I was attempting to forge a coalition of all the American labs to back this idea. SLAC was always looking toward electron acceleration; Brookhaven was struggling to keep Isabelle alive; and a lively and very talented gang at Cornell were trying to upgrade their electron machine to a status they called CESR II. I dubbed my Desertron lab "Slermihaven II" to dramatize the union of all the fiercely competitive labs behind the new venture.
I won't belabor the politics of science, but after a year full of trauma, the U.S. particle-physics community formally recommended abandoning Isabelle (renamed CBA for Colliding Beam Accelerator) in favor of the Desertron. Now called the Superconducting Super Collider, it was to have 20 TeV in each beam. At the same time—July 1983—Fermilab's new accelerator hit the front pages as a success, accelerating protons to a record of 512 GeV. This was soon followed by further successes, and about a year later the Tevatron went to 900 GeV.
PRESIDENT REAGAN AND THE SUPER COLLIDER: A TRUE STORY
By 1986, the SSC proposal was ready to be submitted to President Reagan for approval. As director of Fermilab, I was asked by an assistant secretary of the DOE if we could make a short video for the president. He thought a ten-minute exposure to high-energy physics would be useful when the proposal was discussed at a Cabinet meeting. How do you teach a president high-energy physics in ten minutes? More important, how do you teach this president? After considerable agony, we hit on the idea of having some high school kids visit the lab, be taken on a tour of the machinery, ask a lot of questions, and receive answers designed for them. The president would see and hear all this and maybe get a notion of what high-energy physics is all about. So we invited kids from a nearby school. We coached a few just a bit and let the rest be spontaneous. We filmed about thirty minutes and cut it down to the best fourteen minutes. Our Washington contact warned us: no more than ten minutes! Something about attention span. So we cut more and shipped him ten lucid minutes of high-energy physics for high school sophomores. In a few days we had our reaction. "Way too complicated! Not even close."
What to do? We redid the soundtrack, wiping out the kids' questions. Some of them, after all, were pretty tough. A voice-over expert then related the kinds of questions the kids might have asked (written out by me), and gave the answers while the action remained the same: the scientist guides pointing, the kids gawking. This time we made it crystal clear and very simple. We tested it on nontechnical people. Then we sent it in. Our DOE guy was getting impatient.
Again he was underwhelmed. "Well, it's better but it's still too complicated."
I began to get a little nervous. Not only was the SSC in danger but my job was at stake. That night I awoke at 3 A.M. with a brilliant idea. The next video would go this way: a Mercedes pulls up to the lab entrance, and a distinguished gentleman of fifty-five or so emerges. The voice-over says: "Meet Judge Sylvester Matthews of the Fourteenth Federal District Court, who is visiting a large government research lab." The "judge" explains to his hosts, three handsome young physicists (one female), that he has moved into the neighborhood and drives past the lab on his way to court every day. He reads about our work in the Chicago Tribune, knows we are dealing with "volts" and "atoms," and, since he never studied physics, is curious about what goes on. He enters the building, thanking the physicists for taking time with him this morning.
My idea was that the president would identify with an intelligent layperson who is self-assured enough to say that he doesn't understand. In the subsequent eight and a half minutes, the judge frequently interrupts the physicists to insist that they go slower and clarify this and that point. At nine-plus minutes, the judge shoots his cuff, looks at his Rolex, and thanks the young scientists graciously. Then, with a shy smile: "You know I really didn't understand most of the things you told me, but I do get a sense of your enthusiasm, of the grandeur of the quest. It somehow reminds me of what it must have been like to explore the West ... man alone on horseback with a vast, unexplored land..." (Yes, I wrote that.)
When the video got to Washington, the assistant secretary was ecstatic. "You've done it! It's terrific. Just right! It will be shown at Camp David over the weekend."
Greatly relieved, I went to bed smiling, but I woke up at 4 A.M. in a cold sweat. Something was wrong. Then I knew. I hadn't told the assistant secretary that the "judge" was an actor hired from the Chicago Actors' Bureau. This was around the time the president was having trouble finding a confirmable appointee to the Supreme Court. Suppose he ... I tossed and sweated until it was 8 A.M. in Washington. With my third call I got him.
"Say, about that video..."
"I told you it was great."
"But I have to tell—"
"It's good, don't worry. It's on its way to Camp David."
"Wait!" I screamed. "Listen! The judge. It's not a real judge. He's an actor, and the president may want to talk to him, interview him. He looks so intelligent. Suppose he..." [Long pause]
"The Supreme Court?"
"Yeah."
[Pause, then snickering] "Look, if I tell the president he's an actor, he'll surely appoint him to the Supreme Court."
Not long afterward the president approved the SSC. According to a column by George Will, the discussion about the proposal had been brief. During a Cabinet meeting the president listened to his secretaries, who were about evenly divided on the merits of the SSC. He then quoted a well-known quarterback: "Throw deep." By which everyone assumed he meant "Let's do it." The Super Collider became national policy.
