Lucifer’s Legacy by Frank Close

Author:Frank Close
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications, Inc.

Extraterrestrials

As the energy of the collisions increases, new things begin to occur. We know this from experiments on earth and are aware that it happens in the universe too as cosmic rays—little particles smaller than atoms—are showering down from the heavens as you read this. At this very moment millions of them are pouring through you every second without you being aware of them. They are the result of stars that exploded long ago, deep in space, with such force that they were utterly disrupted, ejecting some trillion trillion trillion trillion elemental nuclear particles into the galaxy. Electric and magnetic fields that permeate interstellar space whip the debris into violent motion, giving to some of the atomic particles energies more extreme than anything found on earth. A few, passing near our planet, are trapped by the magnetic arms of the earth and pulled down until they crash into the atmosphere far above our heads. The violence of these collisions breaks the atoms of the air into little pieces that shower down to the ground.

These cosmic particles are smaller than atoms but even so we can detect their presence. If you live far enough north you may have seen their effects with your own eyes. The Northern Lights or “Aurora Borealis” are the result of the cosmic rays having been concentrated into quite intense beams by the earth’s magnetic poles, and shaking light from the atoms in the upper atmosphere. It is also possible to see some of the cosmic rays directly with relatively simple instruments. The particles can short circuit a chamber full of electrically charged wires; the ensuing sparks in this “spark chamber” reveal their flight paths. Very occasionally, if you are unlucky, they may confuse your computer chips or crash your system.

Cosmic rays have such high energies that their collisions with atoms in the upper atmosphere can create short-lived exotic particles whose existence had not been previously suspected let alone known to scientists trapped in their earthbound laboratories. Any theory of the universe must explain why they occur. It was the discovery of such exotic, “strange” particles half a century ago that stimulated the modern science of high-energy particle physics, where beams of protons or electrons are accelerated to high energies, simulating the cosmic rays.

These rays have brought us news of a violent universe, but they arrived at random and raised more questions than they answered. Who ordered these particles? Why are they as they are? How are they related to the familiar proton and neutron that are the seeds of life as we know it? Are they necessary to the existence of the material universe? And so on. To answer these and a host of other questions the era of “atom smashes”—huge accelerators of particles capable of reproducing the energies of the cosmic rays and creating the fleeting exotic particles under controlled conditions—began. This quest originated with the intention of understanding the nature and structure of matter, but in recent years has evolved into a study of

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