Fabiola Gianotti...four years and the Higgs boson

"Q&A with Fabiola Gianotti, Higgs hunter"

Symmetry sits down with Fabiola Gianotti, who recently finished an eventful four years as spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

by

Lori Ann White

April 19th, 2013

Symmetry

Physicist Fabiola Gianotti, one of the two experiment leaders who announced the discovery of a Higgs-like particle last summer, recently stopped by Stanford University to deliver the physics department’s annual Hofstadter Lectures. Symmetry writer Lori Ann White took the opportunity to interview Gianotti about her time as spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment; her nomination to be Time magazine’s 2012 Person of the Year; the future of the Large Hadron Collider; and, of course, Gianotti’s use of the oft-maligned Comic Sans font.

S: How is life different now that you've finished your term as ATLAS spokesperson?

FG: It's a different life (laughs). Of course the four years as spokesperson were unique—a great time, a very special scientific and human adventure. Unforgettable.

Now I am back to doing more hands-on work, which is different but is equally interesting and stimulating. I like my “new life.” I feel pretty much like a post-doc, and I am working with many young people.

S: What are your impressions of your time as spokesperson now?

FG: I'm extremely grateful to the ATLAS collaboration for giving me such an important and prestigious opportunity. The past four years have been very intense for the whole LHC community—accelerator, experiments, computing—very demanding, every day a new challenge. For sure we didn’t get bored!

The huge number of satisfactions and accomplishments since the LHC started operation at the end of 2009 reward decades of hard work by the community. People should keep in mind that the Higgs boson was not discovered in a few months.

From a more personal point of view, it was for me very enriching to work with so many competent, motivated, enthusiastic and dedicated ATLAS colleagues, in particular the young people. There is a very strong team spirit in ATLAS, which has allowed us to face in the best way difficulties and challenges and savor together several outstanding accomplishments.  
 
S: What do you consider your best accomplishment as spokesperson?

FG: Frankly, I don’t know. I have tried to do my best for the experiment as every other ATLAS colleague. What we accomplished is the result of this collective work, over the years.

S: Do you feel your nomination for Time magazine’s Person of the Year is an indication that the public doesn't understand how collaborations work?

FG: All the people who have contributed to the LHC should have been runners-up for Time’s Person of the Year. But I guess this would have been unpractical.

I am obviously honored to have been selected by Time, but I consider myself to be there as a representative of a much bigger community, so I share this honor with my ATLAS and CMS colleagues, as well as the LHC accelerator team and all the people who have been working on the LHC project over the years.

I think it's positive that Time magazine has chosen a representative from science and research as one of the runners-up. It’s a very good demonstration that society values knowledge.
 
S: How has the discovery of the Higgs changed your life?

FG: It has changed it in that I have now much stronger relationships with people outside our field. The discovery of the Higgs boson has raised a big interest in society. I've had the chance to give a few public lectures since the 4th of July. At each time, the attendance is huge, and people ask very good questions that indicate their genuine interest and that they have prepared themselves. I also receive a huge number of mails from young people, in particular teenagers and undergrad students, who would like to know more about the Higgs boson, the LHC, how to become a scientist, etc. It's really very nice to see how much people are interested in fundamental knowledge.

S: I have to ask. Why do you use Comic Sans in your slides?

FG: Because I like it. It's so cute. As you see, I didn't change it [for the Hofstadter Lectures]. I find it a sweet and pleasant font.
 
S: What do you think of the reactions to your use of the font?

FG: (laughs) I was amazed. It made such a big splash. I learned that a person in the UK is running a campaign to rename Comic Sans to Comic CERN.

S: What future news do you anticipate coming out of the LHC experiments?

FG: Now that we have discovered a new particle, we are going to measure it in detail, so I expect many more nice results about the Higgs boson to come out in the next months.

For the rest, I have no idea. I am serious. The LHC has been conceived and built to address a long list of questions, of which the existence of the Higgs boson is only one. There are many others: the composition of dark matter, the origin of the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe, the unification of forces, etc.

So we will continue to work and hopefully we will be able to solve, at least partially, some of these issues. We will see what surprise nature has set aside for us.

I think the best reward will be to find something totally unexpected. So I would say I don't know today what future news to anticipate. But I hope it will be something very intriguing.

Fabiola Gianotti [Wikipedia]

Choreographer Liz Lerman at CERN

Why not--not much else going on there.

"Dancing with physicists"

For her latest work, choreographer Liz Lerman took members of her dance troupe to CERN, where they reveled in the fog, danced in the aisles and found inspiration in wide-ranging conversations with scientists.

by

Calla Cofield

August 2009

Symmetry

Liz Lerman is an accomplished choreographer, writer, performer, educator, and artist whose laurels include the American Choreographer Award, an honorary doctorate from Williams College, Washingtonian Magazine's 1988 Washingtonian of the Year and a 2002 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship. She founded The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, in 1976. Since 2006, the group has traveled throughout the country performing a multimedia dance production titled Ferocious Beauty: Genome. With Gregor Mendel as a leading character, this work examines the nature of discovery and the implications of present-day research in genetics.

