So in the end, the challenge of doing a piece for The Verb, BBC Radio 3 - a beginners guide to the words of particle physics...
Here is the uncut version...a response to the beauty of physics, mixing real voices with an imaginary voice, and sonic interpretations of particle collisions as collected from one of CERN"s detectors...fact meeting fiction, vision meeting precision, imagination meeting application...the beauty of particle physics reflected in the form of the piece...
With thanks to the wonderful physicists who took part and who's playfulness made the piece when they became and described their favourite particles - John Ellis, Michael Doser, Alison Lister, Christine Sutton, Henri Bacachou, Luis Alvarez Gaume, and big thank you too, to Katharina Voight for her sonic interpretations of particles colliding.
Listen to the BBC Radio 3 version produced by Laura Thomas http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnsf The Verb on April 9th 2010 at 21.15.
But for the meantime here is the full version for you to imagine...
PARTICLE COLLIDER
An introductory lexicon to the words for some of the particles you will find in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, beneath the foothills of the Jura mountains in the 27km ring. Featuring the voices of scientists who work there...showing the playfulness and imagination of particle physics...
Vox is the guide, who may or may not be in the ring...it is for you to discover. But Vox changes tempi and rhythm as the words themselves deliberately suggest, in the blink of an eye...so when words have deliberate rhymes, the pace is fast and connected and rhymic, running into each other, like particles colliding...the alliteration and repetition is deliberate and a way of conveying collisions...Take-it-Make-It-Hold is as your own for example is said at great speed...and thus the piece reflects the sounds of particles as they interact...the very sounds which Katharina Voight has used to interpret the data of particle physiscs...
Vox is a warm, alto voice - playful and very intimate. She wants you to understand and be as captivated as she is by the world of particle physics and the terms which whirl about.
FX - Sounds of Particles colliding...as collected at the detector ALICE, September 2009
VOX - FEMALE, ALTO
[starting in a hush of intimacy and thought..]
Close your eyes. For one tightly held moment. This moment here. Now. Or there. Back then. A moment ago. A century ago. A day- an-hour-a milli-second ago. No matter. All matter. Any time now... Just take it-Make it-Hold it as your own.
Eyes closed. Pinpricks of light. Picked out. Like an electric tattoo. Neon bright. Necklace tight. Bright-Light-Tight. Falling before your eyes - a curtain of exquisite rain. Beating out time. Deep-earth-down. Muon down. Until we are here. There. Where. In this tunnel. Beneath your feet. Above your head. Side on. Head on. In no place... Some place. No time at all. No matter. It All matters. Words matter. Here. There. In this peculiar, particular, particle universe:
CHORUS: Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Proton, Lepton, Neutrino and Squark
[Coming randomly from different parts of stereo image]
VOX : Dimensions slipping and sliding. Watch your step - it is riddled with holes. Your body is a sieve. A billion neutrinos every second pouring through every centimetre of your skin. The mind's footholds - gone. It's Jorge Luis' Borge's library of Babel, in which the books contain all knowledge, but seemingly mean nothing at all. Where, plucking a book off the shelf, means it melts in your hands, words spilling through your fingers to voice their own thoughts:
INSERT Montage of physicists' voices spinning out :
I am a muon...a neutrino... an anti-proton...a gravitino - the best detective...a Gluon
CHORUS
Slepton, neutrino, proton smuon
Electron, Gravitino, squark, gluon
[random spatial stereo placement]
VOX: Let's grab that one. That last one word. Gluon. Hold it fast. Like it's name suggests. Catch it as catch can. Before it slips away:
INSERT: John Ellis as a gluon
Hi I am a gluon. My job is to hold nuclear particles together...so my first job is to hold quarks together inside a proton...so you could say I am responsible for holding the whole thing together. I am quite a colourful character, because quarks come in many colours, red, blue, yellow
[Fade under as it continues]
VOX: [Cuts in] Quarks? Did he say Quarks? Three Quarks for Mr Marks. That line from Finnegans Wake. The babel and babble of books. A subatomic particle with a literary name. Courtesy of James Joyce. And in the world of quarks. There are three too. Just like the good book says.
INSERT: Alison Lister as top quark
I am called Top Quark but I was originally called truth because my friend that's the bottom, used to be called beauty. They used to have strange too. Truth and beauty sounded nice...but the more pragmatic physics named me top and my friend bottom because Strange was always known as middle.
