The Standard Model of elementary particles and their interactions via the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions is a fabulously successful theory. Tests of quantum electrodynamics have been made to a precision at the level of better than one part in one billion; electroweak tests approach the one part in one hundred thousand level; and even tests of quantum chromodynamics, which are intrinsically more challenging, are being made at the per cent level.
Yet, despite this, we are still sure that the Standard Model cannot be the “ultimate” theory. We have yet to account theoretically for the exciting observations of the recent decades, namely, massive neutrinos, dark matter and dark energy, which provide direct evidence for new physics processes. We cannot account for the observed patterns of the masses of the fermion building blocks of matter, their manifestation in three generations or “families”, the “mixing” between the generations, or why the universe seems to contain almost no antimatter. And we don’t yet understand how to incorporate gravity in terms of a quantum-field theory.
Theoreticians have not been idle in developing models of the new physics that could underlie the Standard Model and that ought to manifest itself at the tera-electron-volt energy scale, such as alternative spontaneous electroweak symmetry-breaking mechanisms, supersymmetry and string theories, for example. However, within the framework of the Standard Model itself, we have yet to observe the Higgs boson, the presence of which is required to account for the generation of the masses of the W and Z particles.
This substantial book – at more than 600 pages – gives a detailed and lucid summary of the theoretical foundations of the Standard Model, and possible extensions beyond it.
Chapter 1 sets up the required notations and conventions needed for the ensuing theoretical survey. Chapter 2 reviews the basics of perturbative field theory and leads, via an introduction to discrete symmetry principles, to quantum electrodynamics. Group theory, global symmetries and symmetry breaking are reviewed in Chapter 3, which forms the foundation for the presentation of local symmetries and gauge theories in Chapter 4, where the Higgs mechanism is first introduced.
The heart of the book lies in Chapters 5 (strong interactions), 6 (weak interactions) and 7 (the electroweak theory), which at more than 170 pages is the most substantial. These chapters present a clear theoretical discussion of key physical processes, along with the phenomenology required for a comparison with data, and a brief summary of the relevant experimental results. Precision tests of the Standard Model are summarized, and the framework is introduced for parametrizing the head-room for new physics effects that go beyond it.
The final chapter summarises the known deficiencies of the Standard Model and introduces the well developed extensions: supersymmetry, extended gauge groups and grand unified theories. Fortunately, now that the LHC is up and running, we should expect to start to address experimentally at least some of these theoretical speculations. LHC results will provide the sieve for filtering the profound and accurate, versus the merely beautiful and mathematically seductive, models of nature.
The book ranges over huge swathes of theoretical territory and is self-consciously broad, rather than deep, in terms of coverage. I heartily recommend it to particle physicists as a great single-volume reference, especially useful to experimentalists. It also provides a firm, graduate-level foundation for theoretical physicists who plan to pursue concepts beyond the Standard Model to a greater depth.
School is where students study what is in textbooks and university is where they start doing research. Or so most people think. It therefore comes as a surprise to discover that teenagers still at school can participate in a research programme that allies space science and earth science. While sceptical educators would argue that in a normal situation teachers have no time, energy, motivation or money for such projects, Becky Parker at Simon Langton Grammar School in the UK has proved that the opposite can be true.
Inspired during a visit to CERN in 2007, she decided to bring leading-edge research to her school. Instead of going back with a simple presentation about how CERN works, Becky took back a real detector and started sowing ideas about how to set up a real research programme, which she called CERN@school. Her ideas fell on fertile ground as her school in Canterbury, in the county of Kent, is one of the most active in implementing innovative ways of teaching science in the UK. One of the school’s declared goals is to “provide learning experiences which are enjoyable, stimulating and challenging and which encourage critical and innovative thinking”. Students at Simon Langton Grammar School do not just study science, they do it.
“During one of my visits to CERN, I had the opportunity to meet Michael Campbell of the Medipix collaboration, and his young enthusiastic team,” recalls Becky. “They showed me the Timepix chip that they were developing for particle and medical physics. I thought that something like this could be used in schools for conducting experiments with cosmic rays and radioactivity.”
Cross-collaboration
The Timepix chip is derived from Medipix2, a device developed at CERN that can accurately measure the position and energy of single photons hitting an associated detector. The most recent success of the Medipix collaboration is the Medipix3 chip, which is being used in a project to deliver the first X-ray images with colour (energy) information. Initially designed for use in medical physics and particle physics, the Timepix chip now has applications that include beta- and gamma-radiography of biological samples, materials analysis, monitoring of nuclear power-plant decommissioning and electron microscopy, as well as the adaptive optics that are used in large, ground-based telescopes.
The students at Simon Langton Grammar School use the Timepix chip by connecting it directly to their computer via a USB interface box. “The box was developed by the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics in Prague,” explains Becky. “They also developed the Pixelman software that we use to read out the data.” The chip and the box have a certain material cost but the software is made available for free by the Medipix collaboration.
Given the simple set-up and its relatively low cost, Becky’s idea can potentially be transferred to many other schools across the UK and elsewhere in Europe. “Collaboration is a key factor in modern research,” confirms Becky. “And, like in a real scientific collaboration, we are going to involve as many schools as possible in our project. We have received funding from Kent to put 10 Timepix chips into the county’s schools to create a network. This will allow us to show students how you do things at CERN and in other big laboratories.”