Over the next year a lively search for a site for the SSC engaged communities all around the nation and in Canada. Something about the project seemed to excite people. Imagine a machine that could cause the mayor of Waxahachie, Texas, to stand up in public and conclude a fiery speech with "And this nation must be the first to find the Higgs scalar boson!" Even "Dallas" featured the Super Collider in a subplot in which J. R. Ewing and others attempted to buy up land around the SSC site.
When I referred to the mayor's comment at a meeting of the National Conference of Governors, in one of the several million talks I gave while selling the SSC, I was interrupted by the governor of Texas. He corrected my pronunciation of Waxahachie. Apparently I had deviated by more than the normal difference between Texan and New Yorkese. I couldn't resist. "Sir, I really tried," I assured the governor. "I went there, stopped at a restaurant, and asked the waitress to tell me where I was, clearly and distinctly. 'B-U-R-G-E-R—K-I-N-G,' she enunciated." Most of the governors laughed. Not the Texan.
The year 1987 was the year of three supers. First, there was the supernova that flared in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 years ago and finally got its signal to our planet so that neutrinos from outside our solar system were detected for the first time. Then there was the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, which excited the world with its possible technological benefits. Early on there was hope that we would soon have room-temperature superconductors. Visions arose of reduced power costs, levitated trains, a myriad of modern miracles, and, for science, much-reduced costs of building the SSC. Now it's clear that we were too optimistic. In 1993 high-temperature superconductors are still a lively frontier for research and for a deeper understanding of the nature of material, but the commercial and practical applications are still a long way off.
The third super was the search for the site of the Super Collider. Fermilab was one of the contenders largely because the Tevatron could be used as an injector to the SSC main ring, an oval track with a circumference of fifty-three miles. But after weighing all considerations, the DOE's select committee picked the Waxahachie site. The decision was announced in October 1988, a few weeks after I had entertained a huge meeting of the Fermilab staff with my Nobel jokes. Now we had quite a different meeting as the gloomy staff gathered to hear the news and wonder about the future of the laboratory.
In 1993 the SSC is under construction, with a probable completion date of 2000, give or take a year or two. Fermilab is aggressively upgradin
g its facility in order to increase the number of p-bar/p collisions, to improve its chances of finding top, and to explore the lower levels of the great mountain the SSC is designed to scale.
Of course, the Europeans are not sitting on their hands. After a period of vigorous debate, study, design reports, and committee meetings, Carlo Rubbia, as CERN's director general, decided to "pave the LEP tunnel with superconducting magnets." The energy of an accelerator, you will recall, is determined by the combination of its ring diameter and the strength of its magnets. Constrained by the seventeen-mile circumference of the tunnel, the CERN designers were forced to strive for the highest magnetic field that they could technologically visualize. This was 10 tesla, about 60 percent stronger than the SSC's magnets and two and a half times stronger than the Tevatron's. Meeting this formidable challenge will require a new level of sophistication in superconducting technology. If it succeeds, it will give the proposed European machine an energy of 17 TeV compared to the SSC's 40 TeV.
The total investment in financial and human resources, if both of these new machines are actually built, is enormous. And the stakes are very high. What if the Higgs idea turns out to be wrong? Even if it is, the drive to make observations "in the 1 TeV mass domain" is just as strong; our standard model must be either modified or discarded. It's like Columbus setting out for the East Indies. If he doesn't reach it, thought the true believers, he will find something else, perhaps something even more interesting.
9. INNER SPACE, OUTER SPACE, AND THE TIME BEFORE TIME
You walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In your medieval hand—
And everyone will say
As you walk your mystic way,
If this young man expresses himself
In terms too deep for me,
Why, what a singularly deep young man
This deep young man must be.
—Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience
IN HIS "DEFENSE OF POETRY," the English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley contended that one of the sacred tasks of the artist is to "absorb the new knowledge of the sciences and assimilate it to human needs, color it with human passions, transform it into the blood and bone of human nature."
Not many romantic poets rushed to accept Shelley's challenge, which may explain the present sorry state of our nation and planet. If we had Byron and Keats and Shelley and their French, Italian, and Urdu equivalents explaining science, the science literacy of the general public would be far higher than it is now. This, of course, excludes you—not "dear reader" anymore, but friend and colleague who has fought with me through to Chapter 9 and is, by royal edict, a fully qualified, literate reader.
People who measure science literacy assure us that only one in three can define a molecule or name a single living scientist. I used to characterize these dismal statistics by adding, "Did you know that only sixty percent of the residents of Liverpool understand non-Abel-ian gauge theory?" Of twenty-three graduates randomly selected at Harvard's 1987 commencement ceremonies, only two could explain why it's hotter in summer than in winter. The answer, by the way, is not "because the sun is closer in summer." It isn't closer. The earth's axis of rotation is tilted, so when the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, the rays are closer to being perpendicular to the surface, and that half of the globe enjoys summer. The other hemisphere gets oblique rays—winter. Six months later the situation is reversed.