Truth is a much nicer name, top is not bad though because you can imagine top is a very special - sort of top of the pile.
FX
A quark is one of the smallest building blocks around us. The smallest blocks are quarks and leptons - essentially what makes up nucleus - and protons and neutrons are all made up of quarks and gluons which are the sticky stuff which hold them together
You will find me right in the middle of the collisions...I only exist for a short period of time...you wont actually be able to see me but only what I decay into...
FX - FADE UP SOUNDS OF PARTICLES COLLIDING
VOX: Why stop here? Let's meet another. They may be nearly all greek to me - proton, neutron, electron - but here's one with an Italian ending - thanks to the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi.
INSERT: Christine Sutton as a neutrino
Hello! I am an electron neutrino..The electron neutrino was first discovered in 1956, that was more than 20 years after it had been proposed by a physicist called Wolfgang.Pauli. In fact Pauli was embarrassed about his hypothesis about the neutrino because the neutrino hardly exists at all and it wasn't discovered for some time. You cant' see me.
Electron neutrinos come out all the time, from nuclear reactions in the earth or sun.
In the LHC I'll be zipping out of the collisions which make the protons. Other neutrinos identical to me or some with other names. You know I am here, because occasionally like the invisible man I can ping off something and knock something over, like someone walking along the corridor kicking over a wastepaper basket, without seeing them - so that's a neutrino.
FX - Sound of a ping. Done as a sting.
CHORUS:
Hadron, Neutrino, Meson, Tauon
Electron, Gravitino, Photon, Pion
Proton, neutrino, quark, muon
Electron, gravitino, squark, gluon
Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Proton, Lepton, Neutrino, Squark
VOX: Words, words everywhere and not a moment to think...in the blink of an eye, a twist of the tongue, names collide:
INSERT Luis Alvarez Gome as gravitino
I am a gravitino. Every time I am produced I can decay if I so desire into a quark or a squark, I always decay into pairs. I am very sociable.
The name was given by Murray Gellman, a great man who gave names. He is the one who invented quarks, and then he imitated Fermi, hence the word gravitino...
If you have nothing better to do, then you invent names, and sometimes stories and theories...[laugh] .You need to be whimsical. Most of the things we are looking at have no names...quarks have colours, tastes and flavours...this is obviously whimsical because they are small, dont last long, and we cant see them...but giving them names you give them pictures...metaphors...
Segue
INSERT Alison Lister
Physics is a very down to earth subject which is why when physcists find names, they try and be as creative as possible and one way in which they express their humour or creative sides.
FX OF Particles colliding...mixed through with a roulette wheel...
Monte Carlo is what we compare the LHC too...casinos...It is a really nice place in the south france...but for us, it is the method that we use to create simulation of the physics which goes on in our detectors...quantum mechanics only predicts a probablily of things and not an absolute outcomes. Monte Carlo probably comes from the fact it has a lots of casinos and that is dominated by probability and so are our simulations techniques.
VOX: [Teasingly] Do you get it now? Is it all making sense? Non sense. All sense? Some sense? All reason and no rhyme. Or all rhyme and no reason. Alice Through the Looking Glass. A real quantum world - if ever I saw one [Irony]:
INSERT: John Ellis as Higgs Boson
Hi I am the Higgs Boson...now I have a very weighty role in particle physics...I feel I do a very important job in the world...If I weren't doing my job...If I do my job too well the sun wouldn't shine
If I were a fairy tale character, I would be the cheshire cat...except I would be the cheshire cat with a smile...but eventually I might become a real cat although so far I haven't been discovered...there were previous rounds which looked for me...Fermilab in the united states...but I have been hidden up until now..I really hate being called a god particle...I really wish people didn't call me this.
VOX: Look...It's behind you..There in the air. A smile. Lunar wide. A melon grin. A cat's tale/tail ready to be told.
[Wonderment]
[BEAT - LIKE AN AFTER THOUGHT]
FX: Sound of particles colliding
[Bring up under I am a proton]
VOX [Excited]: We are on the ultimate collision mission.. This millionth of a second dash-dare. A race against time...and light But wait - one nano second. I am all words, me. A proton. The first. The one which does this ring-riding. The super colliding. A million splashes before last Christmas. Millions more happening now. Meeting myself again and again and again...and all these other particles too...again and again and again and again and again and again and again
[REVERB ECHO and fade under and hold then up the other end]:
CHORUS: Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Proton, Lepton, Neutrino and Squark
Hadron, Neutrino, Meson, Tauon
Electron, Gravitino, Photon, Pion
Proton, neutrino, quark, muon
Electron, gravitino, squark, gluon
VOX: again and again and again
[Fading up]
Except....STOP.