By setting-up a network, schools will collect large amounts of data on cosmic rays. “In the future we hope to have Timepix detectors in schools across the world. Participating schools will be able to send data back to us because we have powerful IT facilities and we can store large quantities of data,” says Becky. “We know that in other countries, such as Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, there are similar school programmes that collect data on cosmic rays. It would be ideal if we could all join our efforts and integrate all of the collected data together.”
Timepix in space
Nothing is out of reach for Becky’s ambitious teaching methods, not even deep space. In 2008 the school’s students decided to enter a national competition run by the British National Space Centre to design experiments that will fly in space. Next year, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd will fly the Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector (LUCID), a cosmic-ray detector array designed by Langton’s sixth-form students, on one of its satellites. “The students are learning so much from working on LUCID with David Cooke at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited and Professor Larry Pinsky from the University of Houston,” says Becky.
In LUCID, four Timepix chips are mounted on the sides of a cube (figure 1). Students have demonstrated that the four chips allow for the largest active area without breaking power and data transmission limits. A fifth chip, mounted horizontally on the base of the cube, will be modified to detect neutrons. LUCID’s electronics, including a field-programmable gate array for read-out, will be on printed circuit boards attached to the chips.
The Timepix detectors produced at CERN do not qualify for use in space. “At one of the last stages of the competition, we were told that our project would go through if we could raise the additional £60,000 needed to qualify the Timepix detectors for space,” Becky recalls. Thanks to the support of the South East England Development Agency and Kent County Council the money was found and LUCID could go into space. LUCID will be mounted outside the spacecraft’s fuselage, housed in a 3 mm (0.81 g cm–2) or 4 mm (1.08 g cm–2) enclosure. Components will mostly be on an inside face of the board offering a further 0.25 g cm–2 of shielding. The detector will also have to be qualified to withstand a vibration level of 20 grms.
Under Becky’s plans, data from LUCID will be compared with data collected by detectors installed on Earth, thus providing information about cosmic rays. “We expect terabytes of data each year from space. We will receive support from the UK Particle Physics Grid (GridPP) to use the Grid. It is a whole research package!,” she says.
The CERN@school project is not the only scientific project that Simon Langton Grammar School students are carrying out. “We collaborate with Imperial College on a research project in plasma physics. One of our students won the ‘Young Scientist of the Year’ prize and published a paper in a proper scientific journal. Others participate in a scientific project for the observation of exoplanets using the Faulkes Telescopes in Hawaii and Australia,” says Becky.
In addition the school hosts special projects in biology and in other branches of science, and also has its own research centre, the Langton Star Centre. This facility, still under construction, will have laboratories and training and seminar rooms. “We will be able to train teachers and students from other schools who want to take part in CERN@school and our other projects,” explains Becky. The centre’s website will include pages where data and analysis results from the network of participating schools will be shared.
These innovative teaching approaches benefit both students and teachers. The school’s philosophy is that 30% of the activities carried out must be beyond the official syllabus. The outcome is that the school provides about 1% of the total number of students studying for physics and engineering degrees at British universities. At the same time, motivating the teachers becomes much easier when they have the prospect of participating in real research programmes in collaboration with CERN, for example.
Many young people at school do not know what it would be like to study physics or engineering at university and do forefront research. However, when they get to work with the real scientists, they discover how amazing this is and readily jump aboard ambitious programmes. “If teachers let students take control in these kinds of projects, they will not mess around – they are going to do all of this properly because they know that this is serious stuff,” assures Becky. “With my students, I am quite rigorous. I tell them that they are going to do it like real scientists. And because this is really an amazing thing to be involved with, they do it properly and with a lot of enthusiasm.”
Becky’s attitude to “her” students, whom she calls “sweethearts”, is a far cry from that of teachers who say how difficult it is to control behaviour in schools and motivate students every day. So why is Becky’s experience so different? “I am in a lovely school,” she explains. “The cool thing to do at my school is physics. A 12 year old came to me last year and said: ‘Miss, we would like you to teach us quantum physics’ and so I did it.”
Becky’s initiative to foster the knowledge of “cool” physics in the region includes the “Langton Guide to the Universe”, in which parents are invited to attend physics lectures on modern and exciting physics. “Families come and receive a first input on things like quantum mechanics. Some kids who attended those lectures when they were very young later joined the school and set up the ‘quantum working group’, which produced a guide to how to teach quantum mechanics to the youngest. They have entered a national competition and reached the final.” These are the sort of expectations that you can have when you go to Simon Langton Grammar School. As Becky explains: “Our philosophy is that if students are interested in doing a scientific project, however ambitious, they can come and talk to us. This is your world, take the initiative and make it successful!”
To celebrate Murray Gell-Mann’s many contributions in physics in his 80th year, the Institute of Advanced Studies at Nanyang Technological University and the Santa Fe Institute jointly organized the Conference in Honour of Murray Gell-Mann, which took place in Singapore on 24–26 February. Aptly entitled “Quantum Mechanics, Elementary Particles, Quantum Cosmology and Complexity” to focus on Gell-Mann’s achievements in these fields, the three-day conference was a festival of lectures and discussions that attracted more than 150 participants from 22 countries. Those in attendance included many of Gell-Mann’s former students and collaborators. For a select few this was their second visit to Singapore, having attended the 25th Rochester Conference held there 20 years ago.
