Beyond the God Particle Read Free Page A

discoveries and exploration of the ultimate frontiers—and the burgeoning future economies this will bring—happen in Europe, China, India, and elsewhere? With the discovery of new phenomena, such as the Higgs boson at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will indeed come direct and indirect applications that can resuscitate moribund economies. But is this is now less likely to happen in America?
    Fortunately, at least for American scientists, the US does significantly participate in the big experiment collaborations that do their physics at the LHC, and the US significantly contributes technology and manpower to build it. Particle physics has grown up to become a truly international activity, and no large particle accelerator will likely ever be built again without full international collaboration. Even the use of the Fermilab Tevatron, which was the leading particle accelerator for two decades prior to the LHC, was an international collaborative effort, and Fermilab, like CERN, flies the colorful flags of its collaborators’ nations in front of the main building.
    But there's no place like home, and not having such a large-scale project on American soil makes the economic gain diffuse and less powerful in the long run. Schoolchildren in the Chicago area can now only visit a museum showcasing a past great particle accelerator at Fermilab—not an operating facility collecting never-before-seen data about the inner universe of matter.

    Yet, as regards the future of Fermilab and the US particle physics program, we're eternally hopeful. We'll discuss what we could and should plan to do to change this and move forward. There is a pathway back for American science, but we'll certainly have to refresh our American aspiration for greatness and find our old our “get up and go” that seems to have “got up and went.”
    LONG LIVE THE KING
    The LHC is operating superbly today. It is a particle accelerator that hurls protons at enormous energies head-on into one another, at the highest energies ever achieved by humans. Within every trillion collisions of the protons at the LHC there emerges a mysterious new form of matter—shards of matter that exist for only a billionth of a trillionth of a second—yet enough time to be recorded in the two great eyeballs of the LHC, the particle detectors known as ATLAS and CMS. The market value of this form of matter cannot be assessed—it's meaningless—its value is determined by the cost of the entire project of the LHC and, per ounce, it is literally trillions of trillions of trillions times greater than that of gold.
    With the demise of the SSC, the US walked off the playing field of the highest energy particle accelerators. The US has essentially outsourced this, perhaps the most important science, to someone else. And that “someone else” is CERN, and the Europeans know what they are doing and they are doing it well.
    So, what is this place called CERN?
    Western science began in Europe. It began with the ancient Greeks, but the modern era traces to Galileo, who divined the law of inertia by studying balls moving on inclined planes. Newton encoded this into his laws of nature and discovered that gravitation is a universal force that permeates the universe, holds the earth in its orbit about the sun, and controls the fall of an apple in a garden.
    This was the birth of the Age of Enlightenment. It ultimately led to the summation of the laws of electricity and light by Faraday and Maxwell, to Max Planck and Albert Einstein and the twentieth century leap forward with the discovery of the quantum behavior of all small things. Countless phenomena that were opaque and mysterious could now be attacked scientifically.The atom, the chemical bond, and the chemical basis of life as well as the properties of materials and properties of the elementary building blocks of all matter could now be understood. But the political climate in Europe shifted toward horror, with the rise of fascism in the