[Fear/urgency/assertive for once]
INSERT Michael Doser as anti-proton
I am an anti proton...a designer baby...discovered in the 1960s.
I exist all over the place...half the universe is made of me...at least it was at the beginning...unfortunately it is much lonelier now...and there is no more anti matter in the universe... so I can only be produced in labs but in principle, once I am produced, I exist forever. I am eternal just like protons are.
When I meet my namesake, the proton, we tango around each other in a furious spiral of death..... and then anihilate each other, then once we are both gone, you will know it is me...
VOX: 10.3 million years later....meetings still matter. They all matter. That meeting made matter. The world we live in. The chair we sit on. The tongue in your head. The flowers in the field. The books we read.
But beyond the pages we turn - there's a place like now. A time like now. All like now. But no now. A positive or negative charge of difference. A time-twin, place-twin, particle-twin, lone-twin. Same difference. Somehow. In this parallel world of super-symmetries.
CHORUS
Proton, anti-proton, muon, smuon,
Neutrino, Sneutrino, Lepton, Slepton
Muon, Smuon, Gravitino, Quark
Lepton, SLepton, SNeutrino, Squark
FX OF PARTICLES COLLIDING...
VOX: NOW....
[Firmly and authoritatively. Pause for 3 beats..then...in an intimate hush]
Close your eyes. For one tightly held moment. This moment here. Now. Or there. Back then. A moment ago. A century ago. A day-an-hour-a milli-second ago. No matter. All matter. Any time now... Just Take-it/Make-it/Hold-it-as-your-own.
[FX UP]
ENDS
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
A Wordful of worlds
Close your eyes. For one tightly held moment. This moment here. Now. Or there. Back then. A moment ago. A century ago. A day-an-hour-a second ago. No matter. All matter. Any time. Now... Just take it. Make it. Hold it as your own.
Eyes closed now. Pinpricks of light. Picked out. Like a tattoo. Neon bright. Necklace tight. Bright-Light-Tight. Falling before your eyes - a curtain of exquisite rain. Beating time. Drilling down. Deep-earth-down, Until we are here. There. Somehow where. In this tunnel. Beneath your feet.In your dream-sleep. Awake in mind. Beside. Self. I. You. Me. They. Beside. Me. Too.
I am reflecting on the way you can recreate the beauty of particles in writing. This month I am composing a piece for BBC Radio 3 to mark the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. And somehow, however much I try to stick to the brief - to create a lexicon of terms - I feel it all slipping away, and the impulse is to use words like particles instead - as things which change and mutate, can contain their opposite in the beat of millisecond, meaning and sense appearing only to disappear again.
Like everything to do with particle physics, even if you are a scientist, there is the sheer madness of trying to capture for one fleeting second the invisible and the dichotomy that forces you to face, the looking glass you go through, passing to the other side only to see that you are in two places at once and in no place at all.
Keith Tyson is passionate about science, the way it forges new knowledge and breaks boundaries. In my interview with him in this month's Cern Courier, he makes the case for science and art respecting their differences and being quite separate. And somehow this all makes sense. Because in difference, space and distance, we can fully be ourselves. But both have this in common: art and science are means by which we forge new knowledge and sometimes that is lost in our understanding of them. Whilst science creates knowledge through experiments, tried and tested, art creates knowledge in how we relate to the world, each other and to ourselves.
For artists who engage with science, sometimes the challenge is to stay afloat in the swimming pool of knowledge, as the swiss artist Christian Gozenbach has called it. It is so seductive, that sometimes it feels as if the artist may drown in a pool of understanding, where everything is to be prooved, once the possibilities have been explored.
And so back to my pool of words. How to engage with gravitinos and muons and quarks and convey them to an audience who loves words? Do I dive straight into dictionary definitions, or does the act of writing become the process which, just by being, shows the space-time-gravity of the words which are used to denote particles, some of which, may only exist in the imagination of the scientists who dreamt them up? The creative process...experimenting, exploring, then evaluating...same difference and yet something in between...
