Underneath farmland near Geneva, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive scientific experiment, has re-started. It will engage, among other things, in a hunt for the mysterious dark matter that is said to make up 84 per cent of our universe. Scientists say it will be a real leap into the unknown.
And yet that incredible machine, the world’s mightiest particle accelerator, cannot match the power of the human brain, which consumes less energy than a dim light bulb and needs nothing more than pen and paper to revolutionise physics. It was 110 years ago that Albert Einstein propounded the theory that time runs more slowly near a strong source of gravity. It took decades to validate his idea, most recently with a quantum computer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Whatever the Large Hadron Collider discovers, it is likely to prove what an oxygen-breathing scientist has already postulated.