Now, Lerman and her company are producing a piece that explores the question of how things begin, and are advancing their research through conversations with specialists in a variety of fields, including scientists at the Large Hadron Collider.

On her second trip to CERN, the European particle physics lab near Geneva that is home to the LHC, Lerman brought with her a small team of dancers who spoke with scientists and even performed a few dances in the LHC tunnels and work spaces. Lerman spoke with symmetry's Calla Cofield about her impressions of CERN's huge scientific community, whether symmetry is beautiful, and why dancers and physicists share a certain kinship. She remains in contact with a number of scientists as she begins to shape the piece, set to debut in the fall of 2010, that she tentatively calls Matter of Origins.

Q. What made you choose particle physics and the LHC for your next project?

A. Well, that completely took me by surprise. I wasn't looking, and I wasn't imagining it at all. I was approached by Gordy Kane, a physicist at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, to at least think about [going to CERN] and I decided to go take a look. Once we went, then a whole lot of things took over.

A long time ago, my dance company spent almost two years going back and forth to a shipyard-the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard-for a big community arts project with multiple outcomes, including a finalé of 700 participants.

And in some ways CERN reminded me of that: this huge complex, this enormous number of people working together toward something much bigger than themselves. It's a very inviting kind of environment just to see the thousands of stories that are there.

I think the other thing is, as a dancer and choreographer I've spent a tremendous amount of my life defending something that's very hard to see. I mean people see dance, they see the dancers, but they have trouble understanding why it's valuable, what you're trying to say. And in some ways I feel that's reflected in what I learned initially from the physicists. It's very abstract, it's hard to see, people have trouble trying to understand it, it has tremendous value to us as a civilization but it's not easy to explain. So I think I felt a certain kindred spirit even though our fields are obviously quite distinct.

Q. What was the response from the physicists at CERN when you talked to them about your project?

A. I think people like to talk to artists, and the scientists are mostly very happy to speak. A lot of times they tell us things that they think we want to hear. They tell us things that they think are physical, or things that they think would look beautiful as a dance. But sometimes they'll just look at you with great bemusement and say, "Well, what's on your mind? What do you want to know?"

But what was really fun at CERN was that the minute Ben Wegman, the dancer, was down in the ATLAS cavern and he was dancing, just spinning, work stopped. People started flashing their camera phones and we understood later that there had been an electric current through the whole place. Word spread that there was a dancer down in the cavern. I think people got really excited. And of course they laughed and hooted and all that, but we're used to that. That was very interesting.

The other thing that I love-and maybe this is why it's interesting for scientists to spend time with us-is when you have to explain yourself to somebody who doesn't know any of your jargon, you are forced to try again. And when you try again, then I think sometimes you stumble into a way of describing, modeling, or actually understanding yourself better. I know that's true for me when I try to explain myself to people who don't know what I'm doing. I think that happens for the scientists too. And you know, we ask very challenging questions because we have a way of thinking and seeing that's different.

"As a dancer and choreographer I've spent a tremendous amount of my life defending something that's very hard to see."

Q. What were the challenging questions?

A. I'll tell you a conversation I'm in the midst of with Gordy. I keep hearing about symmetry. I read things by the physicists and they talk about symmetry and supersymmetry and the elegance, simplicity, beauty, and aesthetics of symmetry. Well, I wrote Gordy and I said for me this is a problem, because for me symmetry is not beautiful: symmetry suggests amateurs, symmetry suggests static. So now we're in a big discussion about that.

Meanwhile, with that conversation in mind, I went to Spain, where my daughter is spending her junior year, and we went into Cordoba. And we saw this Islamic influence in the architecture there and in these tiles that are all symmetric. And I got interested because I'm in the middle of this debate with Gordy and I actually liked the symmetry I saw there. I picked up a book on Islamic art and symmetry and the author says the Islamic symmetric design is an expression of the "essential relationships that lie beneath the visual surface of the world." So I am delighted to go down that path for a while, to study these ideas and to see where they go and to compare the language to what I'm hearing from the physicists. Whether this shows up in the piece or not I don't know, but we are working hard on symmetry right now.

Q. Were there any other big ideas that stood out to you when you talked to these scientists?

A. One of the things we're interested in is what are the questions they're asking, and which of those questions have real, enormous resonance for the public? For example, they think they're going to understand more about the big bang, and I think the public is just incredibly interested in that. I think how we see our beginnings really affects us emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, in all kinds of ways.

