Des Moines Register
01-29-07
Technological marvel pushes edges of knowledge (and it's a lot cheaper
than war)
BY JOHN HAUPTMAN
More complex than a space-shuttle launch, large enough to encircle all of
Des Moines, a deep underground tunnel is being filled with 10,000
superconducting magnets maintaining a precision of the width of a strand
of hair over a path of 17 miles.
It is called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the highest-energy particle
accelerator ever built. The collective nations of Europe support the highenergy physics laboratory CERN, whose physicists and engineers have
designed and brought to life this amazing scientific and technological
instrument. CERN is the lab used in Dan Brown's "Angles and Demons."
The scientific goal is to bring individual protons, the familiar particles that
fill up the nuclei of atoms, to extremely high energies in counter-rotating
rings and collide them head-on, hoping that in these most energetic
collisions some clues will be found that might explain the universe we now
observe. It is not known what might be found, in spite of theoretical
speculations advanced over the previous 20 years. It is a big gamble - an
$8 billion gamble that the United States folded on 12 years ago when the
Republican Congress cut discretionary spending, leaving the field open for
the Europeans. But it's also a visionary gamble - a multinational investment
in the quest for knowledge, rather than squandering wealth in the pursuit of
war.
European high-technology industries were intimately involved from the
beginning, moving 120,000 tons of precision instruments from all over
Europe to Switzerland. The final 17-mile string of superconducting
magnets is now being cooled to 1.9 K, just above absolute zero, where
they fall into their superconducting state of exactly zero electrical
resistance.
It will be several more months before the first protons are gingerly injected
into the vacuum pipe inside the magnets and allowed to coast a few miles
in a slow arc bent by the sideways force of the magnetic field. Each
magnet itself has been carefully tested at its full electric superconducting
current, and those not good enough rejected.
Its only close but smaller cousin is the Tevatron Collider at the U.S. highenergy physics laboratory outside Chicago called Fermilab, where protons
and anti-protons, the actual anti-matter counterparts to protons, are
brought up to energies one trillion times higher than everyday atomic
energies, and then aimed at each other in head-on collisions. The most
fundamental stuff of our known universe is produced at Fermilab: the six
quarks that make up most of all visible matter, the leptons like the familiar
electron that partner with the quarks, and the presently known force
carriers. All of these particles, presumably, existed only at the beginning of
the universe, and only now have all been re-created at Fermilab.
The particle collider itself is half the story. In parallel, huge detectors
capable of identifying these speculated force carriers are being built and
installed at four interaction points around the ring. The detectors have
been designed, prototyped and built in universities and laboratories around
the world over the past 10 years, including at Iowa State University and
the University of Iowa. The United States has contributed about $300
million to the building of the two larger detectors.
A U.S. business executive once remarked that the best technology transfer
was the van that carried the new physics Ph.D. from the university to
industry, and this includes my student Bryan Lauer, who earned his
doctorate at Iowa State and remarked after his first year at Lucent
Technologies: "I haven't yet had a problem as hard as the problems I
solved at Fermilab."
Such young people are at the edge of knowledge, where they solve
problems not previously even conceived. The World Wide Web was
invented by Timothy Berners-Lee at CERN to solve the problem of how an
LHC physicist in Lubbock, Texas, would communicate with a Dutch
engineer in Switzerland about a 100-ton fixture made in Iran to support iron
wedges from Russia outfitted with sensors from Iowa City, and to be
calibrated by a student from Turkey. But it is more than software and
superconductors. There are new electronics, detectors and instruments
both faster and more accurate than anything before that drive down the
costs of new technologies in medicine, communications, space and energy
research.
Although some object that high-energy physics is a waste of money, the
costs for all of this is equivalent to a few weeks of war in Iraq. I worked with
physicists from the Soviet Union in the mid-70s, when the United States
and Soviet Union were in a nuclear death dance. I have found that
communication, negotiation and working together reveal that people all
over the Earth share the same human values and aspirations.
In centuries past, Europe was drenched in repeated wars, but no longer.
Spending money on international science - on archaeology in Syria and
Iraq, on nuclear fusion for power generation in Japan and France - is
cheaper than war.
JOHN HAUPTMAN is a professor of physics at Iowa State University.