Vice: How did you get involved with all this fancy science stuff?

Lyn Evans:

How did you end up at CERN?

What’s been the project’s biggest challenge?

This scary-looking monster is named ALICE. It’s going to detect the behavior of particles in the aftermath of a collision similar to the one that happened during the Big Bang. CERN is hoping that it will also generate a quark-gluon plasma, which will help us understand why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks that make them up.

Not many people would be willing to make that type of commitment. Did you imagine it would take 15 years to get to this point?

How did you feel when the first test failed at the last step?

What went wrong?

We happened upon a cross section of a replacement superconducting magnet. There are over 9,000 of these things in the accelerator ring. The two bits covered by tinfoil are the pipes through which the proton packets travel, completing over 11,000 laps of the LHC every second. At various points these two pipes join and the protons are forced to collide, generating temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the sun’s core.

It was a problem with some of the magnets bending, correct?

There was a lot of media attention when the LHC first started running and some thought it was a giant waste of time and money. How do you deal with that and the reaction to the failure?

And what do you think of these critics? Are they hysterics?

Are you really trying to re-create the Big Bang?

Where did it go?

Given the importance of the work you do, I find it a little odd that your lab is as open as it is.

What is the next step for CERN and the LHC?

Want to see the machine that some people think will gobble up the entire universe? Watch an extended interview with Lyn on

Motherboard

on VBS.TV.