Last time I saw Gordy I said, "What happens if you don't find [the Higgs boson]?" He's convinced they're going to find it, and I said what if you don't? Who's right, who's wrong, and do you have to put some ideas to bed then? And does that mean that people who spent 20 years looking for it feel regret or shame, or is this the end of an idea? I don't know if regret is part of a scientist's world. In science, what happens when things turn a corner?

One of the conversations we got into a lot, for some reason, was physicists' spiritual feelings. They kept bringing this up. It was so interesting. I didn't ask a question about that but it just kept coming up, what the state of their belief was. And in fact I told them an old story, a Jewish creation story that's not the biblical one you usually hear; it's from the Midrash, one of the Jewish alternative stories to the Bible. God wants to create the world but God can't because God takes up too much room, so God contracts in order to make room for the world. That's a shorthand version. And the physicists just loved that.

Q. What did people have to say about spirituality?

A. There was a wide range, from cynicism to complete spiritual belief to people who actually said straight out, "My science is my religion, but let me point out all the parallels." And then they would point out all the ways in which CERN was like a church, and who was playing what role.

I think I did ask them if they were looking at the big bang, how they were helping the public through questions. You know, did they feel any responsibility about people who come with their religious beliefs about that? And in fact the scientists are thinking about it. They don't dismiss that question. I find that most professionals feel a responsibility to the issues that their field has to address or is causing them to address. But most of our professions don't value our helping make that work for the public. It's as if you're more of a professional if you stay disengaged from the public's need. And I find that very peculiar, but I find that's true across the board. I'd love to see that change.

Q. In some of the early dancing that your group has done for this project, you have people representing particles. What does that do to our notion of a particle?

A. It's one of those interesting things where we realize that all language is symbolic. Because even calling it a particle, you might think of a dust particle or a dirt particle or whatever is in people's imaginations. I ran into this with genomics stuff. They talked so much about protein folding, and we got so into folding and had such a good time with all this folding stuff. And then I finally saw an animation of what people thought protein folding was, and it's not folding at all! It's more like intense wrapping. I would never call it folding. That's when I realized that our language is problematic, too. It's not just that dancing is an approximation, but the language is an approximation unless you can see the actual thing, and with a lot of this stuff you can't. And that got me very excited, actually. I thought for a while that I could make a dance about dueling metaphors, because people say such different things when they're trying to explain something that you can't see.

"For me, symmetry is not beautiful: symmetry suggests amateurs, symmetry suggests static."

Q. What else would you like to see happen at CERN in terms of artists going there?

A. I wish there was enough money for CERN to have a whole group of artists there, because there are so many good stories to be told. It just wouldn't even cost that much to have an official storyteller in residence. My husband is a storyteller; that's his job. He collects stories and he tells people stories and he went with me on both these trips [to CERN], and unlike my work, which requires lots of bodies and lots of tech, he just pulls a stool out, sits down, and starts talking.

The thing is, there's so much to be learned. Everybody working at CERN has an interesting story. Even if you just started with "Why are you here?" or "How did you get here?" or "Who's the person in your life who helped you understand that this is where you needed to be?" we would learn so much about teachers! We would learn probably all there is to know about good teachers if we asked everybody at CERN who's the one that inspired you, when did it happen, why. And imagine the catalog of incredible discoveries we would hear. Or, we saw this guy mowing the lawn while we were there, and we thought wouldn't it be interesting to interview the guy who mows the lawn? What do you suppose he's thinking? You think he's worried? (laughs) You think he wonders if, you know...

Q. Does he wonder if they're going to create a black hole?

A. You know, he may embody some of those things we keep hearing about, I don't know.

Q. Are you going back to CERN again?

A. I hope to. I want to very, very much. We hope to have a three-week residency. But right now the funding in our world is really hard hit. We need to do it, but I don't know if we'll get to.

Q. The performance is set to premier in the fall of 2010. Will you perform it at CERN?

A. We would love to take it to CERN, and we talked to a festival held about ten to 15 minutes away from CERN where we could perform it. Or we could take it apart and do pieces of it around CERN. But we'd love to perform there.

Fermilab vs CERN--clash of atomic titans

PBS's Independent Lens on Tuesday November 25th will offer a film on Fermilab's competition with the LHC to discover the Higgs boson particle.

"Film chronicles race between Fermilab and CERN"

September 2nd, 2008

Symmetry

A character-driven documentary highlights the cross-Atlantic competition pitting US-based Fermilab against Europe-based CERN in the race to discover the supposed mass-endowing Higgs boson particle.

This research showdown will premier at the world’s largest science celebration, Science Chicago.

The 75-minute film Atom Smashers will air Sept. 19 and 21 at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry with a panel session following the initial screening. Eight Fermilab scientists play key roles while other employees appear occasionally in shots.

Following its Chicago debut, the film will head to several international cities and hit the air ways with a 53-minute version on PBS’s Independent Lens Nov. 25.

