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.
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