Cross the Streams with Collider!
It’s Black Friday, the annual tradition where families of vampires awake before dawn and then shuffle in zombie-like shambling hoards through the parking lots to the gates of hell. Or at least Macy’s. Hey, that actually sounds like fun when put like that!
But this holiday season, I’d like to recommend one gift that doesn’t involve a 45 minute wait at Denny’s: Paul Halpern’s book Collider! (Check out Paul’s excellent blog as well). With the Large Hadron Collider starting up again this week, this is a perfect time to gift someone the story surrounding the exciting search for the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. With Collider, Paul tells a tale with a colorful cast of characters who are sometimes engaged in intense rivalries. Set against the backdrop of two world wars and a pretty big cold one, these seemingly obsessed scientists and engineers create high-powered hardware so potent, some people fear that it might break the world. Is it too late to buy an extended warranty for the Earth?
The Large Hadron Collider, set to make some major discoveries about the basic building blocks of matter, is the gleaming culmination of almost 100 years of particle collider experiments. Eighty years before the $4.5 billion, 27-kilometer long high powered collider is set to find the exotic and elusive Higgs Boson, an obscure Norwegian engineer by the name of Rolf Wideröe began the collider era with an unassuming prototype just one meter long. He accelerated sodium and potassium ions into a stationary target, and used photographic plates to record the resulting particle explosions.
Wideröe’s working model inspired a team led by atomic heavyweight Ernest Rutherford in England, who previously discovered the atomic nucleus, which led to his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Rutherford was known for his relentless drive, booming voice, and red-faced temper tantrums. Collider does a wonderful job illustrating Rutherford’s abrasive style and his ability to produce results through a combination of recruiting top physics students and his own insights into atomic theory. Under Rutherford’s direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton eventually morphed the Wideröe model into the world’s first “atom smasher”, which split the Lithium atom in 1932.
Much like the cascade of subatomic particles that colliders create, Paul guides us through the cascade of scientific personalities who would later become giants of physics through the study of the very small. Ernest Lawrence anchored the American entry into atom smasher business, developing the circular cyclotron accelerator, which earned him the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics. Lawrence then spearheaded war-time nuclear research in his famous Radiation Lab at Berkeley.
Lawrence begat physicist Robert Wilson, if you can consider firing Wilson twice from his laboratory “begatting.” Undeterred, Wilson would become one of the most famous physicists in the world by heading up the creation of the then-colossal 4 mile-long collider later named Fermilab. In addition to bringing it under budget and on time (could it be the last government project to do that?), Wilson personally designed Fermilab’s futuristic buildings to be in harmony with its natural surroundings in the rural fields of Illinois. This included dirt floors in some of the laboratory buildings, and grazing bison on the grounds to remind everyone of the pioneering work that they were doing there.
Accelerators evolved to higher energies, probing ever deeper into the subatomic abyss, like the California’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1962. Collider illuminates how these historical foundations formed the two large forces in nuclear accelerators: the American labs on one side of the Atlantic and the European consortium CERN on the other. The Texas-based Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled in 1993 due to skyrocketing budgets, which at three times the power of the LHC, could have found the Higgs Boson over ten years ago. This led the way for CERN to build the cheaper but nonetheless impressive LHC in an already existing tunnel. With this, Paul brings us back again full circle to the present day wonder of modern science that is the LHC, humming deep under the green hills and quaint villages of France and Switzerland.
From http://qrczaq.blogspot.com/
Collider explains in easy to understand language about the accusations and concerns among some that the LHC’s power will create some bizarre unforseen catastrophe – from creating microscopic black holes which would swallow the earth, to the creation of giant magnetic monopoles that would give us all a permanent orange afro. From the books’ introduction,
One team of activists, led by former nuclear safety official Walter Wagner, has gone so far as to sue to LHC, pressing for a halt to its operations. In response to public concerns about the LHC’s purported dangers, researchers working on the project have issued detailed analyses of potential threats to the planet, demonstrating how none of these are worth fretting about.
I have exclusive videotape of those tests:
Paul does a great job of explaining why the LHC won’t destroy us all using easy to understand terms without dumbing down the physics behind it. It’s so much more in depth than we’re used to getting from a 60 second TV news report or even a short newspaper article. I usually don’t give away the ending to books, but maybe I’ll make an exception here: we’re all going to be OK!
And that’s an overall trait that I really enjoyed about Collider. Paul does not shy away from explaining the physics driving the quest for these tiny particles in a very easy to understand language and metaphors that makes popular science books great. During the journey, you’ll learn tons about atomic and subatomic physics, cosmology, the four fundamental forces of nature, quantum mechanics, string theory, multiple dimensions, dark energy and so much more. By the end of the book, you’ll know your MACHOs from your WIMPs.
Collider is a great resource that not only gives you the details about the LHC and what its looking for firsthand from a physicist, but the necessary history and human motivations to appreciate it even more. The LHC has captured the imagination of the public in a way the other gigantic science project of the times hasn’t, the International Space Station. The LHC has resurrected the images of giant Tesla coils, Jacob’s Ladders, Van de Graaf generators and wild-eyed scientists from the yellowed celluloid of science fiction films, and placed them at the heart of our imaginations as something new and mysterious. Collider is your gateway to the New Mad Science.
