On his book The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider
Cover Interview of May 12, 2009
In a nutshell
In the fall of 2008, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, began operations for the first time. Circulating beams of protons under the Swiss and French countryside, the accelerator generated worldwide excitement. A disappointing technical malfunction delayed collisions, but scientists expect to turn the machine back on in October.
It is only a couple of times in a lifetime that a new particle accelerator is launched that can explore an entirely different energy frontier. The Fermilab Tevatron was in 1983 – a quarter century ago. It is expected that the new LHC will dominate the research landscape for the next decade or two.
The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider tells the story of this magnificent scientific instrument.
The book’s first chapter is about what we already know, the context for the exciting measurements we expect.
The second chapter reminds that we don’t actually know what the LHC will discover; this is truly terra incognita. However, I do discuss three of the interesting questions the LHC was built to investigate: (1) the elusive Higgs boson, sometimes called the God Particle; (2) supersymmetry, which predicts many new particles and would shed light on a few unanswered questions; and (3) the intriguing possibility that the smallest particles of which we are aware are themselves composed of even smaller particles. (These “smallest” particles are quarks and leptons—current theory treats both as containing nothing within them. The most familiar lepton is the electron; quarks are found inside the familiar proton and neutron.)
The third chapter is about how particle accelerators work and about many of the amazing features of the LHC—including the temperature of the magnets (colder than space itself) and the vacuum in the accelerator (ten times better than the surface of the moon).
Chapter four is about how particle detectors work, and describes the four major detectors arrayed around the LHC’s ring. Two of these detectors include in excess of a hundred million distinct pieces each.
The fifth chapter takes a broader view. Staring deep into the cosmos, astronomers have found that fully 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is of totally unknown kinds. What might the LHC say about these mysteries?
There are other accelerators under consideration and upgrades of older ones. In addition, not all mysteries are found in a particle collider environment. Yet it is deeply intriguing that an accelerator here on Earth can perhaps answer mysteries that span the universe. The Quantum Frontier closes with a discussion of some of the broader issues that contemporary scientists are trying to tackle. It’s a heady time for physics enthusiasts; a paradigm-changing discovery could be just around the corner.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
In the fall of 2008, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, began operations for the first time. Circulating beams of protons under the Swiss and French countryside, the accelerator generated worldwide excitement. A disappointing technical malfunction delayed collisions, but scientists expect to turn the machine back on in October.
It is only a couple of times in a lifetime that a new particle accelerator is launched that can explore an entirely different energy frontier. The Fermilab Tevatron was in 1983 – a quarter century ago. It is expected that the new LHC will dominate the research landscape for the next decade or two.
The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider tells the story of this magnificent scientific instrument.
The book’s first chapter is about what we already know, the context for the exciting measurements we expect.
The second chapter reminds that we don’t actually know what the LHC will discover; this is truly terra incognita. However, I do discuss three of the interesting questions the LHC was built to investigate: (1) the elusive Higgs boson, sometimes called the God Particle; (2) supersymmetry, which predicts many new particles and would shed light on a few unanswered questions; and (3) the intriguing possibility that the smallest particles of which we are aware are themselves composed of even smaller particles. (These “smallest” particles are quarks and leptons—current theory treats both as containing nothing within them. The most familiar lepton is the electron; quarks are found inside the familiar proton and neutron.)
The third chapter is about how particle accelerators work and about many of the amazing features of the LHC—including the temperature of the magnets (colder than space itself) and the vacuum in the accelerator (ten times better than the surface of the moon).
Chapter four is about how particle detectors work, and describes the four major detectors arrayed around the LHC’s ring. Two of these detectors include in excess of a hundred million distinct pieces each.
The fifth chapter takes a broader view. Staring deep into the cosmos, astronomers have found that fully 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is of totally unknown kinds. What might the LHC say about these mysteries?
There are other accelerators under consideration and upgrades of older ones. In addition, not all mysteries are found in a particle collider environment. Yet it is deeply intriguing that an accelerator here on Earth can perhaps answer mysteries that span the universe. The Quantum Frontier closes with a discussion of some of the broader issues that contemporary scientists are trying to tackle. It’s a heady time for physics enthusiasts; a paradigm-changing discovery could be just around the corner.