The meeting began with a brief scientific biography of Gell-Mann presented by his close collaborator Harald Fritzsch of Ludwig-Maximilians University, who highlighted his main achievements. During the 1950s Gell-Mann worked with Francis Low on the renormalization group and with Richard Feynman on the V-A theory of weak interaction. The application of the SU(3) symmetry group to classify hadrons led Gell-Mann to predict the existence of the Ω– particle in 1961; its subsequent discovery in 1964 paved the way to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969. Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed quarks as the constituents of hadrons in 1964.
Gell-Mann studied the current algebra of hadrons together with various co-workers. In 1971 he introduced light-cone algebra together with Fritzsch, as well as the colour quantum number for quarks. A year later they proposed the theory of QCD for the strong interaction. In 1978 Gell-Mann, Pierre Ramond and Richard Slansky proposed the seesaw mechanism to explain the tiny neutrino masses. Then, in around 1980, Gell-Mann switched his interest towards the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum cosmology and string theory.
Multifaceted
Gell-Mann’s interests extend beyond physics – he loves words, history and nature. He has moved between disciplines that include historical linguistics, archaeology, natural history and the psychology of creative thinking, as well as other subjects connected with biological and cultural evolution and with learning. He currently spearheads the Evolution of Human Languages Program at the Santa Fe Institute, which he co-founded.
The subsequent talks by Nicholas Samios of Brookhaven National Laboratory and George Zweig of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were very entertaining. They touched on the historical background that led to the discovery of the Ω– – predicted by Gell-Mann’s Eightfold Way – and to the quark model of hadrons, and were accompanied by interesting anecdotes and photographs. Zweig related the origin of the terminology “quark” and how the battle between “aces” and quarks unfolded.
There were several talks on recent advances in various theoretical and experimental aspects of QCD as well as on the Higgs boson. CERN’s John Ellis discussed the Higgs particle and prospects for new physics at the LHC. Nobel laureate C N Yang of Tsinghua University gave a talk on his recent work on the ground-state energy of a large one-dimensional spin-1/2 fermion system in a harmonic trap with a repulsive delta-function interaction, based on the Thomas-Fermi method. Gerard ‘t Hooft of Utrecht University – another Nobel laureate – presented a possible mathematical relationship between cellular automata and quantum-field theories. This may provide a new way to interpret the origin of quantum mechanics, and hence a new approach to the gravitational force.
Gell-Mann himself ended the first day’s sessions with interesting personal recollections and reflections on “Some Lessons from 60 Years of Theorizing”. His main observations can be summarized as follows. First, every once in a while, it is necessary to challenge some widely conceived idea, typically a prohibition of thinking in a particular way – a prohibition that turns out to have no real justification but holds up progress in understanding. It is important to identify such roadblocks and get round them. Second, it is sometimes necessary to distinguish ideas that are relevant for today’s problems from ones that pertain to deeper problems of the future. Trying to bring the latter into today’s work can cause difficulties. Finally, doubts, hesitation and messiness seem to be inevitable in the course of theoretical work (and experiments too, sometimes). Perhaps it is best to embrace this tendency rather than organizing over and around it, for example, by publishing alternative contradictory ideas together with their consequences, and leaving the choice between them until a later time.
The following day and a half covered a variety of topics. Rabindra Mohapatra of the University of Maryland discussed neutrino masses and the grand unification of flavour. Further talks focused on the origins of neutrino mixing and oscillations, as well as on what the LHC might reveal about the origin of neutrino mass.
John Schwarz of Caltech gave an interesting review of the recent progress in the correspondence between anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theory, which is one of the most active areas of modern research in string theory. He focused mainly on the testing and understanding of the duality and the construction and exploration of the string theory duals of QCD. Other talks reported on string phenomenology and string corrections in QCD at LHC. Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California described a gauge symmetry in phase space and the consequences for physics and space–time.
The sessions on quantum cosmology covered topics on black holes, dark matter, dark energy and the cosmological constant. These included a talk by Georgi Dvali of New York University, who discussed the physics of micro black holes.
The main sessions of the conference ended with a talk by Nobel laureate Kenneth Wilson of Ohio State University, a former student of Gell-Mann. He touched on a fundamental problem: could the testing of physics ever be complete? According to Wilson, in the real world no law about continuum quantities such as time, distance and energy can be established to be exact through experimental tests. Such tests cannot be carried out today, and cannot be done in the foreseeable future – although estimates of uncertainties can be improved in future. Wilson also took part in a discussion session with school teachers and students in a Physics Education Meeting held in conjunction with the conference.
The parallel sessions on particle physics, cosmology and general relativity attracted presentations by more than 30 speakers, many of whom were young physicists from Asia (China, China (Taiwan), India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore). There was also a special session on quantum mechanics and complexity featuring invited speaker Kerson Huang of MIT who gave a talk on stages of protein folding and universal exponents.
• To mark the occasion of Gell-Mann’s 80th birthday, the publication of Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers, edited by Harald Fritzsch (World Scientific 2010), was launched during the conference.
