[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