Europe overtakes US in physics, pushes search for ‘God particle’

From the BusinessMirror:  Europe overtakes US in physics, pushes search for ‘God particle’ 

THE nations of Europe, home to Galileo and Newton, are poised to reclaim the lead in physics from the US, as scientists around the world flock to Geneva in search of the so-called God particle.

More than 10,000 scientists are working at the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer circumference particle accelerator buried beneath France and Switzerland, in search of the Higgs boson—a subatomic particle believed to create mass and hold together the universe. Discovery of the particle—if it exists—may be announced this year.

While the US has contributed $531 million to the $10.5-billion project and supplied 1,708 researchers, it doesn’t participate in running it and can’t fully share in commercial technologies from it.

The US, which canceled funding for its own accelerator in 1993, risks ceding the lead in science to Europe, even with its economic woes, because the US is no longer investing in large projects like the collider, said Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York.

“Being at the top is not a forever thing, and too many people took that for granted,” Tyson said in an interview. “We will fade.”

Since the 1930s, when Albert Einstein led a flood of scientists fleeing Europe, the US has been a dominant power in physics. American physicists developed the atomic bomb, discovered the quark and built the space shuttle. US discoveries in physics led to the transistor, microchips and the modern computer industry.

‘Can-do attitude’

THE US is now losing the will to push scientific boundaries, said Pushpa Bhat, an American physicist working at the hadron collider.

“The US is giving up its leadership and we’re giving it up too easily,” she said. “We put a man on the moon. We had a can-do attitude. Now we’re settling for second best, and that’s not very American.”

Last year the US Energy Department shut down the Tevatron, a 4-mile accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that had been the US’s most powerful collider.

With the Tevatron’s demise, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has become the world’s center for cutting-edge research in high-energy physics, the discipline devoted to exploring questions about the fundamental nature of the universe. CERN, founded in 1954, is a consortium of 20 European nations that built the hadron collider. The US shares observer status with countries including Turkey, Israel and India.

Public investment

A LACK of public investment in science threatens US competitiveness internationally, according to “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” a report by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine published in 2005 and updated in 2010. Its authors include Richard Levin, president of Yale University, and Lee Raymond, former chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Corp.

Math and science education in US public schools lags behind other industrialized nations, and the US ranks 27th among developed nations in the percentage of college students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering degrees, according to the report.

Federal funding for research and development as a fraction of the US gross domestic product (GDP) has declined 58 percent from 1967 to 2007, according to the National Science Foundation.

Espresso, pastry

AT CERN’s headquarters, between Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, scientists work in a complex that resembles a college campus. In the cafeteria, physicists sip espresso and eat pastries, chattering in French, German, Spanish and English. On the wall, digital screens post updates on the progress of the massive machine 100 meters beneath them.

Accelerators, called “atom smashers,” collide tiny particles at high speeds. At the Large Hadron Collider, billions of protons from hydrogen atoms are hurled together at almost the speed of light to recreate conditions that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang.

The particles are directed by thousands of magnets that are cooled to minus 271 degrees Celsius, or almost absolute zero, with liquid helium. The particles whip around the accelerator, making 11,245 circuits and generating 600 million collisions a second. Those collisions are monitored by the teams of scientists using detectors that weigh as much as 12,500 metric tons and cost about half a billion dollars. Sophisticated computer algorithms sift and analyze the data.

God particle

THE hope of many scientists at CERN is they will discover the Higgs boson, a particle first theorized in the 1960s by Peter Higgs and other physicists.

The Higgs, nicknamed the “God particle” by US physicist Leon Lederman because of its significance and elusiveness, is thought to generate mass, allowing matter to stick together and form the atoms that make up stars, planets and life. Its discovery would help validate the Standard Model, which has been used to explain the building blocks of the universe.

“If we discover the Higgs, that’s arguably one of the biggest discoveries in half a century in our field and one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time,” said Joe Incandela, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who heads one of the main experiments at CERN. “We’re basically finding why there is structure, why mass exists, why life can happen.”

Because the Large Hadron Collider is in Europe, US business has less opportunity to benefit from new technologies developed there.

CERN contracts

ONLY companies in CERN’s 20 European member states are eligible to bid on CERN contracts. CERN also licenses new technologies to industry and while they aren’t limited to Europe, “primarily European companies benefit,” said Giovanni Anelli, the head of CERN’s knowledge-transfer group.