Eyes closed now. Pinpricks of light. Picked out. Like a tattoo. Neon bright. Necklace tight. Bright-Light-Tight. Falling before your eyes - a curtain of exquisite rain. Beating time. Drilling down. Deep-earth-down, Until we are here. There. Somehow where. In this tunnel. Beneath your feet.In your dream-sleep. Awake in mind. Beside. Self. I. You. Me. They. Beside. Me. Too.
I am reflecting on the way you can recreate the beauty of particles in writing. This month I am composing a piece for BBC Radio 3 to mark the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. And somehow, however much I try to stick to the brief - to create a lexicon of terms - I feel it all slipping away, and the impulse is to use words like particles instead - as things which change and mutate, can contain their opposite in the beat of millisecond, meaning and sense appearing only to disappear again.
Like everything to do with particle physics, even if you are a scientist, there is the sheer madness of trying to capture for one fleeting second the invisible and the dichotomy that forces you to face, the looking glass you go through, passing to the other side only to see that you are in two places at once and in no place at all.
Keith Tyson is passionate about science, the way it forges new knowledge and breaks boundaries. In my interview with him in this month's Cern Courier, he makes the case for science and art respecting their differences and being quite separate. And somehow this all makes sense. Because in difference, space and distance, we can fully be ourselves. But both have this in common: art and science are means by which we forge new knowledge and sometimes that is lost in our understanding of them. Whilst science creates knowledge through experiments, tried and tested, art creates knowledge in how we relate to the world, each other and to ourselves.
For artists who engage with science, sometimes the challenge is to stay afloat in the swimming pool of knowledge, as the swiss artist Christian Gozenbach has called it. It is so seductive, that sometimes it feels as if the artist may drown in a pool of understanding, where everything is to be prooved, once the possibilities have been explored.
And so back to my pool of words. How to engage with gravitinos and muons and quarks and convey them to an audience who loves words? Do I dive straight into dictionary definitions, or does the act of writing become the process which, just by being, shows the space-time-gravity of the words which are used to denote particles, some of which, may only exist in the imagination of the scientists who dreamt them up? The creative process...experimenting, exploring, then evaluating...same difference and yet something in between...
Thursday, 10 December 2009
The Beauty of the Beast
So it has finally happened. The great beast under the earth sprang to life this November and protons are hurtling around it at record breaking speeds. And in bunches too. Not just in single beams. The Large Hadron Collider is now the fastest in the world and this is only the beginning. Not only in terms of the universe and how it began, but also meaning the biggest experiment in the world. It has been a journey 25 years in the making, in which the lives and minds of some of the world's greatest scientists, engineers and technicians have been poured into this tunnel under the earth. As one CERN personnel observes, 'All our lives and energy have been subjugated to the beast. We have to feed the beast. It is unthinkable that it fails. If it does, can you imagine the impact it will have on all of us who have devoted our lives to it? It will be as if for nothing.'
It is no exaggeration to say that a whole generation of particle physicists and engineers will be lost if the world's greatest experimental apparatus fails. But that is not all there is at stake. As the LHC ramps up to yet more record-breaking power and new collisions in the New Year, and as the data-deluge breaks all records too, what really is at stake is the future of science itself. Not just particle physics. But all science and the whole quest for knowledge for its own sake. After all, what is the immediate result and application of knowing how and why matter won the battle that critical nano-second 14 million years ago? There is no direct instantaneous application other than the beauty of knowledge itself. And this knowledge won't immediately cure cancer or solve climate change. It might lead in the future to new understanding which may be applied to solve these problems which are politically centre stage and which therefore attract funding. But the relevance may not be for another generation. This is not quick fix knowledge with instant results. The UK government, with its £55 million annual contribution, is rumoured to be closely watching what happens with the LHC, keen to divert the funding elsewhere in an economy in crisis. But so far, it is bravely and resolutely supporting the ultimate Enlightenment project, as the floods of data start pouring in.
This is the beauty of the beast - the human capacity to imagine and create new knowledge to understand existence. Why did matter win over anti-matter? Why do we have star dust in our bones? Why is matter 80 per cent empty? In the end it is also what particle physics is about and why particle physicists seem to be the most alive and curious people about living you will ever encounter. After all, they are perhaps the ultimate definition of what it is to be human - to imagine, to create and to know.