The sad part about the ignorance of the twenty-one out of twenty-three Harvard grads—Harvard, by God!—who couldn't answer the question is what they are missing. They have gone through life without understanding a seminal human experience: the seasons. Of course, there are those bright moments when people surprise you. Several years ago, on Manhattan's IRT subway, an elderly man sweating over an elementary calculus problem in his textbook turned in desperation to the stranger sitting next to him, asking if he knew any calculus. The stranger nodded yes, and proceeded to solve the man's problem for him. Of course, it's not every day that an old man studies calculus next to the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist T. D. Lee on the subway.
I had a similar train experience, but with a different ending. I was sitting on a crowded commuter train coming out of Chicago when a nurse boarded, leading a group of patients from the local mental hospital. They arranged themselves around me as the nurse began counting: "One, two, three—" She looked at me. "Who are you?"
"I'm Leon Lederman," I answered, "Nobel Prize winner and director of Fermilab."
She pointed at me and sadly continued: "Yes, four five, six ..."
But seriously, the concern over science illiteracy is legitimate, among other reasons because of the ever-increasing linkage of science, technology, and public welfare. Then, too, there is the great pity of missing out on the world view I have tried to present in these pages. Though still incomplete, it has grandeur, beauty, and an emerging simplicity. As Jacob Bronowski said:
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations of Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation.
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature—or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.
INNER SPACE/OUTER SPACE
To see this edifice in its proper context, we now make an excursion to astrophysics, and I must explain why particle physics and astrophysics have in recent times been fused to a new level of intimacy, which I once called the inner space/outer space connection.
While the inner-space jocks were building ever more powerful microscope-accelerators to see down into the subnuclear domain, our outer-space colleagues were synthesizing data from telescopes of ever greater power, supplied with new technologies for increasing sensitivity and the ability to see fine detail. Another breakthrough came with space-based observatories carrying instruments to detect infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays—in short, the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, much of which had been blocked by our opaque and shimmering atmosphere.
The synthesis of the past one hundred years in cosmology is the "standard cosmological model." It holds that the universe began as a hot, dense, compact state about 15 billion years ago. Then the universe was infinitely or almost infinitely dense, infinitely or almost infinitely hot. The "infinite" description sits uncomfortably with physicists; all the qualifiers are the result of the fuzzy influence of quantum theory. For reasons we may never know, the universe exploded and has been expanding and cooling ever since.
Now how in the world did cosmologists find that out? The Big Bang model arose in the 1930s after the discovery that the galaxies, collections of 100 billion or so stars, were all flying away from one Edwin Hubble, who happened to be measuring their velocities in 1929. Hubble had to collect enough light from distant galaxies to resolve the spectral lines and compare them to lines of the same elements on earth. He noted that all of the lines shifted systematically toward the red. It was known that a source of light moving away from an observer would do just that. The "red shift" was in fact a measure of the relative velocity of source and observer. Over the years Hubble found that all galaxies were moving away from him in all directions. Hubble showered regularly, and there was nothing personal in all this; it was simply a manifestation of the expansion of space. Because space is expanding the distances between all galaxies, astronomer Hedwina Knubble, observing from the planet Twilo in Andromeda, would see the same phenomenon—galaxies flying away from her. Indeed, the more distant
the object, the faster it is moving. This is the essence of Hubble's law. It implies that if you ran the film backward, the most distant galaxies, moving faster, would close in on the nearer objects, and finally the whole mess would rush together and coalesce into a very, very small volume at a time presently estimated as about 15 billion years ago.
The most famous metaphor in science asks you to imagine yourself a two-dimensional creature, a Flatlander. You know from east-west and north-south, but up and down do not exist. Cast up-down out of your ken. You live on the surface of a balloon that is expanding. All over the surface are the residences of observers—planets and stars, clustered into galaxies all over the sphere. All two-dimensional. From any vantage point, all objects are moving away as the surface continually expands. The distance between any two points in this universe increases. That is how it is in our three-dimensional world. The other virtue of this metaphor is that, as in our own universe, there is no special place. All points on the surface are democratically equivalent to all other points. No center. No edge. No danger of falling off the universe. Since our expanding-universe metaphor (the balloon surface) is all we know, it is not a case of stars rushing out into space. It is space carrying along the whole kaboodle, which is expanding. It isn't easy to visualize an expansion that is happening everywhere in the universe. There is no outside, no inside. There is only this universe, expanding. Into what is it expanding? Think again of your life as a Flatlander on the surface of a balloon. The surface is all that exists in our metaphor.
The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? Page 48