Among the innovations derived from the hadron collider are scintillating crystals, first used in particle detectors and now part of next-generation medical-diagnostic equipment in France; oncological hadron therapy, used to treat cancerous tumors in Italy; and grid computing, designed to process the huge amounts of data produced by the LHC, and now used by a UK company to model computer data for the pharmaceutical industry.

If the Higgs exists, it should have been discovered more than a decade ago in Texas, said Chris Quigg, an American theoretical physicist who was involved in the design of the proposed US accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider. A machine 54 miles long, it would have been three times as powerful as the collider at CERN, Quigg said.

“We could have done it, and we didn’t do it,” said Quigg, who works at Fermilab.

Accelerator scrapped

CONGRESS canceled the $11-billion project in 1993 after years of planning and $2 billion spent in underground construction near Waxahachie, Texas, with members citing its high cost, uncertain benefits and annual budget overruns.

CERN was able to secure funding for the Large Hadron Collider because the US scrapped the Texas project, making the European device the only collider capable of discovering the Higgs, said Chris Llewellyn Smith, an Oxford University physicist who was director general of CERN from 1994 to 1998.

The cancellation “played into CERN’s hands,” Smith said. “People were proud that CERN had taken the lead away from the Americans in this field.”

The Texas collider was an obvious target for Congressional budget cutters, said Jim Slattery, a former Democratic representative from Kansas who said he voted against the project partly because the estimated cost kept climbing.

‘Textbook lesson’

“IT was almost a textbook lesson in how you could lose a project,” said Slattery, now a lobbyist in Washington. “The Congress loses confidence in the numbers crunchers’ ability to project a cost. They feel like they’re being hoodwinked.”

Slattery said the US will still see the scientific advances that come out of the hadron accelerator and he has no regrets about voting to kill the Texas collider.

“The interesting thing is how will this affect anyone’s lives as we go forward,” he said. “In 15 years, 20 years, it may look like it was a terrible choice. Right now, I’m not convinced it was.”

The US is unlikely to host any device that succeeds the hadron collider, because it won’t make a large commitment to a project that it can’t control, said Barry Barish, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology who is helping to plan the next-generation machine.

Historically, the US hasn’t collaborated with other nations on science projects because it hasn’t needed to, he said.

Nationalistic outlook

“THE US is very nationalistic in its outlook and it takes some realization that to do big things you have to partner in ways where you are not the dominant force,” Barish said. “We’re not there yet.”

As CERN’s hadron collider becomes the premiere facility for particle physics, young European scientists are choosing to pursue careers at home rather than work at US universities.

David Lopez Mateos, 29, is a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University who received his undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. at Caltech. The native of Salamanca, Spain, said he would prefer to work at a Swiss university when he finds a permanent job.

“For young people, it’s very advantageous to be near the machine,” Lopez said.

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist who helped create the Standard Model that predicted the Higgs Boson, said US society loses something important when it is no longer pushing the frontiers of science.

“I would feel just as badly as if there were no poets writing in America,” Weinberg says.

 

 

CERN to give update on search for 'God-particle'

From the Express Tribune:  CERN to give update on search for 'God-particle'

 

The ATLAS detector. PHOTO: CERN

PARIS: The European Organisation for Nuclear Research said Friday it may announce next month whether tests with its atom-smasher have found the elusive “God particle”.
Known formally as the Higgs boson, the particle is the theoretical missing link in the standard model of physics and is believed to be what gives objects mass, though scientists have never been able to pin it down.
The organisation, known as CERN, saids that at a July 4 Geneva conference it will “deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson” it is carrying out with its atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider.
The theory behind the so-called God particle is that mass does not derive from particles themselves but instead comes from a boson that interacts strongly with some particles but less, if at all, with others.
“In December we said that there were hints in the data that there may be something there (but) not strong enough to say it’s a discovery or not,” CERN spokesman James Gillies told AFP by telephone.
“On July 4 we will be able to say whether either there is nothing in the data this year; or there are still hints in the data, but not strong enough for us to be able to say that it is a discovery; and possibly a discovery,” he said. “Either of those three things is possible.”
The seminar will precede a major physics conference in Melbourne, Australia, where progress in the search for the Higgs boson will be reported.
The Large Hadron Collider, sometimes called the world’s largest machine, is located in a 27-kilometre (17-mile) ring-shaped tunnel near Geneva that straddles the Franco-Swiss border up to 175 metres (580 feet) below ground.
It fires streams of protons in opposite, but parallel, directions in the tunnel. The beams are then bent by powerful magnets so that some of the protons collide in four giant labs, which are lined with detectors to record the sub-atomic debris that results.
Data-taking for the Melbourne conference concluded on Monday, CERN’s director for accelerators and technology, Steve Myers, said in a statement.
“I’m very much looking forward to seeing what the data reveals.”
The agency’s research and computing director, Sergio Bertolucci, added there was now twice as much data as last year.
“That should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in 2011 data are still there, or whether they’ve gone away. It is a very exciting time.”
If and when a new particle is discovered, scientists will need time to ascertain that it is indeed the Higgs boson, or some other, unknown particle.

