Knowledge fever

Chasing Higgs, and the case for science education in Oklahoma

“This is the story of the people who have devoted their lives to discovering the ultimate nature of reality, of which the Higgs is a crucial component. There are theorists, sitting with pencil and paper, fueled by espresso and heated disputes with colleagues, turning over abstract ideas in their minds. There are engineers, pushing machines and electronics well beyond the limits of existing technology. And most of all there are the experimenters, bringing the machines and the ideas together to discover something new about nature.”
—Sean Carroll, “The Particle at the End of the Universe.”

“We make one definitive discovery: it usually opens up several more questions—if the community learns something and it kind of closes the book on that subject, it’s really kind of a bummer…the interesting part of the discovery of the Higgs project—it has left some really curious questions about what comes next…”
—University of Tulsa Physics Professor Jerry McCoy

Watching science happen is a pretty rare, exciting thing, even if it's second hand.

Imagine what it might have felt like to have been with Galileo when he decided to build a telescope from the word-of-mouth instructions floating around 16th century Italy. Instead of checking out Pisa, his crib world, the epic inventor/engineer/artist and thinker turned his freshly crafted instrument to the heavens and almost immediately discovered the four "Galilean" moons of Jupiter.

Recently I had the pleasure of viewing Mark Levinson's documentary, "Particle Fever," an intense, dramatic look at the high-energy physics community in 2008-2013 as it powers up and employs the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most advanced particle accelerator, near Bern, Switzerland. Levinson is himself a particle physicist in addition to being a first-rate moviemaker, and viewers benefit enormously by the unrivaled eye of Walter Murch (“THX 1138,” “American Graffiti,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The English Patient”), one of the great film editors of our time.

I spoke recently about “Fever” and particle physics with Prof. Jerry McCoy of The University of Tulsa. He and a couple of other area physicists did an oral annotation at a recent showing of “Particle Fever” at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema. Afterward, they hosted a discussion about the meaning of the new work at the Hadron Collider, the discovery of the Higgs particle, and the brilliance of the scientific, technological, and managerial talents required to deliver findings that will reshape physics as we’ve known it in the months and years to come.

If you think particle physics is esoteric or fey, then you are missing out on the origins of integrated circuits—the under-the-cupboard gizmos that animate our cell phones and computing machines, pieces of the foundation tech in medical scanning devices, the GPS system that drivers and pilots use to navigate through the streets and our sky and, oh yes, that whole business of atomic weapons.

“Fever” is one of the most exciting, lucid documentaries I've ever seen. It chronicles the years-long efforts of an agile cadre of super-nerds who managed to convince the European community, India, Japan, and Russia to pony up over $7 billion for one of the most adventurous projects in the history of science and human enterprise. The good old USA chunked about $2 billion in to round out the budget, but it's important to know that the LHC project was only put on the ground in Switzerland after our government, via an early episode of congressional cowardice, decided not to build an even larger, more powerful, and possibly more rewarding facility in Texas. Abandoned in 1994, the Super Conducting Supercollider ran into a bunch of nonsensical objections, and inadvertent early-stage cost overruns that are too much of the American recent past and our often baffling present. But with our $2-billion buy-in, the American theoretical and experimental physics communities, some talented two hatters from cosmology, and our advanced computational cadre have a seat at the table, including the direct participation of a handful of physicists from Oklahoma's academic community.

The LHC is easily the biggest and most complex contraption ever erected by humans, if writer/Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is to be believed. But the project is also a brainy micro-society, populated by scientists from over 100 countries and managed by CERN, the European high-energy physics organization.

If you get the willies about the future of the planet given the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russian provocations in Ukraine, the feverish Shia/Sunni conflict in Syria and Iraq, or our own seemingly hapless domestic political conflicts, it's as refreshing as hell to learn about a peaceful oasis overseen by a polyglot medley of scientists pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.

It was an astonishing success. Within only a few months of operations, the LHC led to the identification of the long-theorized Higgs, which the physics community believes is responsible for the fact that matter particles have mass—a profoundly practical feature since, otherwise, the universe as we know it, the galactic systems, the Milky Way, our solar system, our sun, the Earth and life as we experience it, would likely not be possible without the Higgs and the ubiquitous "field" it engenders.

Like Einstein's work at the beginning of last century, the work that Isaac Newton and his peers did in 17th century England, and Michael Faraday's history-altering work with electromagnetism in the 19th century, the results at the LHC are not meant to be practical—the crew there is not looking for new applied or tangible technologies—not intentionally, anyway. But it's not too hard to imagine that some discovery that comes from the epic quest for how subatomic processes truly operate will produce a world-beater technology or a head-busting engineering rework. Consider the breakout ‘80s work of Tim Berners-Lee, a British/American computer scientist, then laboring as an IT guru at CERN. In his spare time he developed the World Wide Web server/client concept and HTML. He wanted to link up his far-flung physicist clients in a better and richer fashion. Basically, he crafted the work that led to ARPANET—the network predecessor of what we now call the Internet.

So we have the Higgs particle, or at least a reasonable representation of what the physics community imagined, a big part of what 83-year-old Peter Higgs (an American who won the Nobel prize last year) stipulated in a 1964 paper, has essentially been detected. Now there is a fresh, grand mystery that springs from the fact that the mass of the Higgs exceeded what many had imagined. The findings call into question several variants of a theory known as supersymmetry, a passel of subatomic theories that mandate the discovery of a kind of partner to all of the particles on the scene in pre-Higgs days. They’re ghostly particles that, when the Hadron Collider is fired up again in 2015, after a round of planned enhancements, have to be discovered. Otherwise, as TU's McCoy and folks discussed in Sean Carroll's book said, there will be a huge crisis at the center not just of particle physics but our entire conception of the physical world. 

That’s the wonderful, almost magical thing about the scientific enterprise–it invariably leads human beings to explore realms we barely imagined. It pushes human intellectual and creative abilities in ways that people hadn't thought possible.

The Higgs quest is important, and science needs to be aggressively supported nationally and in here in the Sooner State. Fundamental science and the push for new knowledge are under attack in America and are far from a top priority in Oklahoma. The efforts of Steadman Upham at the University of Tulsa, David Boren at University of Oklahoma, and some of the excellent scientific research work at Oklahoma State University in the material sciences, are all islands of excellence, archipelagos that are unambiguous refutations of anti-science, those malignant forces that will doom our country and our state if they are allowed to grow and go "untreated.”

TU’s professor McCoy told me about his recent visit to Singapore, which has witnessed an incredible explosion in its per-capita gross national product over the course of the last 50 years—in no small part, McCoy reminded me, because of huge increases in outlays for public education, for an ambitious research and development program, and for a whole slew of science-related training and developmental initiatives.

McCoy called them insightful. We could use more of that around here.