By Alexander W Chao and Weiren Chou (eds), World Scientific. Volume 1 Hardback ISBN 9789812835208, £55 ($99). E-book ISBN 9789812835215, $129. Volume 2 Hardback ISBN 9789814299343, £81 ($108).
The development of accelerators represents one of the great scientific achievements of the past century. The objective of this new journal – Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology – is to give readers a comprehensive review of this dynamic and interesting field and of its various applications. The journal documents the tremendous progress made in the field of accelerator science and technology and describes its applications to other domains. It also assesses the prospects for the future development and use of accelerators.
The history and function of accelerators is told from its beginnings and extends to future projects in an extremely competent and complete approach, as the authors have themselves contributed in many ways to the success of the fields presented. The journal shows clearly how progress in science is strongly coupled to advances in the associated instruments, allowing us to see beyond the macroscopic world – into the finer structure of matter – and to apply these instruments to fields such as elementary particle physics, medicine and industry. From the structure of cells, genes and molecules to the Standard Model of elementary particles, the scientific developments are recounted back to the early development of these versatile instruments.
Volume 1 presents the history of accelerators, from the first table-top machines to the colliders of today and those being planned for the future. It is written in a fashion that serves as a historical account while also providing the scientific and technical basis for a deeper understanding. The volume transmits the spirit of this truly multidisciplinary and international field. With an excellent bibliography for each chapter, together with the historical development of the science of accelerators and the contributions by key figures in the field, it succinctly describes the overall history and future prospects of accelerators.
The articles in this volume include a review of the milestones in the evolution of accelerators, a description of the various types of accelerators (such as electron linear accelerators, high-power hadron accelerators, cyclotrons, colliders and synchrotron-light sources) as well as accelerators for medical and industrial applications. In addition, various advanced accelerator topics are discussed – including superconducting magnets, superconducting RF systems and beam cooling. There is also a historical account of the Superconducting Super Collider, and an article on the evolution, growth and future of accelerators and of the accelerator community.
Volume 2 focuses on the first of many specific subfields, its theme being medical applications of accelerators. Out of about 15,000 accelerators of all energies in existence today, more than 5000 are routinely used in hospitals for nuclear medicine and medical therapy. The articles in this volume feature overviews of the medical requirements written by physicians; a review of the status of radiation therapy, radioisotopes in nuclear medicine and hospital-based facilities; a detailed description of various types of accelerators used in medicine; and a discussion on future medical accelerators. In addition, one article is dedicated to a prominent figure of the accelerator community – Robert Wilson – in recognition of his seminal paper of 1946, “Radiological Use of Fast Protons”.
These first two volumes of Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology are timely, instructive and comprehensive. The journal is well laid out and, thanks to the many informative photos and diagrams, it is easy also to read. It is written in an impartial and balanced way and covers the achievements made at several laboratories around the world. To ensure the highest quality, the articles are written by invitation only and the submitted papers have all been peer-reviewed. An editorial board consisting of distinguished scientists has also been formed to advise the editors.
The journal represents an excellent balance between a historical account of the developments in the field and the technical challenges and scientific progress made with such machines. Volume 2 in particular comes at an auspicious moment because the synergies between the science behind accelerators and the related spin-offs, such as the applications of accelerators to fight disease, are of great importance to human health – with a profound impact on our society.
In conclusion, the journal is a tribute to accelerators and the people who developed them. It appeals to the expert as well as to all scientists working and applying the use of accelerators. Active scientists and historians of science will appreciate this chronicle of the development of accelerators and their key role in the progress of various domains during the past century. It should be on the shelf of every scientist working with accelerators and of those with an interest in the history and future directions of accelerators and their applications. I hope that it also inspires students to look deeper into accelerator science and technology and to choose this field as a career.
If you ask 10 people working at CERN how they would describe what CERN is in a single sentence, the chances are that you will get 10 different answers.
Most people think of CERN, first and foremost, as an accelerator “factory” and a provider of facilities for the experiments. Some would state that it is a high-profile research organization, as well as a formidable training centre. Others will emphasize that it is an attractive and responsible employer. Finally, some may point out that CERN is, among other things, a strong, internationally recognized “brand”.
They are all correct in some way because CERN is a complex system with manifold activities and worldwide impact, to an extent that is sometimes hard to appreciate from an in-house perspective. Personally, I like to think of CERN as a “knowledge hub”. In fact, despite people’s different views on what CERN is, they are all part of its knowledge-exchange network.
Knowledge from universities, research institutes and companies flows into CERN through the people who come to participate in its activities. New knowledge is generated at CERN and knowledge then flows out, for example through R&D partnerships and technology transfer and through those who leave.
CERN is actually more than a hub because it plays the role of an active “catalyser” in the exchange of knowledge. As a concrete example, in February 2010 the “Physics for Health in Europe” workshop took place at CERN. It brought together more than 400 participants – both medical doctors and technology experts from the physics community. Medical experts attending expressed their appreciation that CERN had organized the workshop, acknowledging the need for such cross-cultural and interdisciplinary events, which cannot easily be organized at a national level. The value of CERN both as a provider of technologies and as a catalyst for the community was widely recognized. There are, of course, many other activities where CERN makes similar contributions towards global endeavours, for example, the Open Access initiative and the deployment of a computing Grid infrastructure in Europe.