Taylor Wilson, Teenage Nuclear Physicist. [Somewhat O.T.]

From E-Cat World:  Taylor Wilson, Teenage Nuclear Physicist. [Somewhat O.T.]

Nevada teen Taylor Wilson is quite a remarkable young man who has grown up with a self-described obsession with radioactivity. At the age of fourteen he built a working fusion reactor in his parents’ garage, and now is working on building portable radioactive isotopes that can be used for medical diagnosis in hospitals.
In a recent blog he wrote at CNN, Wilson says:

One of these technologies, nuclear fusion, is perhaps the disruptive technology that we are in desperate need of. We don’t have the energy source that the human race will need to survive centuries into the future. We are polluting our planet with fossil fuels and even without this eventuality, the simple fact of the matter is we won’t have fossil fuels forever. In fact, we won’t even have uranium to run commercial nuclear power plants for all that long either. Even if we did, the problems with accidents and spent nuclear fuel are still a major concern with these plants.
Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is potentially more powerful than our fission-based power stations but depending on the fuel cycle, produces very little to no residual radiation or radioactive waste. It is also universally abundant. The fuels, whether they be hydrogen, heavy-hydrogen, lithium or boron, are found all around us.

It’s always interesting to me when I learn about people who have a skill or interest that they develop from very early years. Sometimes people know from childhood what they want to devote their lives to. I don’t know if Taylor has studied anything connected with LENR/cold fusion, but I would hope that at some point he might get interested and apply his considerable powers of creativity and determination to see whether he can help make strides in this emerging field. A couple of interesting videos are posted below — the first a TED talk about building his fusion reactor, and the second a feature on his work with medical devices.

 

