Particle Fever

If the Higgs Boson had turned out to be 115 gigaelectonvolts it would have supported the theoretical notion of supersymmetry, filling in the missing piece of the puzzle about the Standard Model of matter. If it had weighed in at 140 it would argued the idea of the multiverse, a concept which led to the frightening idea of chaos, in which the particle itself would prove to be less a key to the understanding of what happened at the time of the big bang than a kind epistemological black hole. As it was in 2012 when the two beams of protons traveling near the speed of light through the l7 mile long LHC actually began to collide, the Boson turned out to be uncooperative coming in about 126 GeV, a number that left more questions than answers and supported neither theory. At one point during Particle Fever Mark Levinson’s almost Socratic dialogue between the experimental and theoretical physicists involved with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, an economist asks how the enormously expensive and time consuming activity can be justified. “What is it good for? “ he demands to know, about a project which for some scientists is comparable in ambition to the building of the Pyramids. “Nothing except understanding everything,” is the response of the David Kaplan, a physicist who is also the film’s narrator. On a more basic level have you ever wondered, what really goes on inside the LHC where the conditions that occurred at the moment of the big bang are duplicated? Have you ever tried to imagine how energy of this scale could be generated (giant super cooled magnets are used) or what it would look like? Then Particle Fever takes you inside the inner workers of a project involving thousands of scientists sometimes from warring counties like Pakistan and India, Georgia and Russia who all work together to try to unearth the secrets of things like the cosmological constant, dark matter and the reason why the universe continues to expand. The reclusive Peter Higgs, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 2013 and who doesn’t even own a cellphone or employ the internet (“Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs doesn’t own a cellphone or use the internet,” The Week, 10/8/13), even makes a cameo appearance in a film that unlocks secrets of nature, science and even art.

The Stars Our Destination II

The Times ran a front page story about “the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra” (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” NYT, 4/18/13). Naturally, perennially “space" conscious New Yorkers, with little experience of trying to locate space in outer space, will wonder if there is rent stabilization (before they even consider how stable the orbits of the bodies question are)? According to the Times both planets circle a star called Kepler 62  named "after NASA's Kepler 62 spacecraft, which discovered them” and are both “in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” The prospect of affordable space and the citation of Goldilocks make the whole extraterrestrial discovery seem like a rather far flung fairy tale. Indeed getting back to life on earth, hardened Manhattanites would find it more improbable to come across an inexpensive rental than they would to achieve the near speed of light velocities necessary for a rocket ship to get there. But who knows what the future for space travel will hold. No one really understands what space is either in terms of the dark matter that holds things together, nor the dark energy the force which constantly causes things to expand. In studying the Higgs Boson, a basic component of matter, in the Large Hadron Collider scientists are only beginning to understand what happened in the milliseconds following the explosion which created life as we know it today. Did something come out of nothing? Or is there another explanation that still eludes us? When we begin to understand the highways and byways of space in the context of a unified theory which takes into context both the microcosm and macrocosm, will we discover the wormholes that we read about in sci fi and that will allow travellers to make quantum leaps through space/time?

Ting's the Thing

What do you do if you are a Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist who is passed over for work on the LHC? It’s a tough job market out there, but it would seem that having a Nobel on your CV would knock down more than a few doors. If you’re Samuel Ting, you move from the micro- to the macrocosm, from the tiny bits of matter out of which matter came to the product of it all—the stars. These two worlds constitute the two elements of the Unified Theory that Einstein was never successful in completing, though it was a solution he aspired to. Described by the Times as “one of science’s great control freaks and worrywarts,” Ting, a 74-year-old M.I.T professor, “discovered a particle that would revolutionize physics, but he took so long checking for errors and looking for more particles that another lab found it and he wound up splitting the Nobel” (“A Costly Quest for the Dark Heart of the Cosmos, NYT, 11/16/10). That was back in 1974. Today, Ting is the author of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a device that studies the dark matter that Ting and other scientists think is the glue that holds the universe together, and which is due to be flown on the space shuttle Endeavor to the International Space Station on February 27. Essentially, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is the LHC on wheels, what the Times calls “an-eight ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space.” The $ 1.5 billion dollar project, which according to the Times has involved 600 scientists from 16 countries, aims at revealing the mysterious substance “whose gravity determines the architecture of the cosmos.”  Some people will go to any lengths to get a job.