Co-director Monica Ross, an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, said the film doesn’t follow the traditional NOVA-like format of scientist interviews. Instead, the crew followed the lives of scientists working and trying to relax amidst the pressures of dealing with budget cuts, aging machinery, and the threat of watching the prize from a more than decade long search be ripped out of their grasp by the new experiment on the block: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

"There is enough physics there for the people that are interested to find out what the Higgs boson is and how the Tevatron works," says co-director Clayton Brown, a lecturer at Northwestern University. "But for those people who say, 'I flunked high school physics' there is enough character building, politics and culture to engage them."

In between long hours analyzing data and fixing four-story detectors, you see physicists engaging in athletic and musical hobbies and struggling with questions about how to balance a career and family.

While the larger story of the film draws on the quest for scientific discovery and America’s turbulent relationship with science funding, the characters demonstrate the similarities among the passionate in all careers.

"I think most people don’t tend to associate the words passion and obsession with physicists or scientists in general," Brown says. "They think of them as very dry. It has been really great to show the rest of the world that physicists are just as passionate or obsessed about what they are working on as musicians or poets."

The Chicago-based 137films acquired 110 hours of interviews during 3½ years of filming at Fermilab, in Washington DC, London, and New York. Footage of CERN was borrowed from a director working on a documentary there. The film has received international attention from several film and science festivals.

Although none of the crew has a scientific background, they say they are fascinated by science's ability to explain "who we are, what we do, and why we are here."

The documentary poses questions for the public to consider.

"We hope viewers will come away from this asking themselves: Should we continue to do this type of work? And it looks like the dominance is shifting overseas, is that something we should be concerned about?," Brown says. "Those questions are too important for us to answer for the viewer."

Preview

The Atom Smashers

Fermilab 'ghosts' hint at new particles

"60 Minutes" and the LHC

Argonne National Laboratory

"'60 Minutes' segment to feature high-energy physicists Sunday"

ARGONNE, Ill. (Sept. 25, 2008)—Bob Stanek of Argonne's High Energy Physics Division is one of several scientists to be featured in "The Collider," a segment of CBS' "60 Minutes" TV show, scheduled for this Sunday, Sept. 28, at 6 p.m.

The segment, which focuses on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, will also feature scientists Monica Dunford from the University of Chicago, Steven Goldfarb from the University of Michigan, Steve Nahn from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and James Gillies and Austin Ball from CERN.

Archived segment

LHC shut down for maintenance

I suppose this will make some people happy.

"Hadron Collider halted for months"

September 20th. 2008

BBC News

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be out of action for at least two months, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) says.

Part of the new collider was turned off for the weekend while engineers investigated a magnet failure.

But a Cern spokesman said the damage to the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator was worse than anticipated.

The failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C.

The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.

Cern spokesman James Gillies said the sector that was damaged will have to be warmed up well above absolute zero so that repairs can be made.

Cern would have to shut off the new particle collider do to the repairs, he added.

Delays

The first beams were fired successfully around the accelerator's 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring over a week ago.

The crucial next step is to collide those beams head on. However, the fault appears to have ruled out any chance of these experiments taking place for the next two months at least.

The quench occurred during final testing of the last of the LHC's electrical circuits to be commissioned.

At 1127 (0927 GMT) on Friday, the LHC's online logbook recorded a quench in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors.

The entry stated that helium had been lost to the tunnel and that vacuum conditions had also been lost.

It added that the Cern fire brigade had been called to the scene.

he superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9 kelvin above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit.

As a result of the quench, the temperature of about 100 of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C.

The setback came just a day after the LHC's beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.

"LHC loses liquid helium"

by

Jon Cartwright

September 19th, 2008

physicsworld.com

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has lost up to a tonne of liquid helium after some of its superconducting magnets inadvertently heated up this morning, physicsworld.com has learnt.

A log entry written by the current LHC co-ordinator at 11:27 am CET (10:27 am BST) states that there has been a “massive quench” in sector 3–4. Quenches occur when superfluid helium in the magnets rises above its operating temperature of 1.9 K, and can be caused, for example, when a proton beam veers off course.

According to the entry, firefighters were dispatched to that area of the tunnel. It also says that the vacuum in that part of the beam pipe was lost.

A source at CERN, the European lab hosting the accelerator, says that the quench caused one tonne of superfluid helium — about 1% of the LHC’s total — to escape.

An official spokesperson was not available for comment. However, a message on the machine’s website states: "During the commissioning of the final LHC sector (sector 3–4) for 5 TeV operation, an incident occurred at 12:05 [am] today resulting in a large helium leak into the tunnel. Further details are not yet known. Investigations will continue over the weekend and more information will be made available as soon as possible."

An LHC status report on the same website shows that temperatures are now being brought down, implying that technicians have been able to replace the lost helium.