The Nuclear Cult

From CounterPunch: The Nuclear Cult

by KARL GROSSMAN

Nuclear scientists and engineers embrace nuclear power like a religion. The term “nuclear priesthood” was coined by Dr. Alvin Weinberg, long director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the laboratory’s website proudly notes this.  It’s not unusual for scientists at Oak Ridge and other U.S. national nuclear laboratories to refer to themselves as “nukies.” The Oak Ridge website describes Weinberg as a “prophet” of “nuclear energy.”
This religious, cultish element is integral to a report done for the U.S. Department of Energy in 1984 by Battelle Memorial Institute about how the location of nuclear waste sites can be communicated over the ages. An “atomic priesthood,” it recommends, could impart the locations in a “legend-and-ritual…retold year-by-year.” Titled “Communications Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia,” the taxpayer-funded report says: “Membership in this ‘priesthood’ would be self-selective over time.”
Currently, Allison Macfarlane, nominated to be the new head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says she is an “agnostic” on nuclear power—as if support or opposition to atomic energy falls on a religious spectrum.  Meanwhile, Gregory Jaczko, the outgoing NRC chairman, with a Ph.D. in physics, was politically crucified because he repeatedly raised safety concerns, thus not revering nuclear power enough.
Years ago, while I was working on a book about toxic chemicals, the publisher asked that I find someone who worked for a chemical company and get his or her rationale. I found someone who had been at American Cyanamid, the pesticide manufacturer, who said he worked there to better support his growing family financially.
But when it comes to nuclear power, it’s more than that—it’s a religious adherence. Why?  Does it have to do with nuclear scientists and engineers being in such close proximity to  power, literally?  Is it about the process through which they are trained—in the U.S., many in the nuclear navy and/or in the insular culture of the
government’s national nuclear laboratories? These laboratories, originally under the Atomic Energy Commission and now the Department of Energy and managed by corporations, universities and scientific entities including Battelle Memorial Institute, grew out of the World War II Manhattan Project crash program to build atomic bombs. After the war, the laboratories expanded to pursue the development of all things nuclear. And is it about nuclear physics programs at universities serving as echo chambers?
Whatever the causes, the outcome is nuclear worship.
And this is despite the Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi catastrophes. It’s despite the radioactive messes exposed at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility and at Los Alamos and other national nuclear laboratories most of which have been declared high-pollution Superfund sites where cancer on-site and in adjoining areas is widespread. It’s despite the  continuing threat of nuclear war and the horrific loss of life it would bring and nuclear proliferation spreading the potential for atomic weapons globally. Still, they press on with religious fervor.
“Most of them are not educated about radiation biology or genetics, so they are fundamentally ignorant,” says Dr. Helen Caldicott, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility whose books include Nuclear Madness. “They are ‘brought up’ in an environment where they are conditioned to support the concept of all things nuclear.” Further, “nuclear power evokes enormous forces of the universe, and as Henry Kissinger said, ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” And “they practice denial because I think many of them in their heart really know that what they are doing is evil but they will defend it assiduously, unless they themselves or their child is diagnosed with cancer. Then many of them recant.”
Linking the “nuclear priesthood” to the Manhattan Project is Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The scientists involved weren’t really sure what they were unleashing, and had to have a certain amount of faith that it would work and it would not destroy the world in the process. After they saw the destructive power of the bomb, they were both proud and horrified at what they had done, and believed they had to use this technology for ‘good.’ Thus nuclear power was born,” says Mariotte. “The problem is when you have this messianic vision that you are creating good out of evil, it is very difficult to turn around and realize that the ‘good’ you have created is, in fact, also evil.”
Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, says ever since the first test of an atomic device, “the diabolically-named ‘Trinity’ atomic blast, when Manhattan Project scientists placed bets on whether or not it would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s been clear something pathological afflicts many in the ‘nuclear priesthood.’ Perhaps it’s a form of ‘Faustian fission’—splitting the atom gave the U.S. superpower status with the Bomb and then over a 100 commercial atomic reactors, so the ‘downsides’ have been entirely downplayed to the point of downright denial. Perhaps the power, prestige and greed swirling around the ‘nuclear enterprise’ explains why so many in industry, government, the military, and even apologists in academia and mainstream media, engage in Orwellian ‘Nukespeak’ and monumental cover ups….The ‘cult of the atom’ has caused untold numbers of deaths and disease downstream, downwind, up the food chain, and down the generations from ‘our friend the atom’ gone bad.”
A parallel situation exists in Russia, the other nuclear superpower. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, a biologist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and environmental advisor to Presidents Yeltsin and Gorbachev, says the nuclear scientists there refer to themselves “atomschiky” or “nuclearists” and “think and act as a separate, isolated caste.” From the beginning of nuclear technology in the Soviet Union, they “were enthusiastic about the great, the fantastic discoveries of splitting the atom and developing enormous power. This ‘secret knowledge’ was magnified by state secrecy and a deep belief—in the Soviet Union as in the United States—of atomic energy ‘saving the globe’…There is a remarkable similarity in the argumentation of these groups here and in the United States. Step-by-step, they turned to an atomic religion, closed societies, a ‘state inside a state.’”
Dr. Heidi Huttner, who teaches sustainability at Stony Brook University, explains:

“As in so many parts of our industrialized and mechanized culture, there is no thought of consequences, or connections to the larger web of science, health, and human and nonhuman life…The nuclear culture becomes absolutely caught up in its own language and story. This self-enclosure feeds, validates and perpetuates itself. Without an outside critique or ‘objective’ third eye, any such culture loses the ability to self-regulate and self-monitor.  This is where things become dangerous.”