Some of the knowledge exchanges taking place across CERN’s network are structured, explicit and therefore easy to track. This is the case, for example, with technology-transfer activities, which are typically formalized through contracts that give third parties access to CERN’s intellectual property portfolio. Other knowledge-exchange processes are tacit or informal. For example, knowledge transfer through people’s mobility from CERN towards European companies is hard to track in a systematic way.
The CERN Global Network aims to facilitate knowledge exchange across the various groups described above and to improve the visibility of partnership opportunities related to CERN’s activities. It will also enable CERN to gather data on knowledge transfer through mobility.
This Global Network will welcome former and current members of the CERN personnel (including users), companies from CERN’s member states, universities and research institutes. It will deliver a database of members and a dedicated website, providing information about partnership and knowledge-sharing opportunities (training, new R&D projects, transferable technologies, jobs etc) across the community. It will also foster the creation of special interest groups and organize events at CERN.
The scope of the Global Network is broader than a typical “alumni” association because it aims to build and reinforce links between all of the key players in the knowledge-exchange process – be they individuals or institutions. Interactions between individuals will generate a CERN-specific social and professional network, while interactions between individuals and institutions will create value in areas such as recruitment by linking job seekers with potential employers. Finally, interactions between institutions will enable the exchange of best practice in specific thematic areas.
As a last point, I would like to stress that the importance of knowledge transfer through day-to-day exchanges with the general public cannot be overemphasized. No doubt most readers of this article are routinely asked by ordinary citizens to explain what CERN is. In these circumstances we are all acting as ambassadors for CERN, endowed with the responsibility to remove misconceptions about our field and to explain the role of fundamental research as a driver for innovation.
Contributing to communication with the general public is everyone’s responsibility – the CERN Global Network will provide its members with information about the CERN-related projects that make an impact on society and that can be used to illustrate how CERN concretely delivers value to the community, in addition to its contribution to the advancement of basic science.
Facilitating and catalysing knowledge exchanges are among the most valuable benefits that we at CERN can deliver to society. A few words from George Bernard Shaw suffice to illustrate why: “If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
by Gian Francesco Giudice, Oxford University Press. Hardback ISBN 9780199581917, £25 ($45).
If you are of the opinion that working physicists do not care about the history of their discipline or that theorists, like Gian Giudice, have no interest in the details of the experimental machines and detectors, this book will come as a surprise. The same is true if you share the view that it is not possible to describe the frontiers of modern physics – including the most speculative ones – to non-experts in a way that is both faithful and comprehensible. This book does all of that and is enjoyable reading, with the important information that it carries mixed in with many fun facts and anecdotes of all sorts. Not to mention the spot-on explanatory metaphors that are distributed profusely throughout almost every chapter.
One quality of this book is its comprehensive character, with its contents in three approximately equal parts. The first gives a brief but inspired history of particle physics, from J J Thomson’s discovery of the electron up to the setting of the Standard Model, without neglecting James Clark Maxwell, quite appropriately, or even Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. In the author’s words, the expected “results for the LHC” – surely the main inspiration of the book – “cannot be appreciated without some notion of what the particle world looks like”. The central section “describes what the LHC is and how it operates” – no more or less than that – in a successful effort to make clear the astonishing technological innovations involved in the LHC enterprise. This is useful reading for everybody, including politicians.
Last but not least, the third section “culminates with an outline of the scientific aims and expectations of the LHC”, addressing the central open issues in particle physics and beyond. Here Giudice is also not afraid to venture into the description of interesting theoretical speculations, while always keeping a sober view of the overall subject. “We do not know what lies in zeptospace and the LHC has just started its adventure” is the very last sentence of the book, which I fully support. By the way, “a zeptometre is a billionth of a billionth of a millimetre”, not quite but almost the distance that will be explored for the first time by the LHC: hence “zeptospace”.
The coming of the LHC is certainly the main inspiration of the book. The awe and excitement brought on by the start of LHC operation exudes from all its pages. But I think there is more to it than that. There is a view of what I like to call “synthetic physics”, that is the physics that aims to describe nature, or at least some part of it, in terms of few principles and few equations. In many respects the book pays tribute to “synthetic physics”. This is what determines the unity of its style and of its arguments. To whom do I recommend its reading? To everybody, experts or non-experts. I would in particular encourage young people, starting from those who are nearing the end of their high-school studies. I am sure that their efforts will be highly rewarded, not to mention the pleasure they will find. I believe, and I certainly wish, that this book will become required reading for anyone interested in scientific human endeavour, in the reality of our world.
by Federico Brunetti (ed.), Editrice Abitare Segesta. Hardback ISBN 9788886116930, €50.
With 350 photographs in about 150 pages, The Rings of Knowledge is a beautiful photographic collection interspersed with some text, whose role in putting over the message is almost peripheral. The book is bilingual, English and Italian, and so is aimed at an international audience.