It is no exaggeration to say that a whole generation of particle physicists and engineers will be lost if the world's greatest experimental apparatus fails. But that is not all there is at stake. As the LHC ramps up to yet more record-breaking power and new collisions in the New Year, and as the data-deluge breaks all records too, what really is at stake is the future of science itself. Not just particle physics. But all science and the whole quest for knowledge for its own sake. After all, what is the immediate result and application of knowing how and why matter won the battle that critical nano-second 14 million years ago? There is no direct instantaneous application other than the beauty of knowledge itself. And this knowledge won't immediately cure cancer or solve climate change. It might lead in the future to new understanding which may be applied to solve these problems which are politically centre stage and which therefore attract funding. But the relevance may not be for another generation. This is not quick fix knowledge with instant results. The UK government, with its £55 million annual contribution, is rumoured to be closely watching what happens with the LHC, keen to divert the funding elsewhere in an economy in crisis. But so far, it is bravely and resolutely supporting the ultimate Enlightenment project, as the floods of data start pouring in.
This is the beauty of the beast - the human capacity to imagine and create new knowledge to understand existence. Why did matter win over anti-matter? Why do we have star dust in our bones? Why is matter 80 per cent empty? In the end it is also what particle physics is about and why particle physicists seem to be the most alive and curious people about living you will ever encounter. After all, they are perhaps the ultimate definition of what it is to be human - to imagine, to create and to know.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Cloud 9
Yesterday clouds came down to earth. Morning started with great white curls of clouds stretching along the Jura mountains, following every curve, bump and cliff, like an uncanny etcha-sketch echogram. The heartbeat of a November morning at CERN written in the sky. By afternoon, the purest clouds on earth were being created, when the CLOUD experiment went live for the first time. Pure elements of air were pumped into CLOUD's chamber, driven by delicate motors and filters. And there was CLOUD itself...the container which 3 weeks ago looked like a shiney bathyscope lying on its side, now shrouded in a metallic crunchy coating and transformed into something you would encounter on a moon-landing. So much has happened so quickly, with intricate rigging lines and a portakabin turned into a control room, full of the requisite monitors to control the experiment and with a dozen scientists in attendance.
There is alot of brilliance about CLOUD. It is an experiment in which Jasper Kirkby, a leading particle physicist, is working with atmospheric chemists - a unique collaboration. There is also the fact that cloud formation - that most ethereal of creations - is being recreated down here on earth, and that the effects of cosmic rays on the cloud droplets and even ice particles will be studied too. But most of all, there is the sheer enlightenment of the CLOUD enquiry. It is an experiment which may proove that the cosmos has a role to play in climate change. For some, who have battled so hard to get climate change accepted as a human-generated catastrophe, which now politicians accept, this is unpalatable and a knowledge which they dont wish to be publicised. Last year a Scandinavian journalist had her story on CLOUD spiked because it mentioned this fact. Censorship is an emerging phenomenon in the climate change era.
What CLOUD shows is a pure drive for truth and knowledge. Even in this fractured century, in which climate change is now threatening to become a new orthodoxy which no-one should dare effect in any way, CLOUD is going for the pure ideal. It is the real deal. The truth of the matter - knowledge contained in the secrets of a droplet.
There is alot of brilliance about CLOUD. It is an experiment in which Jasper Kirkby, a leading particle physicist, is working with atmospheric chemists - a unique collaboration. There is also the fact that cloud formation - that most ethereal of creations - is being recreated down here on earth, and that the effects of cosmic rays on the cloud droplets and even ice particles will be studied too. But most of all, there is the sheer enlightenment of the CLOUD enquiry. It is an experiment which may proove that the cosmos has a role to play in climate change. For some, who have battled so hard to get climate change accepted as a human-generated catastrophe, which now politicians accept, this is unpalatable and a knowledge which they dont wish to be publicised. Last year a Scandinavian journalist had her story on CLOUD spiked because it mentioned this fact. Censorship is an emerging phenomenon in the climate change era.
What CLOUD shows is a pure drive for truth and knowledge. Even in this fractured century, in which climate change is now threatening to become a new orthodoxy which no-one should dare effect in any way, CLOUD is going for the pure ideal. It is the real deal. The truth of the matter - knowledge contained in the secrets of a droplet.