Russell Ace Hoffman, author of The Code Killers, Why DNA and Ionizing Radiation Are a Dangerous Mix, says: “It is a cult. It fits all the classic definitions of a cult. It’s an elitist, war-mongering, closed society of inbred, inwardly-thinking, aggressively xenophobic, arrogant pseudo-nerds stuck in ideas that are at least half a century out of date…Another cult-like behavior is they don’t care about the suffering of their victims.  Not one bit.”
Dr. Barbara Rose Johnston, an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, recounts spending three days at a U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored conference for people involved in the atmospheric monitoring program at the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada. “Many of the scientists and technicians in attendance were from southern Utah and St. Georges County area where the heaviest atomic fallout from the Nevada test site occurred…I did not find a single man who saw a connection between fallout and cancer rates, despite the fact that most had suffered. My initial reaction was that these folks truly ‘drank the Kool-Aid’—true believers through and through.”
“The nuclear industry requires buying into an orthodoxy,” explains nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson. “I know, as I was in it as a senior VP.” He tells of how, after he voiced concerns and criticism, an industry lawyer “told me, ‘Arnie, in this industry, you are either for us or against us, and you just crossed the line.’ The same thing happened to [outgoing NRC Chairman] Jaczko  I know of one nuclear engineer with 40 years of experience who committed suicide five days after Fukushima because he simply could not accept that his life’s work was based on erroneous assumptions.  He had worked on the Mark 1 design [the GE design of the Fukushima Daicchi plants].”
Alice Slater, New York representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says the “nuclear scientists are out of touch with reality. They talk about ‘risk assessment’—as though the dreadful, disastrous events at Chernobyl and Fukushima are capable of being weighed on a scale of ‘risks and benefits.’ They’re constantly refining their nuclear weapons—Congress has budgeted $84 billion for over the next 10 years to maintain the …’reliability of the nuclear arsenal,’ and $100 billion for new ‘delivery systems’—missiles, submarines and airplanes. After the horrendous effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everyone knows these catastrophic weapons are unusable and yet we’re pouring all this money into perpetuating the national nuclear weapons laboratories. They’re not including the Earth in their calculations and the enormous damage they are doing. They’re involved in the worst possible inventions with lethal consequences that last for eternity. Still, they continue on. They’re holding our planet hostage while they tinker in their labs without regard to the risks they are creating for the very future of life on Earth.”
Dr. Chris Busby of the Health and Life Sciences faculty at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and author of Wings of Death, Nuclear Pollution and Human Health, says:

“What we are seeing with nuclear scientists is a desperate need to control their environment and their lives and the forces that may affect their lives by creating a virtual universe which they can deal with by mathematics and by drawing straight lines on paper.”

It’s the “cult of the nuclearists,” says Busby. And this construct of the nuclear scientists seeking to “control nature with mathematical equations that make them feel safe” sets up a “collision with reality”—and a “way we are going to destroy ourselves.”  The belief in nuclear power is “far beyond anything scientific or rational,” says Busby, who has a Ph.D. in chemical physics.
Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, says the “religious passion for nuclear technology” started with the “guilt” of those in the Manhattan Project. “Those in the ‘nuclear priesthood’ knew that these horrible bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and they wanted to make up for that…They developed atomic energy for warfare and then thought it had other uses—and they would do anything to make that work.” But the civilian nuclear technology they devised was also deadly, and this realization was too “devastating to be accepted” by the “nuclear originators” or those who followed who “spend their days with their buddies, their colleagues, all thinking the same way.”
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, in his 1955 book The Open Mind, wrote: “The physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons….In some sort of crude sense…the physicists have known sin.”
Whether out of indoctrination, misguided belief, an obsession to “control nature,” the lure of the cult, closeness to power, job security, or their seeking to perpetuate a vested interest, the “nuclearists” have a religious allegiance to their technology. On a moral level, they have indeed sinned—and continue to do so. On a political level, they have corrupted and distorted energy policy in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. On an economic level, they are wasting a gargantuan portion of our tax dollars.
Choices of energy technology should be based on the technology being safe, clean, economic and in harmony with life. Instead, we are up against nuclear scientists and engineers pushing their deadly technology in the manner of religious zealots.

Australia: Particles and persecution: why we should care about Iranian physicists

From the Conversation:  Particles and persecution: why we should care about Iranian physicists

On a given day, your typical physicist is mainly preoccupied with trying to understand the intimate secrets of the universe. As with most academics, we get to visit one another in parts of the world to discuss our ideas. And as long as our curiosity continues to produce valuable contributions, we’re given the freedom and resources to pursue our academic endeavours.
That is, unless you’re a physicist in Iran. On January 12 2010, as he left for work, Professor Masoud Alimohammadi was assassinated by the blast from a motorcycle bomb detonated outside his car.
His academic research was on quantum field theory and appears to have had no professional connection with any nuclear research and development. He was just sympathetic to the views of the reformist movement in Iran.
Over the last two years a number of physicists in Iran have suffered similar fates, some involved in nuclear physics research, some not. The most recent was on Sunday May 13. The journal Nature reported:

“Omid Kokabee, an Iranian graduate student who has been imprisoned in Tehran for the past 15 months, was sentenced to 10 years on Sunday for allegedly conspiring with foreign countries against Iran."