The problem will be a disappointment to the operations team, who had enjoyed a highly successful media day last week when they circulated beams of protons in both directions around the machine’s 27 km-long ring.

Must have been chaos...

LHC--no problem so far

Pinching validates existence...
I pinched myself...
Therefore, I exist

The LHC was successful today but understand that this was just a linear experiment and that particle collisions won't occur until next month.

"Scientists' joy after world's greatest atom-smasher starts operations"

September 10th, 2008

PhysOrg.com

Particle physicists were jubilant on Wednesday after the long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first test with flying colours.

Cheers, applause and the pop of a champagne cork -- rather than the cataclysmic suck of a black hole, as doomsayers had feared -- marked the breakthrough at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Robert Aymar, the organisation's director general, hailed it as a "historic day" for CERN and mankind's thirst for knowledge.

Humans have "a quest for (knowing) where they came from and where they should go, whether the Universe will end, and where the Universe will go in the future," he said.

Just after 0730 GMT, the first proton beam was injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHV), a massive built 100 metres (325 feet) underground at CERN headquarter.

The mission aims at resolving some of the greatest enigmas in physics: whether a so-called "God particle" exists that would account for the nature of mass; an explanation for "dark matter" and "dark energy" that account for 96 percent of the cosmos; and whether other dimensions exist in parallel to our own.

In a 27-kilometre (16.9-mile) circular tunnel on the Swiss-French border, parallel beams of protons will be accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

Superconducting magnets will then steer the counter-rotating beams so that strings of protons smash together in four huge laboratories, fleetingly replicating the conditions that prevailed at the "Big Bang" that created the Universe 13.7 billion years ago.

Arrays of detectors will trace the sub-atomic rubble spewed out from the collision, looking for signatures of novel particles.

CERN scientists have dismissed fears that the process could create a "black hole" whose super-gravity would swallow the Earth.

Wednesday's startup marked the start of a long and cautious commissioning process to check equipment and operational procedures before these collisions can get underway.

The first batch of protons was halted, sector by sector, to verify that monitoring systems and the steering magnets were working properly. Their speed was purposely slowed for the inspection process.

The clockwise beam completed this first test lap in under an hour, causing an eruption of joy and an outbreak of bubbly in the control room.

"No-one would have imagined that this could have been done in less than an hour. It's phenomonenal, quite unbelievable," an operator told AFP. "We are very happy and proud."

By comparison, the predecessor to the LHC at CERN, the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, took 12 hours to achieve the same goal.

A test of the anticlockwise beam would take place later on Wednesday, scientists said.

LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans, who has been working on the collider for 14 years, said he felt a wave of relief after the protons had completed their first lap so smoothly.

"It's a machine of enormous complexity and things can go wrong at any time," he said.

Messages of congratulations flooded in from CERN's partners and rivals, including the legendary Fermilab particle physics lab near Chicago.

The LHC took nearly 20 years to complete and at six billion Swiss francs (3.76 billion euros, 5.46 billion dollars) is one of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted.

When all is ready, the LHC will whizz two parallel beams, one clockwise and the other anticlockwise, around the tunnel at up to 11,000 laps per second before steering them into collisions into four chambers whose walls are swathed with detectors.

The first collisions are likely to start in several weeks, but only next year will the LHC be cranked up to its full capacity of 14 teraelectronvolts -- a massive amount of energy -- or seven times the record held by Fermilab.

Over the 10-15 years in which will the LHC will operate, masses of data will spew from these collisions and will be scrutinised by physicists around the world.

"It's about acquiring knowledge for humanity about the behaviour of fundamental matter," physicist Daniel Denegri told AFP. "We expect to make discoveries that could be rather spectacular."

The Holy Grail will be finding a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass. Believed to be ubiquitous -- yet also frustratingly elusive until now -- the Higgs has been dubbed the "God particle."

The giant machine was several times over its initial budget and began operations two years late.

Before the startup, Internet-driven rumours said the LHC would create black holes or a nasty hypothetical particle called a strangelet that would gobble up the planet.

CERN commissioned a panel to verify its safety calculations and France also carried out its own assessment.

Σπυροπούλου [Maria Spiropulu]--physicist

BIG BOOK on high-energy physics available soon

British politics and science

Cooooooooool--LHC in preparatory stage

Drawing a perspective on the LHC

Eleventh hour legal wrangling

"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

"God particle"/Higgs boson--knowledge of the universe

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

Kate McAlpine raps about the LHC

LHC again

Nerds/geeks rule

Still fussing in the courts about the LHC

Government and lawyers put suits to rest

Now it will be officially put to rest though I doubt the naysayers will be placated.

"Government Seeks Dismissal of End-of-World Suit Against Collider"

by

Dennis Overbye

June 27th, 2008

The New York Times

Calling its claims "overly speculative and not credible," and saying that it is too late anyway, lawyers for the federal government argued this week that a so-called "doomsday suit" intended to prevent the startup of a the world’s most powerful particle accelerator should be thrown out of court.