Monday, 2 November 2009
The Art of Physics
The punchline in this Sunday`s Observer newspaper said it all: " If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history. If not, we will have assembled the world`s most expensive piece of modern art"
This unattributed quote by a physicist at CERN, talking about the switch of the LHC later this month, shows a division in perception about art and science. A redundant machine becomes art. Art is useless - dysfunctional and prohibitively expensive: literally costing the earth. Whilst science is functional and complex, and earth shattering too: it makes history. Breaks the mould of time.
There is alot at stake here. And it`s not just the elegant universe. There seems to be a vast ocean between the worlds of art and science. Yet look at the great detectors at the LHC from an artistic point of view, and you are blown away. Recently Vanity Fair came to CERN, taking the lifts down to the underground at ATLAS and CMS, emerging half an hour later, blinking into the light. The Vanity Fair photographer said he had never seen anything so beautiful. He was incredulous that something so precisely engineered could have such unintentional beauty. Look at the slices which make up the detectors, and they are giant eyeballs, lying on their sides: unblinking, with a steadfast stare. They are looking beyond - across and through time. Or look at them another moment later, and they are great peacock tails, which the German sculptress Rebecca Horn might have created. There is utter beauty in the micromatic precision of the sensors melded with the metal as well as the kaleidoscope of colours too which they display in their components and wiring.
`I cant believe it that these guys dont see the beauty of what they created,' opined the photographer. But the truth is, he couldnt believe either that such beauty could be created without intention. Or that the beauty the scientists judged their machines on was not about form, but totally about functionality. Beauty as utility.
Yet the irony is particle physics and the LHC in particular is predicated on the visual. On the beauty of seeing. The invisible and infinitely tiny particles are detected by these great monolithic machines aglow in their red, yellow, orange, green and silver colours and the shining metal which is calibrated so precisely that it makes these extraordinary structures the as yet unacknowledged 8th wonders of the world.
To think these detectors in the LHC are discovering how the universe started - with such a technologically advanced way of seeing that a particle collision appears on a monitor like a flash, the infinitely invisible made visible. There is such beauty in it. And artfulness too. The art of physics. It takes some beating. Art and science are not that far apart. They both seek meaning. Truth is beauty. Beauty is Truth. They are a blip on a monitor. A twin heartbeat. A pulse. A moment. At any given point. Now
This unattributed quote by a physicist at CERN, talking about the switch of the LHC later this month, shows a division in perception about art and science. A redundant machine becomes art. Art is useless - dysfunctional and prohibitively expensive: literally costing the earth. Whilst science is functional and complex, and earth shattering too: it makes history. Breaks the mould of time.
There is alot at stake here. And it`s not just the elegant universe. There seems to be a vast ocean between the worlds of art and science. Yet look at the great detectors at the LHC from an artistic point of view, and you are blown away. Recently Vanity Fair came to CERN, taking the lifts down to the underground at ATLAS and CMS, emerging half an hour later, blinking into the light. The Vanity Fair photographer said he had never seen anything so beautiful. He was incredulous that something so precisely engineered could have such unintentional beauty. Look at the slices which make up the detectors, and they are giant eyeballs, lying on their sides: unblinking, with a steadfast stare. They are looking beyond - across and through time. Or look at them another moment later, and they are great peacock tails, which the German sculptress Rebecca Horn might have created. There is utter beauty in the micromatic precision of the sensors melded with the metal as well as the kaleidoscope of colours too which they display in their components and wiring.
`I cant believe it that these guys dont see the beauty of what they created,' opined the photographer. But the truth is, he couldnt believe either that such beauty could be created without intention. Or that the beauty the scientists judged their machines on was not about form, but totally about functionality. Beauty as utility.
Yet the irony is particle physics and the LHC in particular is predicated on the visual. On the beauty of seeing. The invisible and infinitely tiny particles are detected by these great monolithic machines aglow in their red, yellow, orange, green and silver colours and the shining metal which is calibrated so precisely that it makes these extraordinary structures the as yet unacknowledged 8th wonders of the world.
To think these detectors in the LHC are discovering how the universe started - with such a technologically advanced way of seeing that a particle collision appears on a monitor like a flash, the infinitely invisible made visible. There is such beauty in it. And artfulness too. The art of physics. It takes some beating. Art and science are not that far apart. They both seek meaning. Truth is beauty. Beauty is Truth. They are a blip on a monitor. A twin heartbeat. A pulse. A moment. At any given point. Now
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Talking Particles
Imagine particles could talk. That a gluon pokes its head out of table to chat about the hard work it takes to get others to stick together. Sounds implausible? Anything is possible - even in the real, let alone the quantum world.