Omid Kokabee faces ten years in jail for communicating with a hostile government. University of Texas

Kokabee was accused and convicted of “communicating with a hostile government” after spending time abroad at the Institute for Photonic Science in Barcelona and the University of Texas in Austin. He had already spent 15 months in prison awaiting trial. He has consistently denied all allegations and no credible evidence was presented against him during the trial. His field of work does not include nuclear physics.
Oppression in Iran is not something we’re unfamiliar with. But it could have implications for the many Iranian physics students in Australia studying in masters and PhD programs.
Their reasons for studying physics are much like those of other bright young people who are deeply inquisitive. They, too, desire to understand why the world is as we see it. But unlike undergraduate physics students in Australia and abroad, there is pressure brought to bear on the best of these students to direct their efforts into very specific research areas of interest to the Iranian regime.
This might take the form of friendly approaches from government officials. Or it may take the form of “… threats to him and his family”, as Kokabee wrote before his court appearance.

Ethan Hein

The ongoing political tensions within Iran, and between Iran and the international community over its nuclear intentions, has a direct consequence for Iranian physics students, at home and abroad.
Many physics students pursue their graduate studies abroad. For Iranian students, this takes on an additional imperative: it is one way for talented Iranian students who are uncomfortable with the political climate in their home country to leave.
There are obvious benefits to the student, as they develop advanced skills in their chosen discipline. But there are also broader benefits to the host university and nation, as they gain access to excellent students who contribute to their research programs and intellectual capital.
Visiting students are also exposed to our political system, warts and all (where rule of law means that it is important, for instance, how our elected representatives spend tax-payers’ or union-members’ money). One might hope that some of these highly capable students do eventually return to Iran, and find themselves in a position to positively influence the future direction of their home country.

Anthony Mattox

In Australia, this possibility is under some threat, through the Autonomous Sanctions Act (2011) which, among other things, restricts enrolment in courses that involve study in nuclear sciences, ballistic missiles, avionics and other military activities. It is difficult to get student visas for Iranians whose proposed graduate research would involve potentially security-sensitive equipment or training. This includes things like moderately high power lasers common to many physics departments.
There is certainly cause to be concerned about the transfer of sensitive skills to the Iranian regime. However, there is also growing wariness on the part of Australian universities to accept Iranian students into their graduate programs due to difficulties in obtaining student visas, and fears of the potential risk of inadvertently breaching the Autonomous Sanctions Act.
Balancing the potential security concerns with the diplomatic, cultural and intellectual benefits of accepting Iranian students to Australia is a question for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to resolve with Australia’s various security agencies.
But let’s not forget the plight of Mr Kokabee and other Iranian physicists, whose lives and liberties are curtailed because of their scientific curiosity.
 

Canada offered front-row seat for CERN's particle-smashing experiments

From Ottawa citizen:  Canada offered front-row seat for CERN's particle-smashing experiments

 

Photograph by: Denis Balibouse , Reuters

VANCVANCOUVER — A top European physicist is heading to Ottawa to offer Canada membership in one of the most exclusive science clubs on Earth.

Rolf Heuer, director general of the European centre for nuclear research (CERN), is keen to have Canada join as an associate member. The price: $10 million a year and a 10-year commitment.

Heuer, who will meet Tuesday with government science officials, said membership would buy Canada "a seat at the table" at CERN, the storied physics lab re-creating Big Bang conditions in a huge underground particle smasher near Geneva.
Scientists hope for their first glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson this year. The "God particle," as it is often called, is believed to be what gives elementary parties their mass and made everything we see possible: stars, planets and life.

But the hunt for the Higgs is just the start, said Heuer, who was in Vancouver Monday to open a week-long conference on CERN's particle-smashing experiments.

CERN has a 20-year plan to explore the many secrets of "dark matter" and the "dark universe," which Heuer said accounts for 95 per cent of the universe.

While the world of particle physics is esoteric, the real world spinoffs can be considerable. CERN was the birthplace of the World Wide Web, which as Heuer points out, "has changed our world."

Dozens of Canadian scientists are involved with experiments at CERN, and are keen to see the country join as a member as it would mean involvement in decisions about experiments, and more opportunities to work and study at laboratory which is like a university dedicated solely to particle physics.

They say the biggest benefit of membership is that Canadian firms would be allowed to bid on contacts to design and supply equipment for CERN, which has an annual budget of close to $1 billion.

"There is a huge multiplier effect when you have so many different parts of the world coming together," said Rob McPherson, a physicist at the University of Victoria and spokesperson for the Canadian science team involved in the search for the Higgs boson. He said scientists and Canadian companies both would benefit from the collaboration that comes with CERN membership.

