“Indeed,” said George. “The next beam cycle starts tomorrow night. We’re making preparations for it now. Let’s go down and see what’s going on.” He turned and led the way to the elevator.
As they descended, Alice leaned back against the wall and scribbled detailed notes. Then she glanced down, carefully examined the floor of the elevator car, looking for crevices where an ant queen might be able to hide.
18
ALICE SAT ON THE LEM COUNTING HOUSE SOFA, SIPPING from a can of Diet Coke and reading over her notes. She had followed George around the enormous LEM detector for almost two hours. It had been interesting, but now she felt tired.
The room was a typical temporary office module: vinyl tile floor, diffused-fluorescent ceiling lights, and textured plastic workspace partitions. But it was filled to overflowing with computer displays and electronic equipment which, she now understood, consolidated a minute distillation of the vast information processed in the multistory pile of electronics trailers that comprised the electronics stacks down below.
She sucked at the straw and turned as George, across the room, put away his cellphone and walked toward her.
“Roy’s done with Jake, but he apparently has another emergency,” he said. “Belinda suggested that you come to her office tomorrow morning, so that the two of you can work out your interview schedule and probably get in to see Roy. Is that okay?”
Alice nodded. “Sure,” she said, “no problem. I’ll be in Waxahachie for a while. I’ve rented a house there for two months. I’ll spend a couple of weeks here at the SSC doing interviews, then write the Search article and perhaps work on a book project, too.” And I’ll finish the damned thing before I leave, she thought.
“Very good,” said George. He seemed pleased.
“I’ve been reading over the notes I made while you were telling me about the reason for building the SSC,” Alice said.” Can I check them with you to make sure I have it straight?”
“Sure,” said George.
Alice flipped pages in her notebook. “Okay, you people in high-energy physics are not satisfied with this QCD theory you presently use, what you called the ‘Quantum Chromodynamics Standard Model,’ even though it works well, because it relies on too many arbitrary numbers. Did you say that it has twenty-three adjustable parameters?”
“Yes,” said George, “the quark masses, the lepton masses, some mixing parameters, the interaction strengths, and some other things.”
“And you need data from collisions at high energies, which should lead you to a new theory that will explain where the masses and strengths come from. You think that the SSC will provide that data because…” She frowned at her notes. “I’m not sure I caught this part. Something about GeV temperature and boiling water and a change of ‘phase,’ whatever that is.”
George smiled. “In high-energy physics we measure temperatures in energy units like GeV instead of Celsius or Fahrenheit. There’s a special temperature, which we believe is around four hundred GeV — four hundred billion electron volts — where space itself changes its properties in a second-order phase transition, going from the ‘normal’ vacuum of the early Big Bang to a frozen-out vacuum condensate where particles have the masses we measure. ‘Phase transition’ just means space changes its properties, like ice melting or water boiling. The ‘second-order’ business means the change is very smooth, with no conspicuous jumps or bumps.”
Alice nodded, reading her notes. “And you believe the universe made this change early in the Big Bang, after the first millionth of a millionth of a second, and that the SSC will get you to the same temperature.”
“Yes,” said George, “exactly!”
“What I don’t understand,” said Alice, “is why you need the SSC data. If the theory tells you so much about what you’re going to measure, why don’t you just calculate it?”
George laughed. “You sound like a member of the SSC program advisory committee. The scenario I just told you comes from an analogy with the theory used in condensed matter physics to explain superconductivity and related phenomena. In principle, particle theorists could use the same theory, except for a few ‘minor’ problems. They don’t understand the nature of what is being ‘condensed’ from the vacuum, or the underlying forces, or the correct mathematical formalism to use. Therefore, anything they do is a stab in the dark. They need data to set them on the right path. Until we get that data here at the SSC, or perhaps at CERN, we’re stuck where we are, with a paste-up theory that doesn’t really explain the fundamental nature of the universe.”
Alice nodded as she wrote. “And why is it important that it be done now, instead of, say, waiting ten or twenty years until we have better technology and can better afford the expense? As I recall, that’s what some congressmen who opposed the project were suggesting.”
George pursed his lips. “You reporters ask nasty questions,” he said. “When the SSC construction was started in 1988, there was a team of people available to build it who had experience from Fermilab and SLAC and Cornell and were ready to move on to the new project. Building accelerators is an art. If you wait ten or twenty years, it becomes a lost art.
“The same can be said for the people like me who build the detectors and analyze the data. The manpower for the enormous effort needed to successfully build a detector must come from somewhere. That manpower and expertise has been built up in this country since the 1950s, and if Congress had inserted a ten or twenty-year delay, that would have been lost. The trained people would have gone elsewhere, done other things. They would have been unavailable, perhaps retired or even dead, by the time they were needed.”
Alice frowned. “You believe that the SSC could not have been built at all, if it had been delayed and hadn’t been started until, say, 2010?”
George shrugged. “I told you I’m not a very good prophet. All I can say is that the hypothetical people who would start to build the SSC in 2010 would not be the same people who actually built it, and they would surely have far less experience as accelerator builders. There were enough design glitches and start-up problems with the SSC as it was. I’m sure that, starting the project in 2010, there would be a lot more.”
George paused while Alice wrote in her notebook. He smiled, then looked at his watch. “I’m afraid I have to attend a meeting in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “Anything else I can tell you about?”
“Yes,” Alice said. “Next question. I gather that the SSC laboratory has invested quite heavily in telepresence and has some leadership in that field. Why?”
“Well, let’s consider my own case,” said George. “The SSC laboratory is three thousand kilometers from my university. In the old days, if I wanted to do physics here, I’d have to pack up and come with my colleagues, graduate students, and postdocs and either live here most of the year or make nearly weekly trips here. I’d have to spend many days just flying back and forth between Dallas and Seattle, and even more in residence here, away from my classes and most of my students. There was no real alternative. The cost of large particle accelerators is so great that there can be only a few of them, and those who want to use them must rearrange their lives accordingly. My wife divorced me a few years ago because she didn’t like the rearrangements and finally couldn’t tolerate them.”
Alice noted that detail. “Like the astronomers who used to travel to Australia or Chile to use telescopes that could study the Southern sky?” she suggested. She had interviewed some Florida State University astronomers for the Democrat some years ago.
“Exactly,” said George. “Fifteen or twenty years ago, no one thought the situation would ever change. But then came the miracle of bandwidth.”