When it begins operations, the collider will smash together subatomic particles at the speed of light in search of new forms of matter and new laws of physics.

In the lawsuit, filed in March in Honolulu district court, Walter Wagner, a retired radiation safety expert who lives in Hawaii, and Luis Sancho, a Spanish science writer, contended that the Large Hadron Collider could create microscopic black holes that could wind up eating the Earth, or other dangerous particles known as strangelets — a sort of contagious dead matter — or so-called magnetic monopoles, which could catalyze the destruction of ordinary matter.

The two men sued the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider outside Geneva, Switzerland, and its American collaborators, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to stop the collider from going into operation until it had been proven safe.

In a barrage of some 40 documents filed the this week, government lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed and that they were entitled to a summary judgement in their favor because the lawsuit is subject to a six-year statute of limitations. The clock started ticking in this regard in 1998 or 1999 when the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy began spending money on the collider, the government lawyers say.

The government's counterattack comes on the heels of a long-awaited safety report issued by Cern physicists last week and approved by an outside panel that concluded there was no danger to the Earth from black holes or anything else that might come out of the collider. Everything that could happen in the collider has already happened millions of times over due to cosmic rays, the physicists said.

"There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC," the report said.

Citing this and a previous safety report in 2002, the government argued that the plaintiffs, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho, had no standing because they could not demonstrate any credible injury. "Scientifically," the brief says, "there is no basis for any conceivable threat that Plaintiffs have theoretically envisaged, such as strangelets, black holes, and magnetic monopoles."

This is not the first time, as the government noted, that Mr. Wagner has forecast the apocalypse. In 1999 and 2000, he sued to stop the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or Rhic, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island using the same arguments, which were found to be "speculative." Those cases were dismissed.

"This court should similarly reject Plaintiffs' challenges for the pure speculation they are and dismiss Plaintiffs' claims against Federal Defendants," the government said this week.

The lawyers also argued that even if Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho won, it would do them no good because the American share of the collider’s $8 billion cost — some $531 million — has now all been spent. Indeed, on Wednesday, June 25, Raymond Orbach, under secretary for science at the Department of Energy, issued a formal proclamation that the U.S. construction effort had been completed.

Although the U.S. continues to spend some money to support the experiments that will sift and analyze the products of these subatomic collisions, the machine will start up this fall with or without American participation.

In a deposition filed along with the government brief, Bruce P. Strauss, associate program manager for the collider at the Dept. of Energy, said, "If U.S. scientists were pulled back from the LHC today, this would have no impact on CERN’s start of LHC operations."

He added that important discoveries could be made almost immediately once the collider started up. "If U.S. physicists were enjoined from participating in experiments during that period, the U.S. would miss the early scientific benefits of its $531 million investment in the LHC." Of course, Cern, being a European organization based in Geneva, is outside the jurisdiction of a court in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, the government also argues, Fermilab should be let off the hook. It cannot be sued, they said, because it is not a legal entity, not an agency of a corporation. It is "simply a collection of physical asssets (such as scientific equipment and buildings)" owned by the Department of Energy, which approves and pays for all the operations there, according to an affidavit from Joanna M. Livengood, the department’s site manager there.

According to Andrew Ames, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice, the court set the date of Sept. 2 for on the government’s motions, which means both sides will be producing more briefs and depositions in the next two months.

Mr. Wagner said by e-mail that he plans to fight on. "I believe the Complaint does state a valid case," he said, referring to his lawsuit.

Among other things, he said, he and Mr. Sancho will be filing affidavits saying that the safety report is flawed and incomplete, that Fermilab really is a legal entity, and that the U.S. agencies still have "obligations to Cern."


"Fear and trembling"...of the unknown

"God particle"/Higgs boson--knowledge of the universe

I have not and will not post a counter statement from one individual for the links will not function, but in all fairness there are those that are most perturbed about the LHC and it appears that the spokesperson for the movement is JTankers whose website is here .

If you are interested:

Abstract:

The LHC is an opportunity to make a change. By thinking, and speaking publicly, about fundamental concepts that underlie physical theory, the physicist may both accrue public interest in his work and contribute to the analysis of the foundations of modern physics. We start by several remarks on the scientific and societal context of today’s theoretical physics. Major classes of models for physics to be explored at the LHC are then reviewed. This leads us to propose an LHC timeline and a list of potential effects on theoretical physics and the society.