Heuer said in an interview that he has long been keen for CERN to expand its membership beyond the European Union.

"Science is getting more and more global," he said, "and therefore, to my mind, one needs a global approach.
"We have taken the decision that the 'E" in CERN has changed from Europe to Everywhere."

Heuer said the expansion was in the works before the economic crisis that now has governments around the world tightening budgets for big science.

CERN is about as big as earthly projects get. The Large Hadron Collider propelling particle beams around CERN's 27-kilometre underground tunnel at close to the speed of light cost close to $8 billion. The machine's power bill is about $30 million a year.

So far, European countries have made good on their funding commitments to CERN. There have been reports that Greece might have trouble paying this year but Heuer, who recently met with Greek officials, said he would "not be so pessimistic."

While he said the economic crisis is worrisome, Heuer insisted it is not what motivated CERN to open membership to countries outside Europe, a decision that was made in 2009.

Israel became a member last fall, and CERN has opened membership to several other non-European countries, including Brazil, India, Russia, Japan and Canada

The U.S., said Heuer, is "a difficult story."

"It's not stable," he said, noting that U.S. science decisions can change from one year to the next. "Particle physics needs sustainable support."

Heuer is scheduled to meet Tuesday with Gary Goodyear, Canada's minister of state for science and technology, to discuss the finer points of membership.

"For a country like Canada. I don't want to say it's peanuts, but it is a small sum of money," Heuer said, noting that Greece pays $17 million a year for CERN membership.

Canada already has spent more than $100 million on research and equipment for the experiments at CERN.
Along with more access to decisions, contracts and facilities, membership might also open the door to CERN building more facilities in Canada, said Tim Meyer, head of strategic planning and communications at TRIUMF, the national physics facility based at the University of British Columbia. TRIUMF is home already to one of CERN's data farms, storing some of the massive amount of information generated by the particle smashing experiments.

Canada's physics community is keen on CERN membership, but it an open question whether the idea will sell in Ottawa, where the government has been harshly criticized for its recent cuts to government science, and slapped a moratorium on funding for many Canadian science facilities, such as living fungi and algae collections and Arctic research facilities.

 

Obit: George Cowan

From the Telegraph: George Cowan

George Cowan, who has died aged 92, was one of the youngest scientists to work on the Manhattan Project, the American government’s secret wartime programme to develop the Atom Bomb; after the war, as well as continuing his research into nuclear physics, he helped found a bank, an opera company and an independent research institute in New Mexico.

Cowan became involved in the Manhattan Project in 1942 when, with the future Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Wigner, he moved to the Metallurgy Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where the first atomic pile was being developed under Enrico Fermi.

On December 2 that year he was present when the pile generated the first controlled nuclear reaction, paving the way for the development of atomic weapons.

Cowan became seen as a general “Mr Fix-it”, capable of, for example, machining graphite blocks or casting uranium. He was often sent round to the different institutions involved in the project to help resolve bottlenecks or do a bit of fetching and carrying — though health and safety rules were notable only by their absence.

Cowan recalled an occasion when he was sent to transport a kilogram of uranium in a convertible from Massachusetts to a laboratory at Princeton: “I was in the passenger seat with the can of uranium between my legs, and I was supposed to kick it out of the car if it caught fire.” When it arrived at Princeton, a senior scientist took a look at Cowan’s precious cargo: “Like physicists do, he poked at the uranium, and immediately it started to explode and spark.” They took the tub of burning uranium outside: “We stood there and watched this spectacular fireworks as it burned through the tub on to the lawn.”

After the war, Cowan became one of the key figures at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the nuclear research centre in New Mexico where the Bomb had been built. A few weeks after his arrival he analysed soil samples taken from near the Russian border and found minute traces of nuclear debris — which led to the discovery that the Soviet Union had developed a nuclear weapon.

Cowan did much to promote the laboratory and to make both Los Alamos and nearby Santa Fe pleasant places in which to live and work. In 1953 he was a member of the group which founded the Santa Fe Opera, and in 1963 he founded the Los Alamos National Bank to provide a means to obtain housing for Los Alamos employees, serving as its chairman for 30 years.

He was also the driving force, with Murray Gell-Mann, behind the Santa Fe Institute, established in 1984 to promote collaboration across disciplines — from physics, mathematics and biology to the social sciences and the humanities — serving as its founding president.

George Arthur Cowan was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 15 1920 and took a degree in Chemistry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He then studied under Eugene Wigner at Princeton, helping him to design a uranium chain reactor.

