This past Friday, on “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday”, a half-hour of the two-hour program was devoted to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Higgs particle [SciFriLHC]. The guests were luminaries of the hadron and future collider world – the spokesman of the CDF collaboration at Fermilab (Konigsberg), the leader of the International Linear Collider’s (ILC) Global Design Effort (Barish), and the outreach coordinator for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN. As I listened to this, a few things struck me as worrying about the conversation that was taking place. In fact, it was my father who encouraged me to listen to this program. He and my mother had done so on Friday, and expressed their own concern at the way the science was communicated.
First, the topic of the conversation was meant to focus on the LHC. This is a hallmark year for this magnificent machine, marking the year in which the collider will see “first beam” and the detectors will receive their official shakedown. This year is the culmination of a 15-year planning, design, and construction effort. It has (and will continue to) involved thousands of physicists, engineers, construction workers, and students from across the globe. They have penetrated lakes buried deep in the Earth, excavated cavernous halls of rock deep beneath the rolling hills of the French and Swiss countrysides, and erected tremendous living sculptures of metal, silicon, liquid and gas.
Why this undertaking? The universe is a masterful and complex structure, whose great variety appears to have resulted from a handful of mathematical principals. These principals have been revealed over many centuries by careful consideration of nature, direct experimentation both in the lab and in the world around us, and extensive debate and refinement of observations. This scientific process has yielded the single greatest achievement in our understanding of the universe, the modestly named “Standard Model”. However, the Standard Model fails to predict many observations of the natural world – gravity, the accelerating expansion of the universe, the fact that 85% of the matter in the universe is not the familiar protons, neutrons, and electrons, the fact that neutrinos have mass – and one of its own predictions, the origin of the mass of all fundamental building blocks, has not been verified.
Enter the era of modern collider physics. The Tevatron at Fermilab is the highest-energy collider on the planet, capable of probing the universe as it would have existed less than a billionth of a second after its creation. Such extreme conditions are the only way to address the shortcomings of the Standard Model, for by going back to a time before that theory was applicable we hope to discover the overarching guiding principals of the universe. The flavor factories at SLAC and KEK in Japan indirectly probe these scales, searching out misbehavior in the activities of the fundamental building blocks that could point the way to the greater laws of physics. This year, we begin the adventure of the LHC, going even higher in energy than the Tevatron. The first breath of the cosmos will be even closer to our grasp, a chance to perhaps finally discover conclusive evidence of a theory of nature greater and more comprehensive than the Standard Model. While the LHC can smash open the gates and lead us into a citadel of new physics, we believe that a complementary machine, the ILC, is eventually needed to map out the intricate labyrinth of that supertheory of nature.
Given how compelling this all is, given how critical to the very essence of the human spirit this journey back in time has become, I was dismayed at the Science Friday program. When Joe Palca, the hose, turned to Dr. Konigsberg and asked him about what the LHC will offer that the Tevatron cannot, Dr. Konigsberg turned the question around in a political manner and answered a different one: what can the Tevatron offer that the LHC does not? His answer was “data”, and he cautioned that to really get the ball rolling it would be years of hard work at the LHC. I’m not of the belief that the LHC is the only game in town when it comes to new physics; however, I was shocked that in this forum, a chance to really excite the public about the epic journey to understanding the cosmos, a colleague turned the question around so that he could talk up his own experiment. There are better ways to do that. Why not answer the question while also speaking well of the present and the future? “The Tevatron is currently the most powerful particle collider in the world, eagerly hunting the energy frontier for a sign of new physics. The LHC expands the frontier, taking us to energies and piles of amazing data beyond anything we’ve ever had available.” That communicates the same things – CDF has data, the LHC isn’t running yet – while being positive both about the current program and the future progam.
The first caller was the real turning point for this conversation, though (not a good sign). The caller asked how all of this was useful, basically asking for applications. The guests gave the usual talking points about spinoffs and training students, which are fine and well. However, I think this was chance to start with the fact that basic science is exciting – that sometimes, to make great leaps in human thought and human understanding, you have to do things without obvious tangible benefit. Asking questions about the nature of space and time, the age and composition of the universe, and the character of its origin, are some of the things that define our essential humanity. Physics is a means of realizing answers to the curious human spirit, a way of having congress with the universe in order to better understand both it and ourselves. Naturally, asking challenging questions never before answered will have pretty fabulous technological spinoffs. The last few generations of particle physics quests led to particle accelerators for medical treatment (10,000 cancer patients a day are treated with particle beam therapies), the world wide web, massive distributed computing systems, and the idea of “public preprints”, a place where papers can be made public prior to publication. Given all that medical technology, the information age ushered in by the web, and the effects an open exchange of advanced information have done for us, what wonders will emerge from pushing harder against the frontier of human thought?
Overall, I was disappointed by the dialogue on Science Friday. This was a real chance, one that won’t probably happen again this year, to get the public radio listeners excited about this great quest for the origin of mass, the nature of the cosmos. Getting stuck on “whose got data now?” and “cancer and the web” don’t help to get a new generation of the public deeply excited in the thrill of fundamental science at the frontier of human understanding.
.. [SciFriLHC] “http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Jan/hour2_012607.html”:http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Jan/hour2_012607.html