We then explore three conceptual questions connected with the LHC physics. These are placed in the context of debates both in high-energy physics and in the philosophy of physics. Symmetry is the first issue: we critically review the argument for its a priori and instrumental functions in physical theory and study its connection with naturalness. If perceived as a dynamical process in analogy with non-unitary measurement in quantum mechanics, spontaneous symmetry breaking is found to emphasize the role of randomness against physical law. Contrary to this cosmological
view, the strictly non-dynamical role of spontaneous symmetry breaking within quantum field theory provides one of the strongest arguments in favour of the instrumental approach to symmetry. Second, we study the concept of effective field theory and its philosophical significance. Analogy with S-matrix suggests that one should treat effective theory both as a pragmatic and a provisional tool. Finally, we question the meaning of fine tuning. Legitimate fine-tuning arguments are interpreted nonontologically.

These are contrasted with unsound use of fine tuning, e.g., for comparing different models. Counterfactual reasoning referring to the anthropic principle is shown to be problematic both conceptually and in the light of quantum theory.

On the eve of the LHC: conceptual questions in high-energy physics

The last word...

June 28th, 2008

Could hadron collider devour the Earth?

Particle colliders creating black holes that could devour the Earth. Sounds like a great Hollywood script. But, according to UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor Steve Giddings, it's pure fiction.

Giddings has co-authored a paper, "Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes," that has been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review D, documenting his study of the safety of microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is nearing completion in Europe. The paper, co-authored by Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is building the world's largest particle collider, investigates hypothesized behavior of tiny black holes that might be created by high-energy collisions in the CERN particle accelerator. If they appear at all, these black holes would exist for "about a nano-nano-nanosecond," Giddings said, adding that they would have no effect of consequence. However, the paper studies whether there could be any large-scale effects in an extremely hypothetical situation where the black holes don't evaporate. The Giddings/Mangano study concludes that such microscopic black holes would be harmless. In fact, he added, nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already, Giddings said. "The future health of our planet and the safety of its people are of paramount concern to us all," Giddings said. "There were already very strong physics arguments that there is no risk from hypothetical micro black holes, and we've provided additional arguments ruling out risk even under very bizarre hypotheses." The LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland, is expected to begin operations this summer. It will collide proton beams at levels of energy never before produced in a particle accelerator. Those results will then be studied for clues to new forces of nature, and possibly even extra dimensions of space. The first collision of beams is likely to be in September. The $8 billion project has taken 14 years. Two men have filed a federal lawsuit in Hawaii in an attempt to halt the LHC due to their concerns about the safety of black holes. Giddings' study has been cited by CERN as evidence of the safety of the LHC. Giddings is a recognized expert in high-energy and gravitational physics. In 2001, he coauthored the first paper investigating black hole production at the LHC and he has authored many other papers on the subject, including an article for Scientific American. Mangano is also recognized as an expert in high-energy physics and, in particular, hadron collisions. This project, Giddings said, greatly benefited from contributions and advice of other members of UCSB's top-rated Physics Department. Source: University of California - Santa Barbara

Σπυροπούλου [Maria Spiropulu]--physicist

Maria Spiropulu

Some time ago when I was involved in a physics forum, and there was a topic initiated on the sparsity of women in the sciences--physics in particular. During the course of discussion I received a letter from Maria Spiropulu who at that time was at Fermi Labs and has now moved to CERN and the LHC project. Happily, I can say that more women are becoming involved in all branches of the sciences--especially physics.

My name is Maria Spiropulu and I am a research physicist.

I am very glad to see in this forum an organized effort to encourage students, starting at the early stages of their education , to be and keep being scientifically literate as adults. And if they choose to do so, to professionally and successfully be involved in scientific research in an academic or technology related environment. The young wave of college and graduate students in my field, and I think in most natural sciences, both genders, is an enthusiastic, creative, mutlitalented and fun bunch of people to work with, teach and learn from.

In this country the overall number of students that finish with scientific or technology related bachelors degrees and those who are entering in college in such disciplines seems to be going down a fact which is alerting indeed -- and I believe the government is paying close attention to this issue.

I am writing a chapter for a guide-to-science collection that will be published soon and I will keep you posted when it comes out.

With Best Regards,

Maria

Wikipedia:

Maria Spiropulu...was born in 1970 in Kastoria, a small mountain town of Greece, and is an experimental physicist; she is currently based at CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory outside Geneva, and is working on experiments for the Large Hadron Collider. These experiments are designed to test some of the most imaginative and far reaching ideas ever proposed in physics and are hoped to begin at 2008. She describes her work as part of the search to discover the origins of the universe.

Maria Spiropulu received her Bachelor’s degree from the Physics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1993. She had already begun research activity from 1991, working as a technical assistant at CERN’S DELPHI and later at BESSY, the synchrotron laboratory in Berlin, Germany. After graduation she went to Harvard University for her PhD in particle physics.

For the next seven years her time was shared between Boston and Batavia, Illinois, home of Tevatron, the world’s highest energy particle accelerator at that time, where she worked for the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment. For her Doctoral thesis, which was completed in August 21, 2000, Spiropulu developed a “blind” analysis, to search the accelerator’s output data for evidence of supersymmetry.