That is especially if you watched an obscure French children`s programme called Télé Chat in the 1980s. Which is precisely what Henri Bachachou did. And look at him now. Muon-mad, this Parisian works at ATLAS, the biggest of the experiments at CERN, with over 2000 people worldwide exploring the mystery of matter.
Fed on a diet of Télé Chat, with its lead characters, an ostrich and a cat, and its talking and walking particle zoo, Henri is a particle physicist, with an equally playful mind. But when you get him on the subject - or should it be the matter - of the muon, he becomes messenaic and no longer mild mannered and polite. For him, they are THE particle. In character, they are like an electron, but are 200 x heavier, and in fact their weight is in between an electron and a proton. Every second a 100 million muons are falling from the sky in cosmic rays. And because they are heavy, they can be easily detected, leaving very clear tracks, which are also known as spark lines, because they give off an electric charge.
Which also means that they are invaluable when they are artificially recreated in the LHC. Easily identifiable, they are also one of the clues for finding the Higgs, which is thought to give off muons. And they can pass through matter too and that includes your own body. In fact, a muon hole may be opening at your feet this very nano second - it's just that you cant see it - as muons cascade from the sky and fall from between floor to floor to floor. The world is opening up before you. You just don't know it.
That's how it feels when you are talking about particles. Suddenly you see such endless possibilities in the material world that nothing seems material ever again.
'Have you ever wondered why physicists are so indecisive?' asks Henri. 'Take them to an ice cream counter like gelatomania and you will find they cant make up their minds because they know the whole range of tastes available - and are thinking of the new ones which aren't there too.'
It all makes sense somehow. Talk the particular about a particle, and you have entered into a self-contained fairy tale, which contains its own internal logic of actions and context, but equally could very well not exist at all. And that is on this symmetrical side of the universe. Talk asymmetry, and then we really are talking Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass. You enter the world of squawking squarks and smuons and sneutrinos...a Finnegans wake of words and playfulness which seems to make no sense at all....
...which may be why the elusive Higgs, whether it is prooved to exist or not, comes as a bit of a relief. A particle with a human name. For the ultimate invisible particle it has a particularly grounded name. But still, let's talk particles...I will find some more physicists who can do just that...and keep you posted.
That is especially if you watched an obscure French children`s programme called Télé Chat in the 1980s. Which is precisely what Henri Bachachou did. And look at him now. Muon-mad, this Parisian works at ATLAS, the biggest of the experiments at CERN, with over 2000 people worldwide exploring the mystery of matter.
Fed on a diet of Télé Chat, with its lead characters, an ostrich and a cat, and its talking and walking particle zoo, Henri is a particle physicist, with an equally playful mind. But when you get him on the subject - or should it be the matter - of the muon, he becomes messenaic and no longer mild mannered and polite. For him, they are THE particle. In character, they are like an electron, but are 200 x heavier, and in fact their weight is in between an electron and a proton. Every second a 100 million muons are falling from the sky in cosmic rays. And because they are heavy, they can be easily detected, leaving very clear tracks, which are also known as spark lines, because they give off an electric charge.
Which also means that they are invaluable when they are artificially recreated in the LHC. Easily identifiable, they are also one of the clues for finding the Higgs, which is thought to give off muons. And they can pass through matter too and that includes your own body. In fact, a muon hole may be opening at your feet this very nano second - it's just that you cant see it - as muons cascade from the sky and fall from between floor to floor to floor. The world is opening up before you. You just don't know it.
That's how it feels when you are talking about particles. Suddenly you see such endless possibilities in the material world that nothing seems material ever again.
'Have you ever wondered why physicists are so indecisive?' asks Henri. 'Take them to an ice cream counter like gelatomania and you will find they cant make up their minds because they know the whole range of tastes available - and are thinking of the new ones which aren't there too.'
It all makes sense somehow. Talk the particular about a particle, and you have entered into a self-contained fairy tale, which contains its own internal logic of actions and context, but equally could very well not exist at all. And that is on this symmetrical side of the universe. Talk asymmetry, and then we really are talking Alice in Wonderland and through the looking glass. You enter the world of squawking squarks and smuons and sneutrinos...a Finnegans wake of words and playfulness which seems to make no sense at all....
