can be met (up to 85%) by admission tickets and merchandising, and CERN
will contribute in cash and kind (for water, electricity, maintenance, cleaning, etc.)
covering the remaining 15%.
Income in kCHF
Admissions
Merchandising
Various CERN contributions
3 750
2 250
1 100
Expenditure in kCHF
Staff salaries
Marketing
Maintenance, etc
Energy, cleaning & security
4 750
500
1 450
400
TIMETABLE
Building time:
Fund-raising:
Opening of Big Bang:
51 months.
completed by the end of 2002.
end of 2006, to coincide with
commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider.
(*) contributed by CERN
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The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things
which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky,
would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject … And this knowledge
will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our
descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them
… Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have
been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every
age to investigate … Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.
Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7, first century
CERN Copyright
Guy Hentsch & Rolf Landua