Beyond the God Particle Read Free Page B

twentieth century, and many of the greatest European scientists had to leave, including Einstein, Fermi, Emmy Noether, and many others.
    By the end of the Second World War, European science had lost its leadership role held for the three and half centuries since Galileo to the United States of America. However, a small group of the leading European scientists, including most notably Niels Bohr of Denmark and Louis de Broglie of France, envisioned creating a new center for physics in Europe. Such a laboratory would stimulate European scientific research but would also permit sharing the increasing cost burdens of the large-scale facilities required for nuclear and particle physics.
French physicist Louis de Broglie (one of the founding fathers of the quantum theory) put the first official proposal for the creation of a European laboratory forward at the European Cultural Conference in Lausanne in December 1949. A further push came at the fifth UNESCO General Conference, held in Florence in June 1950, where the American Nobel laureate physicist, Isidor Rabi, tabled a resolution authorizing UNESCO to “assist and encourage the formation of regional research laboratories in order to increase international scientific collaboration…” In 1952, 11 countries signed an agreement establishing a provisional Council—the acronym “CERN” was born and Geneva was chosen as the site of the future Laboratory. The CERN Convention, established in July 1953, was gradually ratified by the 12 founding Member States: Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. On 29 September 1954, following ratification by France and Germany, CERN officially came into being. 5
    In 1957 CERN built its first particle accelerator, a comparatively low-energy machine that provided particle beams for CERN's first experiments. It evolved into a machine that was used for research in nuclear physics, astrophysics, and medical physics, and was finally closed in 1990, after 33years of service. The original synchrotron had given way to a more powerful “Proton Synchrotron” (PS) by late 1959, which still operates today.
    Conventional particle physics experiments are identical in configuration to those of a biologist's microscope—a point we'll be harping on throughout this book. Think of a microscope in a typical high school biology lab. Here you have an incoming light source (the particle beam) colliding with some material that you've placed on a glass slide, perhaps containing a drop of pond water (the target), in which there might be a paramecium or an amoeba swimming around (the “quarks” you want to see). The incoming light scatters off the target and is collected in an optical system with lenses that magnify the image and present it to your eyeball (the detector). In this way you can see the little microbes swimming around in their drop (data!). So, in summary we have (1) a particle beam; (2) a target; and (3) a detector that collects (4) data. That's it—very simple indeed—these powerful accelerators and their detectors are microscopes.
    There's one key point, however, about particle physics that you must grasp: the smaller the thing you want to see in the target, the higher the energy you must impart to your beam particles. The reasons for this will be explained later, but it is our basic operating principle. This is also true for microscopes, and it's why electron microscopes, which use higher-energy beams of electrons instead of low-energy beams of visible light, “photons” are better than optical microscopes. This is actually where microscopes really do become particle accelerators—it's more than just a powerful metaphor because it's really true, and all the issues and challenges of building powerful microscopes hold as well for particle accelerators, and vice versa.
    In the usual way of doing their particle collision business,