8.21.2006

why i spent my summer vacation


I just read a nice article by Case Western physicist Lawrence Krauss about why the basic science that we do in particle physics is worth doing: Discovery for the Sake of Discovery.

Here's the beginning:

"On a summer day, you can ride your bicycle through the narrow lanes that bisect fields of grass on the outskirts of Geneva with no thought that, dozens of meters below, one of the most complex construction projects in human history is underway. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), just one year from completion at CERN, will be the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed, the largest and most technologically sophisticated machine ever built, and one of the greatest scientific endeavors humanity has yet undertaken.

The late Austrian-American physicist Victor Weisskopf described the grand particle accelerators that began to take shape around the world in the 1950's and 60's as the "Gothic cathedrals of the 20th century." The comparison was, and is, apt. The medieval cathedrals pushed the limits of available technology, involved the craftsmanship of literally thousands of skilled workers, and took generations (and sometimes centuries) to complete. Modern particle accelerators require decades from conception to completion and involve scientists from about 80 countries, speaking dozens of languages, whose separate handiwork must mesh together perfectly on the scale of thousandths of millimeters. The physical magnitude of these distinct public works projects is similarly comparable—just one of the LHC's four detectors is large enough to house the Notre Dame Cathedral."

... read more.

The photo below is the experiment I've been working on, but this time with a person for scale -- in the lower right-hand corner you can see a guy in a blue jumpsuit and white hard hat. The detectors at the LHC are even bigger. I wasn't around the lab when the detector was being rolled into the collision hall (the photo is a stock Fermilab one) but I hope to be at CERN when things start up there!


* Note! This entry was hacked sometime today. Weird. That stuff about "Megaupload! Send your nasty Screencaps to me" was not me. I swear.