[June 30 2005] CERN and the near-term future of particle physics

................ Table of Contents ....................

---> More than you thought you wanted to know about the current state of
Particle Physics:

--------- Descriptions of CERN, and how it birthed the Web
--------- "God Particle" physics
--------- So, what's it good for?
--------- SSC :-( ----> LHC :->
--------- The mountains be formidable, and Mystery yet eludes us

--- Begun Sat, June 18, 2005; London, UK. --------------------

--------- Descriptions of CERN, and how it birthed the Web:

Dear all-  So i'm writing most of this actually in Luton Airport, UK,
about an hour and a half N of London, waiting to check in on my Easyjet flight to Geneva, Switzerland, where i will be visiting the largest and actually i think oldest major int'l particle physics lab in the world, CERN (if we don't count LBNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, because it no longer has a significant active onsite high-energy particle accelerator -- though it's a crucial contributor to most large particle physics experiments worldwide; i mention all this because though I know many of you from my days at Stanford and my work at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), I actually did all my grad work for UC Berkeley).

CERN is "Where the web was born", as their slogan goes.  And which is in fact the case -- CERN being the birthplace of html and the http protocols, and site of the first website in the world, created by Tim Berners-Lee in about 1991 (and SLAC btw is the site of the first website in the Western Hemisphere, within a year after that, as Berners-Lee used it as a test case for transatlantic web communication, setting this up through talking with a particle physicist friend of his from SLAC, Paul Kunz, who was visiting CERN at the time Berners-Lee was developing the initial ideas of the Web; you can find much more detail on all this history if you're interested here:

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml

[ BTW, the acronym CERN stands for "Conseil Europeene pour la Recherche Nucleaire", which is French for the European Council for Nuclear Research, because when CERN was begun in the 50's, all particle physics fell under the rubric of "nuclear" research, and though there is still overlap, these two fields have diverged a fair bit since then]

--------- "God Particle" physics

And why am i going to visit? I'm going because: CERN is where the major new frontier that particle physicists have wanted to cross, and the secrets we've wanted to unlock for some nearly 40 years, ever since the late 60's, are almost guaranteed to finally be yielded up by Nature.  We cannot know for sure what, if anything, of interest or real excitement we will find -- what adventurer ever knows for *sure* what is on the other side of a large ocean that no one has ever navigated before? But from many intersecting shadows, we really expect Nature to yield up some answers to some of the most vexing and immediate questions we can ask: why do particles have mass at all? Why do we not just fly up into the air weightless as photons of light? (and for that matter, why do the various particles have the masses they *do* have..?? -- not clear that we'll soon have answers to this, thought the the CERN project may point us in the direction of some hints..)

In our current limited (but very well-tested, as far as it goes) picture of the world of subatomic particles, called the "Standard Model", or SM, this occurs through a single 'magical' particle, which former Fermilab director Leon Lederman called the "God Particle" in a popular book of his from the early 1990's.  More officially, this is called the Higgs boson which mediates the more general Higgs mechanism, which in a very mathematically wonderful and beautiful way gives mass to all the originally massless particles in the world, and you can think of your own analogies and why Lederman would call it what he did.

But the Higgs mechanism can be realized in many other ways in theories that include but extend beyond the SM, and it is probably more likely than not that we will find *multiple* Higgses, or something else that we haven't even envisioned yet that is giving us mass at all..

Further q's we may find answers to: is there a mirror world just beyond our own that will double the number of known fundamental particles, while at the same time stabilizing some "infinities" that show up all the time in the theory?

And -- will we see finally see really physical evidence for string theory, or extra dimensions..???

---------------- So, what's it good for?

As for what *possible* ultimate benefit to humanity pursuing these questions and doing this research can have, i will give the most fundamental and maybe provocative answer that i ever offer to as a
justification of the work we do: look, i'm not telling you that we're going to build time machines, or warp drives, or transporters in 100 or 200 years as a result of the work that we are doing today -- but i am not telling you we won't, either.  Particle physics, and its intimately related sister physical science, cosmology, *are* in some profound sense the most fundamental physical sciences, trying to figure out at the very basis what the smallest bits of matter are, and the basic rules that govern how our Universe operates, where we came from, and where we're going.  And major paradigm shifts have occurred at regular intervals in the past as a result of inquiry in these sciences: the Copernican revolution, Einsteinian gravity's replacement (in a subsuming sense) of Newtonian gravity, Quantum Physics and all it has heralded in our world (e.g. for two examples, the laser in your CD player and the semiconductors in your computer as you read this would not have been developed without our modern day understanding of quantum mechanics).