Throughout her “schooling”, she had other interests. She played drums and sang for a Fermilab band called "Drug Sniffing Dogs" (a particular exotic band, with a repertoire ranging from Metal to Jazz), until she was expelled for not attending rehearsals. She also practiced for several years in martial arts, especially karate, and later went on her way by doing kick boxing. In her early teens, she wanted to be an F-16 pilot and then an astronaut.

With a new PhD from Harvard, Maria Spiropulu joined the University of Chicago in 2001, and began searching for spatial extra-dimensions. Her analysis was based on Tevatron data obtained from 1992 to 1996. She was offered a research physicist position at CERN’s LHC in 2003, but before joining CERN, she worked for the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she set up extra dimensions analyses with RunII data. On September 19, 2003, she reported, along with Kevin Burkett of Harvard, that any extra-dimensions, if they exist, must be curled up into circles smaller than a hundredth of an inch.

The hunting for physics beyond the Standard Model, including signal for supersymmetry and extra dimensions/Kaluza-Klein gravitons, led Maria Spiropulu, in 2004, back to Geneva and CERN, where the LHC will turn on with an energy seven times larger than Tevatron. There, together with thousands of physicists, she helps prepare for a revolution she says “will blow our minds”.

Three of her papers:

"Collider Experiment: Strings, Branes and Extra Dimensions"

"Experimental Status of Beyond the Standard Model Collider Searches"

"Particle Physics Probes Of Extra Spacetime Dimensions"



Maria Spiropulu's web page [under construction] at CERN

World Year of Physics 2005

This was a spectacular event in 2005 celebrating Einstein via the "World Year of Physics 2005". Okay, it was no Hollywood slick production being all live and something quite novel but it is, nevertheless, an interesting piece of history of science. This was an event originating from Europe with contributions from CERN [Geneva], National Science Education Center [Taipei], Pirelli Relativity Challenge Awards [Venice], Imperial College [London], Fermilab [Chicago], Slac- Exploratorium [San Francisco], and Bloomfield Science Museum [Jerusalem] as broadcast on December 1st, 2005. It was a twelve hour event broken down into sections and hosted by Paola Catapano.

Paola Catapano

Beyond Einstein/World Wide Webcast

Thursday, December 1, 2005

CERN and the World Year of Physics International Steering Committee are partnering with some of the world's leading physics laboratories, science museums and technology partners to present a twelve-hour live webcast to celebrate Einstein and look beyond the World Year of Physics 2005.

This unprecedented event will be broadcast live on the Internet from a webcast studio in the CERN Globe of Science and Innovation. Similar locations around the world are connected via Tandberg videoconference: the Telecom Future Centre (Venice), Imperial College London, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Chicago), the Exploratorium (San Francisco) hosting scientists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Bloomfield Science Museum (Jerusalem) and the National Science Education Centre (Taipei).

From the seven main platforms, internauts will be taken on a world tour to other physics laboratories and science museums visiting virtually all the time zones of the planet, from Europe to America, from Asia to Tasmania and as far south as Antarctica.

The programme includes subjects such as relativity, gravitational waves, mass and gravity, antimatter and neutrinos, along with the mysteries remaining in Einstein's physics, and the technologies derived from it. A global audience will be able to discuss the impact of Einstein's discoveries and look beyond them with top-level physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies, and with physics Nobel laureates David Gross, Murray Gell-Mann and Gerard 't Hooft, connected from the 2005 Solvay physics Conference in Brussels.

Einstein was also a refugee, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will discuss the positive contribution refugees can make to their society of adoption.

Peter Kirstein from University College London, who was instrumental in the Internet.s early evolution, will be joined by fellow Internet pioneer Bob Kahn, and Robert Cailliau who played a key role at the birth of the Web, to explore the role that basic science plays in the evolution of information technology.

Nobel laureate Leon Lederman will host a show live from Fermilab, featuring interviews with young physicists, fun physics demonstrations and live music.

Other highlights include the award ceremony of the Pirelli Relativity Challenge from the Telecom Future Centre in Venice.

Major technology providers are supporting CERN in this unprecedented event. Tandberg, a global leader in video communication will be responsible for the connection of the seven locations by videoconference. A multipoint-videoconferencing system will be in use, which means that each of the seven participants will always be able to see the six other partners on screen. Telecom Italia is providing global webcast streaming, the INFN (Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics) Multimedia Service is providing webcast encoding. Cisco Systems, a leader in networking for the Internet, has joined the World Year of Physics International Steering Committee, the European Physical Society and the European Science Centre Network, ESCITE, in supporting the science laboratories with their respective expertise and in assembling a compelling programme.

The entire event is available for viewing online.

Beyond Einstein/World Wide Webcast