The authors and editor have succeeded in illustrating the Italian contribution to CERN and the LHC. The book particularly emphasizes the role of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Research (INFN) and its involvement in leading worldwide scientific projects, of which the LHC is the flagship. The pride in contributing to the “LHC era” – as defined by the president of INFN, Roberto Petronzio, in the foreword – sometimes causes the authors to fall into the trap of excessive self-celebration. Statements such as “The LHC could not have been realized without Italy’s collaboration” apply equally to many other member states of CERN and could be badly perceived by an international readership.
The most distinctive feature is that Federico Brunetti, the editor, is an architect and photographer from the Industrial Design, Arts and Communication Department of Milan Politecnico. The chapters “The LHC between science and architecture” and “Physics as design” show his astonishment with the “enormous machines”, “enormous dimensions”, the “never-before-seen extremes of the place”. However, they also show that communication is an issue for any specialized discipline, including architecture.
The wording of these chapters is complex and the concepts are described with a sort of jargon that makes reading difficult. In particular, the concept of “beauty” in design and in physics is mentioned several times and in different places but is never really presented in a clear way. This is a pity because it would have been an interesting point to develop in a comprehensible way.
Back to the main point of the book: I found the photographs really amazing. The square layout is based on Fibonacci’s geometric series and shows the link between physics and design. Unfortunately, even this fascinating point is not clearly explained in the text. For example, one caption on page 25 helps the reader’s intuition but simpler phrasing would significantly increase the overall enjoyment of the book.
CERN and JINR have a long and successful history of collaboration – the first informal meeting on international co-operation in the field of high-energy accelerators took place at CERN in 1959 – and both provided a bridge between East and West for decades. In 1992 they signed a co-operation agreement that included an important number of protocols covering JINR’s participation in the construction of the LHC and the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS detectors, as well as in information technology. JINR has also made valuable contributions to smaller experiments at CERN.
Now that the major obligations undertaken by JINR for the construction of the LHC and its experiments have been met, CERN and JINR have decided to continue and reinforce their co-operation in the fields of particle physics, accelerator physics and technologies, educational programmes and the development of administrative and financial tools, mutually contributing to the scientific programmes of both laboratories. On 28 January, JINR’s director Alexei Sissakian and CERN’s director-general, Rolf Heuer, signed a new enlarged agreement to continue and enhance their co-operation in the field of high-energy physics.
At the City College of New York, Arthur I Miller took large doses of philosophy in addition to physics. This was the start of a path that would lead him to become a well known historian of science and acclaimed author. He earned a PhD in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to do research in theoretical particle physics. He soon became fascinated with the history of ideas and the role of visual thinking in highly creative research.
In 1991 Miller moved to England where he became professor of history and philosophy of science at University College London. Three years later he founded the Department of Science and Technology Studies, which grew out of the original Department of History and Philosophy of Science. He has lectured and written extensively about his research into the history and philosophy of 19th- and 20th-century science and technology, as well as about cognitive science, scientific creativity and the relationship between art and science.
He is the author not only of academic books but also of several widely acclaimed books meant for a wider audience, including Einstein, Picasso: space, time and the beauty that causes havoc (2001), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Empire of the Stars: friendship, obsession and betrayal in the quest for black holes (2005). In December he visited CERN to give a colloquium on his latest book, Deciphering the Cosmic Number: the strange friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009).
When did your interest in interdisciplinary studies start?
Even though physics was what I focused on at university, my passion has always been those pesky “what is the nature of” questions, such as “what is the nature of charge, of mass, of space, of time, of the mind, and so on”. I wanted to understand how scientists made discoveries and how the mind works. Looking into the original German-language papers written by giants of 20th-century physics such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, I came to understand the important role of visual imagery in scientific discovery. I decided to look into this further. I became curious as to how images were generated and stored in the mind, to be called out and used in thinking. I turned to cognitive science, which gave me the means to structure my ideas. This led to my investigation into concepts such as aesthetics, beauty, intuition and symmetry, and how they are used in science and art.
What intrigued you about the lives of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso?
The most important scientist of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, and its most important artist, Pablo Picasso, went through their period of greatest creativity and achievements around the same time, and in similar circumstances. In 1905 Einstein discovered his theory of relativity and in 1907 Picasso discovered Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting that brought art into the 20th century and that contains the seeds of cubism. Even though they did not know about each other, they were both – each in his own way – identifying connections across the so-called “two cultures” of science and art, and striving to find a solution to the question of how to represent the nature of space and time in a more satisfying manner.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was in the air that revolutionary changes were about to occur in many fields. Yet some of the greatest thinkers of the period bucked this tide. The great French philosopher-scientist Henri Poincaré was one of them. To my surprise, he turned out to be a common denominator between Einstein and Picasso. Both men were inspired by his book, Science and Hypothesis. Poincaré failed because he was unable to rid himself of the notion that time was an absolute and not a relative quantity. Just the opposite of what Einstein found when he combined space and time into a single continuum – space–time – and what Picasso did in his cubism, when he represented multiple perspectives all at once on a single canvas. Einstein studied temporal simultaneity, Picasso spatial simultaneity.
Is there a relationship between historical periods and people’s achievements?