------------- SSC :-( ----> LHC :->

I discussed long ago in an earlier piece the issues around an earlier collider that was being built to address the same q's in Texas: the Superconducting SuperCollider, or SSC. the SSC was subsequently cancelled by Congress.  

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN is being built for the same reasons -- the term "hadron" in its name means any particle made of quarks, which protons are (and proving this is what garnered SLAC its first Nobel Prize in the late 60's).  And the LHC will be colliding protons together at the highest energies humans have ever accelerated them together, to "smash them up and see what comes out" -- essentially. :->

Though the LHC is not as "good" as the SSC would've been (its collision energy is a third as much, though its collision rate -- which corresponds roughly to amount of data output from it -- being several times higher than the SSC's would have been compensates for this, to some degree), and though it is about 7 yrs later than initially planned because of the SSC cancellation (which slowed down physics all around the world, because other govts say "heck, if *they're* not willing to pay for this fundamental research that everyone in the end will benefit from, and which seems so esoteric and disconnected from our daily lives at first glance, why should *we*, with all our budgetary and social problems, too???") -- despite all this, the LHC is all we got going on now, at the highest energy
frontier in particle physics.  And its completion and running are what i have waited for in some sense *all of my adult life*, as far as particle physics goes (and the same could be said to some degree of probably all working particle physicists at the current time).

So that's the basic reason i'm going to CERN, to tour this experiment that i'm so profoundly excited will begin running in about a year and a half.  Yes, it could be subject to some delays, and will probably not work right off the bat in the optimal way (colliders always require a certain amount of tuning to get the millions of pieces of machinery to run right and well together, anywhere from a few weeks to months, depending on how well they are designed, how much they push the frontier (each collider is a 'custom' piece, they will never be able to be factory-reproduced), and to some degree -- on the vagaries of Nature, and how kind she is to the accelerator physicists of a given machine.  And to the rest of us in the secrets just beyond our reach.

----------- The mountains be formidable, and Mystery yet eludes us

For several decades, particle physicists have thought they'd just built a machine that would be able to see beyond the incredibly frustrating and high mountain range of the SM, beyond to the Other Side, to answers to some of our current questions -- but Nature has eluded us, and it's been a false highest mountain range in each case.  At machines at CERN, Fermilab (near Chicago), SLAC, DESY (near Hamburg, Germany), KEK (Tsukuba, Japan) and others -- the elusive "Higgs boson" has never been seen.  But now, we really think we're going to see it.  From the shadow evidence i have seen, and the fact that this kind of evidence has led several times in the past to true discoveries (of e.g. most recently, the top quark, neutrino mass, and the bottom and charm quark discoveries), i feel that it's pretty likely, or at least 'more likely than not', that this time, we're going to nab it -- or find whatever out there is playing the role of a single Higgs boson in the SM.

Further -- i also may want to eventually work on the LHC..

Dream big, friends.

Hasta la victoria,

- M

[Oct 22 2006] A gem of a popular cosmology book for kids

This is actually a review of a kids' science book i wrote in Oct on
Amazon, because i liked the book *so* much, and i was happy to get a note
from the publisher this week asking if they could excerpt from my review
and include it in the next edition :> (which i agreed to of course).

Though at this stage of my doings, i'm concentrating on actual research
vs. science education or popularization, the latter *is* extremely
important to me, something i've done a good amount in the past, and care
about spending time and energy on again later at some stage of my life.

So, seeing great examples with a very different paradigm such as this
book, is quite cheering to me that the public *is* very ready and hungry
even, for a different approach to science than has been traditionally
taken by purely mechanistically-minded scientists for a long while..

-M

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 02:38:28 -0700 (PDT)

From: MSSG

Subject: From a cosmologist working in the field: this book is a *gem*

I'll preface this by saying that i'm an experimental cosmologist (working
on weak gravitational lensing to determine galaxy cluster dark matter
profiles) and have also worked in high energy particle physics, so i come
at this book from a particular angle of having a fairly in-depth
background of the subject matter.

Having said this, i want to *strongly applaud* this book, and would like
to point out that of the several reviews given above, most are quite
positive, and the only two highly negative ones are simply *missing the
point* of the book -- it is *not* supposed to give anyone a detailed
explanation of cosmology as we understand it scientifically today. there
are plenty of other books to do that. rather -- this book is supposed to
try to make some sense of what our current picture is in a much more
organic, humane, emotional, spiritual, and yea, *cosmic* sense than most
of the popular or scientific literature of cosmology out there today does.