From Cradle to Grave

Everyone has their day in court, actually two: birth and death. There are exceptions, but the newcomer is generally the most important person in the room, as is the old timer to whom children, friends and relatives have come to pay their last respects. However jaded or cosmopolitan we may feel after reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, which proposes eternal life through cybernetic revamping of dying organs, the coming into existence of a human life (no matter how great its potential for evil) and the departing of life from the body still epitomize the fundamental mystery of the universe. Another mystery of course is this: what preceded life? Scientists talk of the big bang and create ever more powerful telescopes, with mirrors capable of collecting emissions billions of light years away, from the dawn of time, yet no one is able to describe what came before the beginning, before the great event during which a microscopic bit of matter or energy ignited the expansion of the universe. One way to study the macrocosm is to study particles in the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Scientists hope that the huge amounts of energy produced in the collider, which in turn unleash elementary particles like Higgs bosons, can help us to understand how the universe was created. Another way to come to grips with the enigma of the macrocosm is by going to a hospital and witnessing the contractions that attend birth or the last breaths that attend death, as the body labors both to hold onto and relinquish life.

Trading Places

“The Tradeworx computers get price quotes from the exchanges, decide how to trade, complete a risk analysis and generate a buy or sell order—in 20 microseconds,” reported the Times in a piece about the new phenomenon of high speed trading (“Speedy New Traders Make Waves Far From Wall St,” NYT, May 16, 2010). Whether you follow Warren Buffett’s notion of the equity based trade or the Soros model based on reflexivity, everything is a little faster these days. It’s like running on a waxed kitchen floor. At some point you’re going to slip and fall. That’s what happened to the market on May 6, when it fell l000 points in a matter of minutes. Of course, everything’s relative in a multiverse where CERN’s Large Hadron Collider recreates Higgs Bosons and other particles that sprang to life a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. The whole structure of the financial world has changed. Blue-blood families, who might have held stocks in companies like Union Carbide, Exxon or IBM for generations, now pride themselves on holding portfolios for over five seconds. Whether you study a company’s spread sheet and involve yourself in a firm’s business, like Buffett did when he purchased his preferred position in Goldman Sachs, or you deal with currency fluctuations and market forces as Soros has done, in the brave new world of finance your relationship with management will be considered long term if you hold a stock for over thirty seconds. But as seasoned high-speed traders learn in their relatively short half-lives, much can happen in a short period of time, a premise that comes to high finance from pornography, where the short loop in which the beginning, middle and end of a sex act are condensed into a single action long ago replaced the more leisurely story lines of Debbie Does Dallas, Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat. Yes, the old Newtonian trading, where investors purchased stock and actually received certificates that they put in their vaults, is a vestige of an age when people read books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Ulysses.

My Life in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)

In the Belly of the Beast is Jack Abbott’s confessional about the life of crime that eventually earned him an all-expenses-paid return trip to prison, where he  finally committed suicide. My Life in the LHC recounts a similarly turbulent narrative. It starts with the collision of two protons in the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN under the Swiss-French border. Told from the point of view of a Higgs boson, a particle that may, in fact, not even exist, My Life in the LHC introduces the reader to a new kind of underworld that is a far cry from the violent one represented by artistic criminals like Abbott and criminal artists like Norman Mailer. Mailer and Abbott shared an affinity for stabbing. Mailer stabbed his wife after announcing his candidacy for the mayoralty of New York, while Abbott’s return to prison was precipitated by an altercation with a waiter in an East Village establishment called the Binibon on the eve of receiving a laudatory review in The Times for In the Belly of the Beast. Book publishing and politics are both tough rackets, and perhaps the real moral of the story lies in the question of publicity. How far will an author or politician go when it comes to publicizing himself?

   

Of course, the author of My Life in the LHC didn’t have the kind of opportunities open to sociopaths like Mailer and Abbott in that it was only a subatomic particle whose non-existent mass meant that it would have relatively little pull—or gravitas. But My Life in the LHC is still a riveting story in the way that it plays upon Warhol’s idea that everyone has 15 minutes of fame. Here our hero’s fame lasts only a millionth of a second, but within that time, the narrator lives a life that is one of the great thrill rides of the century, something that makes the Coney Island Cyclone seem pathetic by comparison.  My life in the LHC reads like an accelerated On the Road. My Life in the LHC is, in this regard, a quintessentially American tale, told by an idiot and signifying nothing. Its great truth lies in the interstices, in the little turns in the tunnel, in the feats of engineering, and in the big magnets, which martyr themselves for the sake of science.