Definitely. At that time, people were responding, with different degrees of success, to the mysterious synchronous effects of the Zeitgeist – the avant-garde, the intellectual tidal wave that swept across Europe. In fact, it was not an accident that Einstein and Picasso worked on the same problem – the nature of space and time. It was the principal problem of the avant-garde. In 1902, two years after his graduation from the ETH, Einstein was employed at the Swiss Federal Patent Office, in Bern, and was out of the academic mainstream. Picasso, on the other hand, was in Paris, in the centre of things. Most scientists thought that Poincaré would make major breakthroughs in physics, although of a sort that supported the claims of Newtonian science regarding space and time. Most artists in Paris considered that André Derain, Henri Matisse’s star student, was the one who would make the breakthrough to a radically new conceptual art.
Just as Poincaré could not break away from classical thought, Derain did not take seriously the dazzling developments in science, technology and mathematics. Only Picasso and Einstein were in resonance with the drum beat of the avant-garde. To accomplish their breakthroughs both men realized that they had to discover a new aesthetic: for Picasso it was the reduction of forms to geometry; for Einstein it was a minimalist aesthetic, which allowed him to remove “asymmetries that do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena”, as he wrote in the first sentence of his 1905 relativity paper. At their creative moment boundaries between disciplines dissolved and aesthetics became paramount for both of them.
What criteria do you use to compare people in your books?
I look for parallelisms in the working and private lives of highly creative thinkers (Einstein and Picasso). Pairs in opposition are of interest to me in what they say about the human element in science (Chandrasekhar and Eddington) or in a situation in which each learns from the other (Pauli and Jung). For example, Pauli was able to understand the forces that drove his personal life as well as his creative verve. In fact, an important discovery of his – CPT symmetry – stemmed from a dream that he and Jung analysed using Jungian psychoanalysis. Jung learnt enough quantum physics from Pauli to bring to fruition one of his greatest ideas – synchronism.
What can you say about high creativity?
Highly creative researchers are not deterred by mistakes and failures. Rather, they learn from them and turn the situation to their advantage. J Robert Oppenheimer once gave a particularly interesting definition of an expert as “a person who has made all possible mistakes”. Some other hallmarks of high creativity are that early in life the highly creative person realizes the field in which he or she is most competent and then mines it. They also exhibit an almost frighteningly focused mind when they work on a problem, to the exclusion of all else. Such was the case with Einstein and Picasso.
Is intuition part of creativity and the intellectual process?
I think that it is in both. There is nothing mysterious about intuition. It comes about mainly through an accumulation of knowledge. People can make an evaluation within a fraction of a second just because they have a lot of experience behind them. Having an intuition for what to do, solving a problem, judging a work of art, means having made a lot of errors and judgements along the way. Intuition is an achievement, albeit with a bit of the irrational mixed in – just like in scientific discovery. I think that there is not much difference between artistic thinking and scientific thinking, even if sometimes scientists want to appear less emotional and artists less rational.
Of course, an objective truth exists – on this every scientist would agree, even in this era of multiverses. There is a real external world “out there” beyond appearances and science is a way of getting a glimpse of it. Today, scientists have only begun to explore concepts like consciousness. One of the reasons I wrote my book about Jung and Pauli was to bring to everyone’s attention the high level of their discussions about issues that spanned physics, psychology, biology, religion, ESP, UFOs and Armageddon. They realized that neither physics nor psychology alone could reply to such deep questions such as: “What is the nature of consciousness?” Only an interdisciplinary approach could succeed.
What can you say about interdisciplinary research today?
Beginning in about the 1980s it became evident that, for example, biology needed various forms of technology – and also mathematics and physics. The need for interdisciplinarity soon became evident for physics as well, especially with the advent of health physics, computing physics, nanotechnology and then developments in biology. Nevertheless, most universities maintain a departmental structure and consequently a lack of complete interdisciplinarity. Moreover, there are too many instances where students with a PhD in an interdisciplinary topic have problems in obtaining a job.
One of the stumbling blocks here is the need for a common language across different domains. This lack of communication makes people afraid of an outsider interfering in their field. When I was writing my book on Einstein and Picasso I found that, whereas in most cases artists were easy to deal with, not so for historians of art. Their post-modernistic jargon necessarily closes them off from an interdisciplinary approach. Most of them still consider Picasso’s discovery of cubism to have been rooted in African art and the art of Cézanne, ignoring the essential role of science, technology and mathematics in his thinking. Picasso’s stunning discovery of cubism formalized the formerly informal language of art and brought it back into contact with science, where it has been ever since.
• For the video of the colloquium by Arthur I Miller, “The strange friendship of Pauli and Jung – when physics met philosophy”, see http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1228081.
Murray Gell-Mann and I were born a few days apart in September 1929. Being born on almost the same date as a genius does not help much, except for the fact that by having the same age there was a non-zero probability that we would meet. And indeed this is what happened; furthermore, we and our families became friends. Because I was unable to attend the meetings in honour of Murray, I am making this testimony on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
Murray’s family was much affected by the crash of October 1929. His father had to change jobs completely. If this had not happened, it is possible that Murray might have become a successful businessman instead of a brilliant physicist. Everybody knows that Murray is immensely cultured and has multiple interests. I can quote a few at random: penguins, other birds (tichodromes for instance), Swahili, Creole, Franco-Provençal (and more generally the history of languages), pre-Columbian art and American-Indian art, gastronomy (including French wines and medieval food), the history of religions, climatic change and its consequences, energy resources, protection of the environment, complexity, cosmology and the quantum theory of measurement. However, it is in the field of theoretical particle physics that he made his most creative and important contributions. For these, I personally consider him to be the best particle-physics theoretician alive today.