For those familiar with Carl Sagan's work, and particularly "Cosmos" from
the 1980's -- this is very much done in that vein, and i am pretty sure
Carl would have heartily approved.

As a reader might gather from my words, i do *not* fit into the classical
stereotype of scientist with a mechanistic, rational,
Universe-as-clockwork type view that has been the primary paradigm in
science since Cartesian times, but then, neither did Carl, and neither do
more and more modern scientists. and Carl's manner of conveying science
resonated with the public and inspired them likely more than *any* other
modern physical scientist.

Further, i have thought deeply about the human aspects of science also in
my journey along the scientific path, and it's clear to me that the
paradigm one uses to describe whatever our scientific picture of the
Universe and how it came into being and how it evolved up until today,
at any given time in human history, is critical in how we approach not
only science, but every aspect of our lives, from our interactions with
Nature, to how we treat non-human animals, to our picture of and dealings
with others of our own species. when it comes down to it, how we picture
the non-living aspects of our Universe and its whole history, *matters*, a
lot.

And i love the way that J. Morgan and D. Andersen picture it in this book
(and i also hope to communicate directly with them sometime). i love how
they interpret and explain their understanding of everything from the Big
Bang itself, and what came "before", to the limitations in our current
picture of cosmology, to the specific aspects of BBN (Big Bang
Nucleosynthesis), initial star formation, galaxy evolution, and supernova
processes, leading ultimately to *us*.

No, this is not going to appeal to every scientist out there, nor every
person -- but i would suggest this is from not a lack in the *book*, but
from some measure of the imagination needed in our species and society to
evolve to a more mature species in our wondrous Universe.

Also, the glossary, more detailed cosmic timeline history, book
references, and quotes from working scientists in the back are also quite
appreciated and helpful to point people in good directions for more
in-depth understanding and further reading.

There could be much more said about many of these topics, but let me
simply close by saying that i came across this book while dropping in on a
sustainability conference of a local environmental group in my area, and
the title intrigued me enough to start paging through it. and even after
realizing it was a children's book, the flow of the words and the
wonderful evocative paintings drew me in to continue reading it. and it
is a *rare* book or paper on cosmology - and believe me, i have occasion
to read a good number - that brings tears to my eyes with their beauty and
power to stir the soul, as certain lines in this book did.

In Adventure-
MSSG

(ps. any feedback is welcomed!)

[Mar 4 2006] Ways to popularize HEP (particle physics)..

I wrote this to some Slac folks listing some of the useful sources for HEP
(= high energy physics, generally a synonym for particle physics, and an
acronym that is widely used), and ways it connects with our "everyday
life"..

-M

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:39:38 -0800 (PST)
From: MSSG
To: Luke A. Corwin
Resent-Subject: Re: Outreach opportunity

hi there Luke-

i'm currently down at Caltech, far from Slac, so can't help you in person,
but as for some pointers for you to prepare a presentation, i would say
the following:

- it would be useful for you to read the book The Physics of Star Trek.
i haven't yet, but the author, Lawrence Krauss, is a good communicator
(who spoke btw some months ago at Slac on science and creationism, and how
though *those* are incompatible, science and religion aren't) and i have
heard good things about the book.

- yes, it is possible to build a cloud chamber; i haven't done it, but in
i believe Scientific American (or possibly Physics Today) within the last
few years they had a column on how to do it. actually, a quick websearch
showed plenty of sites on how to do it, here's one:

http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~adf4/cloud.html

i think this is a great idea, as probably nothing is as visceral as this
for showing people that particles are always raining down on us (they have
a large and excellent one at the Exploratorium btw, that's wonderful to
watch in action).

there used to be a coincidence counter in the little visitor center next
to the auditorium, don't know if it's still there; that's useful too, but
a cloud chamber is i think the best, for the visual effect.

oh, maybe downloading simulations of collisions also -- there are some
really nice ones on the LHC webpages at CERN, probably the coolest and
most well done ones i've seen. pretty easy to find in searches..

- might be worth reading this article, about how our world would be dif.
if the 18 params of the SM were dif. from what they are (very
hypothetical, but it gives some feeling for how these params affect our
lives), by Bob Cahn:

http://www.hep.yorku.ca/menary/misc/eighteen_parameters_of_sm.ps

- you could also review some of the medical technologies that came out of
particle physics (PET and MRI scans, beam therapies for cancer etc.), and
the history of the development of the Web, and how SLAC was the first
website in the Western Hemisphere, and note all of this to the students,
who all of course use the web daily likely, and who've also probably known
someone with cancer already..

anyway, hope these are some helpful tips for you..?

cheers,
-M