After the war Cowan went to Los Alamos, where in 1946 he participated in the nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll. He then left for doctoral research at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. His research focused on the properties of silver formate which, he discovered, explodes when it dries, unless handled with care.

As he recalled in a memoir published in 2010, however, his doctoral supervisor, Professor Fugassi, did not heed his warnings: “I had instinctively moved behind him and escaped shards of flying glass. Professor Fugassi was not so fortunate, but his wounds soon healed.” The end result was that they obtained a patent for the synthesis of silver formate and sold it to a rocket manufacturer, Aerojet General, for several thousand dollars.

After taking his doctorate in 1950, Cowan returned to Los Alamos, serving as director of chemistry, as associate laboratory director of research, and as a senior laboratory fellow.

During the Reagan administration he served on the White House Science Council and it was the frustration over the fragmented nature of scientific research which he experienced in this role that gave birth to the idea for an institute at Santa Fe. His own scientific researches were wide-ranging and included a major study using brain imaging techniques to investigate children’s brain and behavioural development.

In 1997 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Cowan’s wife, Helen, a fellow scientist whom he had met while working on the Manhattan Project, died last year.

 

Transit of Venus: The view of a century

From Daily Press:  Transit of Venus: The view of a century
 For retired Norfolk teacher Annette McLean and her husband, Bill, it was a chance to see "a monumental astronomical event."

For Rob Mahurin, a nuclear physicist at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, a chance to "look up at the sky and see how the world works."

For 10-year-old Cameron Coleman of Chesapeake, a chance to see something "cool."

They and about a hundred others were lured to Huntington Park Beach in Newport News late Tuesday afternoon for the chance to watch the round black speck of Venus inch across the face of the sun. They peered through telescopes of many sizes, through squares of welders glass glued to Styrofoam plates, through goggles and homemade contraptions devised of cardboard boxes, paper and basic physics.

All for the view of a century.

They gathered along a grassy expanse near the Crab Shack restaurant, nearly all of them amateur astronomers, many with the Virginia Peninsula Astronomy/Stargazers, but others just along for the ride.

Candy Whitley of Newport News wasn't quite sure why she was there. "I stay inside at eclipses," she said.

But when she read in the newspaper that Venus was due to make its rare transit, she invited her four daughters to join her at the beach. Two of them did, and brought their own kids to stand in line at scope after scope, eager for a glance or two into an eyepiece.

"It just seemed like a neat thing to do," Whitley said.

Such transits are so rare they happen in pairs about eight years apart, then don't happen again for more than a century. The last was in 2004, but bad weather made it a wash-out in Hampton Roads. The next won't arrive till 2117.

Only 53 transits have occurred over the past 4,000 years, and only six since the telescope was invented in 1608.

In 1769, astronomers stationed with telescopes at critical points around the globe marked and measured Venus' path. Those measurements helped determine the distance between Earth and the sun — an Astronomical Unit, or standard of distance, that enabled scientists to finally scale our solar system.

Now astronomers use transits to develop ways to analyze a planet's atmosphere, the better to determine the compatibility of planet atmospheres outside our solar system.

Stargazer and NASA Langley aerospace engineer Lawrence "Bird" Taylor worked several scopes, shepherding kids among them and explaining what they were seeing.

"Take a peek — isn't that wicked?" Taylor said.

Mahurin brought his daughter to see something rare. It was astronomy that first hooked him on physics, he said; discovering that the same sets of rules that operate at the cosmic level also operate at the atomic level — "The whole universal in a thimble."

"There should be 300 people out here, not 100," said Annette McLean, who along with her husband regularly encourages others to "look up — look at the beauty."

"None of us are going to be able to see this again." 

 

Livermorium and Flerovium take a seat at the Periodic Table

From Engadget: Livermorium and Flerovium take a seat at the Periodic Table

Just when we thought those pesky scientists had stopped messing with the Periodic Table, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry goes and ratifies another two. The pair of elements were discovered in partnership between the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the States. Element 114 has taken on the spell-check-worrying nomenclature Flerovium (Fl), while 116 becomes Livermorium (Lv). Eagle-eyed readers will notice that both take a name from the labs where they were discovered, the former named after Georgiy N. Flerov and the latter after Ernest O. Lawrence -- both atomic pioneers in their respective countries. The official names will get their first official publication in July's edition of Pure and Applied Chemistry. We guess those textbook makers will be rubbing their hands in glee at all those revised editions it'll sell next term.