May 16, 2007--BIG Science
If you’re wondering what we might be doing if we weren’t spending about $1.5 billion a week on the war in Iraq, we could use less than a month’s worth, $8 billion, to compete with the Europeans in the field of Big Science. While we have been frittering away our national treasure, not to say the lives and bodies of too many of our young people, for the past 13 years, unburdened by military spending, Europeans have been building the largest piece of scientific apparatus in history—the CERN particle accelerator which at 16.8 miles in circumference is so large that the underground circular tunnel that contains it spans the French and Swiss borders.
After they switch it on next summer, it is expected that the subatomic particles that will be accelerating around and around in it at nearly the speed of light, when they smash into each other, they will simulate the primordial energy that existed less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang spawned the universe 14 billion years ago. With a nod to the departed Jerry Falwell, that’s pretty much Creation time. See NY Times story linked below.)
Up to now, using much less powerful particle accelerators, scientists have been able to turn the clock pretty far back toward that Big Bang moment—to millionths of a second. But as far as cosmology is concerned, in small-c creation time that’s already ancient history. To figure out how this earliest energy began to differentiate itself into the forces and particles with which we are already familiar, we have to get to trillionths of seconds after that Bang. For example, we still do not know the composition of the Dark Matter or Dark Energy which together make up 96% of the mass of the universe. So if the CERN machine can help answer those and other questions--is String Theory just a theory or is it verifiable--all the time and money will have been worth it. Right?
Thinking about these possibilities inspired me to recall my own little experience during the early days of Big Science. It was the summer before my senior year at Brooklyn Technical High School, and since I was quite good in both math and physics, I was shopping around for a college to go to that would allow me to major in one or both. Unlike today when parents drive their kids around to a dozen or more colleges for campus visits to see how each “feels” before applying, with a chum, Gene Hecht, I got into the subway and went up to Morningside Heights to visit Columbia. We found Pupin Hall, the location of their at-the-time world-renowned physics department—famous because there were two Noble Prize winners on the faculty.
Gene and I wandered around the empty hallways wondering what we should be looking for. We were that naïve and unprepared! There was in truth nothing to see—no labs to poke our noses into, no one in any of the offices. Feeling lost and a little depressed, we turned to leave when a very tiny man with a thick German accent emerged from what was clearly his office and asked if he might help us. We stammered that we were about to be high school seniors, liked physics, and were there to see if Columbia might be a good place for us. He introduced himself—neither of us caught his name—and offered to show us around.
After a tour of some of the undergraduate labs, which looked unimpressively like ours at Tech, he asked if we would like to go down to the basement to see his lab. Though a little anxious about going down to an abandoned basement with a stopped-over man with a German accent, we screwed up our courage and said, “Sure.”
So he took us down to see his Cyclotron—a Rube Goldberg mass of wires and magnets and cables and pipes and tubes and gauges. Gene and I stood there with our mouths literally hanging open while he told us about how each part worked, what he was studying, and showed us pictures of particle collisions that occurred in the Bubble Chamber. He implied that some of this was Top Secret. We were after all fighting the Cold War and the Atomic Bomb was, we incorrectly thought, invented in New York City—maybe right here. Why else would it have been called the Manhattan Project? (You’re on your own to look up why.)
Gene went to NYU and actually became a physicist; I went to Columbia and, after discovering I was neither a math nor physics genius, majored in comparative literature. And, I should add, that as we were leaving Pupin Hall our guide offered to help us with our applications. He gave us his card. I still have it—I. I. Rabi was his name and he did in fact work on the Manhattan Project (up at MIT) and did win a Noble Prize in 1944 for his work with crystals.
One final thing about the CERN accelerator, a descendent of the kind of Cyclotron I saw back then—as best as anyone can say, in spite of the decades of effort and the billions spent on its construction, the things it will hopefully help us understand about that first trillionth of a second are likely to have no practical value whatsoever.
After they switch it on next summer, it is expected that the subatomic particles that will be accelerating around and around in it at nearly the speed of light, when they smash into each other, they will simulate the primordial energy that existed less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang spawned the universe 14 billion years ago. With a nod to the departed Jerry Falwell, that’s pretty much Creation time. See NY Times story linked below.)
Up to now, using much less powerful particle accelerators, scientists have been able to turn the clock pretty far back toward that Big Bang moment—to millionths of a second. But as far as cosmology is concerned, in small-c creation time that’s already ancient history. To figure out how this earliest energy began to differentiate itself into the forces and particles with which we are already familiar, we have to get to trillionths of seconds after that Bang. For example, we still do not know the composition of the Dark Matter or Dark Energy which together make up 96% of the mass of the universe. So if the CERN machine can help answer those and other questions--is String Theory just a theory or is it verifiable--all the time and money will have been worth it. Right?
Thinking about these possibilities inspired me to recall my own little experience during the early days of Big Science. It was the summer before my senior year at Brooklyn Technical High School, and since I was quite good in both math and physics, I was shopping around for a college to go to that would allow me to major in one or both. Unlike today when parents drive their kids around to a dozen or more colleges for campus visits to see how each “feels” before applying, with a chum, Gene Hecht, I got into the subway and went up to Morningside Heights to visit Columbia. We found Pupin Hall, the location of their at-the-time world-renowned physics department—famous because there were two Noble Prize winners on the faculty.
Gene and I wandered around the empty hallways wondering what we should be looking for. We were that naïve and unprepared! There was in truth nothing to see—no labs to poke our noses into, no one in any of the offices. Feeling lost and a little depressed, we turned to leave when a very tiny man with a thick German accent emerged from what was clearly his office and asked if he might help us. We stammered that we were about to be high school seniors, liked physics, and were there to see if Columbia might be a good place for us. He introduced himself—neither of us caught his name—and offered to show us around.
After a tour of some of the undergraduate labs, which looked unimpressively like ours at Tech, he asked if we would like to go down to the basement to see his lab. Though a little anxious about going down to an abandoned basement with a stopped-over man with a German accent, we screwed up our courage and said, “Sure.”
So he took us down to see his Cyclotron—a Rube Goldberg mass of wires and magnets and cables and pipes and tubes and gauges. Gene and I stood there with our mouths literally hanging open while he told us about how each part worked, what he was studying, and showed us pictures of particle collisions that occurred in the Bubble Chamber. He implied that some of this was Top Secret. We were after all fighting the Cold War and the Atomic Bomb was, we incorrectly thought, invented in New York City—maybe right here. Why else would it have been called the Manhattan Project? (You’re on your own to look up why.)
Gene went to NYU and actually became a physicist; I went to Columbia and, after discovering I was neither a math nor physics genius, majored in comparative literature. And, I should add, that as we were leaving Pupin Hall our guide offered to help us with our applications. He gave us his card. I still have it—I. I. Rabi was his name and he did in fact work on the Manhattan Project (up at MIT) and did win a Noble Prize in 1944 for his work with crystals.
One final thing about the CERN accelerator, a descendent of the kind of Cyclotron I saw back then—as best as anyone can say, in spite of the decades of effort and the billions spent on its construction, the things it will hopefully help us understand about that first trillionth of a second are likely to have no practical value whatsoever.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:23 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home