Caverns Measureless to Man

In caverns cooled to -271°C­—each buried 200 meters below the surface of the earth—two particle beams, accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light in 27-kilometer-long circular orbits, collide with unfathomable precision in a shower of bizarre subatomic particles.

Eyes fixed on these icy caves, we wait for Nature to give up her secrets.

By now we’ve all heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle collider in the world, which girdles land in Switzerland and France as part of the supercollider complex run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). When it first started running a few years ago, there were some who thought its experiments would result in the end of the world. The belief was no more than hysterics, but its cry reflected the strange place contemporary physics holds in our consciousness.

There is an alluring terror to the extreme conditions the accelerator endeavors to recreate. Terms like ‘anti-matter,’ ‘black hole,’ and ‘other dimensions’ ignite the imagination even as they devolve into nonsense. Each word makes sound sense on its own; but when you start putting them together, their meanings begin to blur, to evade intuitive comprehension. At that fundamental level, the answers resolve the mysteries of the questions by revealing greater mysteries.

200 years ago, in the summer of 1797, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge woke up from an opium-induced sleep with visions of another kind of cavern. In his dream a poem came to him “in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.” Furiously writing down what was left of the dream, he left us with one of the most mysterious and imaginative poems in all English literature. “Kubla Khan” begins:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man...

It would be anachronistic to say that Kubla Khan has anything at all to do with modern particle physics, but the coincidental resemblances “Kubla”’s “pleasure-dome” bears to the LHC are tantalizing. The two are great man-made circular structures, enclosing vast quantities of space. The LHC is admittedly bigger: at 27 kilometers in circumference, it encompasses about 22 miles, twice that of Kubla’s 10.

Yet the eeriness of the “caverns measureless to man” continually resurfaces. The exact phrase repeats later on, and recapitulates into “a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.” Outside of the realm of even the most fantastic human artifice, these caverns, made by nature, are the opposite of the “pleasure-dome.” The “caverns” make four appearances in the poem.

The CERN’s website states that four detectors “are installed in four huge underground caverns located around the ring of the LHC.” Like the sacred river, the particle beams pass through underground caverns before surfacing to human measure. But the LHC’s caverns are distinct from Coleridge’s. The CERN is the site of the most precise measurements known to man. What the LHC makes us confront is not immeasurability, but the mystery of what we measure.

Perhaps this nominal coincidence tells us something about the way our knowledge ceaselessly orbits, like particle beams, through “caverns measureless to man”--that we pass through the immeasurable to get to the measurable. Coleridge writes, punning on “measure”:

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

The “fountain” of particle beams swinging through the “caves” of solenoid magnets hundreds of meters below Cessy, France perhaps yields no immediate music to our ears. But science, like art, must pass through these caves of meaninglessness in order to resound with meaning. Song, like subatomic phenomena, is measured; and it is this urge to measure, common to the scientist and the poet, that lends meaning to our endeavors. So we press our ears to caverns, listening for the measure of the universe.

—Columnist Adam L. Palay can be reached at apalay@fas.harvard.edu