The Cosmic Code by Heinz R. Pagels

Author:Heinz R. Pagels [Pagels, Heinz R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486287324
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

The voyage into matter

God used beautiful mathematics

in creating the world.

—PAUL DIRAC

1. The Matter Microscopes

Truth, indeed, may not exist; . . . but what men took

for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for

sympathy. The architects of the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries took the Church and the universe for

truths, and tried to express them in a structure

which should be final.

—HENRY ADAMS, Mont-Saint-Michel

and Chartres

SOME TIME AGO a friend and colleague, Sidney Coleman, and I were enjoying dinner in a small French restaurant nestled deep in the Jura Mountains near Switzerland. We were visiting CERN, a large international nuclear research laboratory just across the border near Geneva, and like many visiting scientists, we indulged in the cuisine of the fine local restaurants. As the summer sun sank, Sidney sliced into his quenelle, sipped his wine, and we began to speculate on the future of high-energy physics.

Enormous laboratories, like CERN, designed to study the most fundamental structure of matter have been built in the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. The main component of these laboratories is a large hollow ring through which protons —quantum particles—are accelerated to very high speed and then collide with a variety of nuclear targets. By examining the results of the collision, physicists learn about the structure of matter.

Sidney and I were theoretical physicists, whose ambition it is to help find a mathematical description of the fundamental structure of matter. But at CERN, the theoretical physicists—although they numbered about one hundred—are but a tiny portion of the total personnel. An even larger number of experimental physicists, drawn to this laboratory from all the universities of Europe and America, compete to use the facilities. Machine builders design and develop the accelerators, while thousands of technicians are employed to build the equipment. Each such lab costs hundreds of millions of dollars and absorbs a good fraction of national budgets for pure research. Sidney and I wondered: Where is the public constituency for high-energy physics research —who cares? Might not research funds be better allocated to areas with more immediate practical goals? I do not believe the answer to such questions can be found in economic analysis. I believe the answer is reflected by the confidence a society has in its idea of civilization.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.