...which may be why the elusive Higgs, whether it is prooved to exist or not, comes as a bit of a relief. A particle with a human name. For the ultimate invisible particle it has a particularly grounded name. But still, let's talk particles...I will find some more physicists who can do just that...and keep you posted.
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Gravitys Rainbow
Talk to a physicist, and you always step into a different dimension. Unwittingly so. Its like diving into clear water and then seeing the stars. The light at first can be blinding, because the accuracy of their vision can be so acute. But then you adjust, dive deeper with them, and discover new vistas. The deep blue has never been more meaning-full.
So I find myself in a room with the man who is writing a paper which is about to change astrophysics. Everyone is standing by for his genius. But no. His bright lazer mind is switched onto other things. We are no longer in a room. We are notes on a musical score. He tells me how 10 years ago he finally learnt the piano. Now he can play Beethoven and it just tumbles out of his mind onto his fingers. You can almost sense he is listening to it, or indeed playing it when he tells me this, his love of this musical dimension is so intense. He tells me also that the way he learns the piece is by diving into it through its harmonic structure. That with the analytical mind of a physicist, he sees the patterns, engages with the harmonies, and totally understands every single note, the why and wherefore of its individual placing. And thus it becomes part of him. So much so, that when trapped in a boring meeting, he seeks refuge by playing a complex sonata in his head and his mind is elsewhere as the patterns rotate and spin.
But switch it all around the other way, and ask him
if music has changed his approach to physics, and he says, it soothes me. He uses it for pleasure. No more, no less. The beauty is the other way round - the way physics makes him approach music with his head, and then his heart comes into play too.
Somehow, at the end of our conversation which was really about something quite other - about Collide, the International Artists Residency Programme I am devising for CERN - it seems totally fitting that Luis volunteers himself for my Radio 3 piece to be a graviton. He of all people will understand the beauty of gravity. He has a levity and gravity which is totally beyond. That of a rainbow.
* Definition of a graviton. The graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity in the framework of quantum field theory. If it exists, the graviton must be massless (because the gravitational force has unlimited range) and must have a spin of 2 (because the source of gravity is the stress-energy tensor, which is a second-rank tensor, compared to electromagnetism, the source of which is the four-current, which is a first-rank tensor). To prove the existence of the graviton, physicists must be able to link the particle to the curvature of the space-time continuum and calculate the gravitational force exerted.
So I find myself in a room with the man who is writing a paper which is about to change astrophysics. Everyone is standing by for his genius. But no. His bright lazer mind is switched onto other things. We are no longer in a room. We are notes on a musical score. He tells me how 10 years ago he finally learnt the piano. Now he can play Beethoven and it just tumbles out of his mind onto his fingers. You can almost sense he is listening to it, or indeed playing it when he tells me this, his love of this musical dimension is so intense. He tells me also that the way he learns the piece is by diving into it through its harmonic structure. That with the analytical mind of a physicist, he sees the patterns, engages with the harmonies, and totally understands every single note, the why and wherefore of its individual placing. And thus it becomes part of him. So much so, that when trapped in a boring meeting, he seeks refuge by playing a complex sonata in his head and his mind is elsewhere as the patterns rotate and spin.
But switch it all around the other way, and ask him
if music has changed his approach to physics, and he says, it soothes me. He uses it for pleasure. No more, no less. The beauty is the other way round - the way physics makes him approach music with his head, and then his heart comes into play too.
Somehow, at the end of our conversation which was really about something quite other - about Collide, the International Artists Residency Programme I am devising for CERN - it seems totally fitting that Luis volunteers himself for my Radio 3 piece to be a graviton. He of all people will understand the beauty of gravity. He has a levity and gravity which is totally beyond. That of a rainbow.
* Definition of a graviton. The graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravity in the framework of quantum field theory. If it exists, the graviton must be massless (because the gravitational force has unlimited range) and must have a spin of 2 (because the source of gravity is the stress-energy tensor, which is a second-rank tensor, compared to electromagnetism, the source of which is the four-current, which is a first-rank tensor). To prove the existence of the graviton, physicists must be able to link the particle to the curvature of the space-time continuum and calculate the gravitational force exerted.
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