Bright beginnings
I met Murray for the first time at Les Houches in 1952, one year after the foundation of the school by Cecile Morette-DeWitt. It was immediately obvious that he was extremely bright. Then he was invited by Maurice Levy to the Ecole Normale and gave some lectures at the Institut Henri Poincaré. He gave these in French, which had an amusing consequence as a result of a practical joke by Maurice. For months, as they worked together, speaking French, whenever Murray had said something like “ces deux termes s’annulent” (these two terms cancel) Maurice repeated it, substituting “se chancellent” for “s’annulent.” Now Murray knew that “chanceler” means to wobble and not to cancel, but he finally supposed that in English-influenced French scientific jargon, “chanceler” could mean “to cancel.” Otherwise, why would Maurice keep using that word? When Murray actually employed the word in one of his lectures, Maurice went into paroxysms of laughter.
In 1955 I attended my first physics conference, in Pisa. After a breakfast with Erwin Schroedinger, I took the tram and met Murray. In the afternoon, at the University of Pisa, he made the first public presentation of the strangeness scheme. The auditorium was packed. I was completely bewildered by this extraordinary achievement, with its incredible predictive power (which was very soon checked) including the KK system. I had already left Ecole Normale-Orsay for CERN when he and Maurice wrote their famous paper featuring for the first time what was later called the “Cabbibo angle”.
I then had the luck to be sent to the La Jolla conference in 1961. There I met Nick Khuri for the first time, who became a close friend, and I heard Murray presenting “the Eightfold Way” (i.e. the SU(3) octet model). Also attending were Marcel Froissart, who derived the “Froissart Bound”, and Geoff Chew, who presented his version of the S-matrix programme. Both were most inspiring for my future work. What I did not realize at the time was that the Chew programme had been largely anticipated by Murray, who first was involved in the use of dispersion relations and then noticed, in 1956, that the combination of analyticity, unitarity and crossing symmetry could lead to field theory on the mass shell, with some interesting consequences (as exemplified by Froissart’s work and by my later work on the subject).
In 1962, during the Geneva “Rochester” conference, I was again present when Murray, after a review of hadron spectroscopy by George Snow, stood up and pointed out that the sequence of particles Δ, Σ*, Ξ* could be completed by a particle that he called Ω– to form a decuplet in the SU(3) scheme. He predicted its mode of production, its decay, which was to be weak, and its mass. This was followed by a period of deep scepticism among theoreticians, including some of the best. However, at the end of 1963, while I was in Princeton, Nick Samios and his group at Brookhaven announced that the Ω– had been discovered, with exactly the correct mass within a few mega-electron-volts. Frank Yang, one of the sceptics, called it “the most important experiment in particle physics in recent years”. I missed the invention of the quarks, being in Princeton, far from Caltech, where Murray was, and from CERN where George Zweig was visiting. I met Bob Serber but I was completely unaware of his catalytic role in that discovery.
Close friends
My next important meeting with Murray was in Yerevan in Armenia in 1965, where Soviet physicists had invited a group of some eight western physicists. This time Murray came with his whole family: his wife, Margaret – a British archaeology student whom he met in Princeton – and his children, Lisa and Nick. During the following summer, which the Gell-Manns spent in Geneva, our families met several times. I remember once when my children, seeing a portrait of Lisa by the famous Armenian painter H Galentz, said: “This is a green Lisa.” The Gell-Manns spent another year at CERN before Harold Fritzsch, Gell-Mann, and Heinrich Leutwyler wrote the “Credo” of QCD.
Margaret and Murray came to Geneva again for the academic year 1979/80. They were living in an apartment in the same group of buildings as us. Schu, my wife, then became a close friend of Margaret, who was a typically British girl: very reserved, very intelligent and possessing a good sense of humour. An example of how she was very modest is that, while we knew that she had been digging at Mycenae for an archaeologist named Alan Wace, we found out only long after her death that she had played a personal role in destroying a theory of Sir Arthur Evans, who claimed wrongly that the Cretans had dominated the Mycenaeans during a certain part of the late-Minoan period – while the reverse was true. In fact, she was the first to discover a Linear B tablet at Mycenae. Although Carl Blegen had found Linear B tablets at Pylos long before, finding them at Mycenae as well was important additional evidence once Michael Ventris had proved that the language of Linear B was an early form of Greek, and that Margaret’s boss was right. He had suffered terribly from his refusal to agree with Evans.
An extraordinary friendship grew up between Margaret and Schu. When the Gell-Manns left Geneva for Pasadena, Margaret knew that there was something wrong with her health. Back in the US she discovered that she had cancer. I do not know the number of transatlantic trips that we made – sometimes both of us, sometimes Schu alone – to help Margaret. This included stays in Aspen during the summers of 1980 and 1981. In between, Schu and Margaret had an extensive correspondence. Schu decided to initiate Margaret into French poetry. In particular, she sent Margaret poems by Jacques Prévert and Paul Eluard. On Margaret’s grave, in Aspen, Murray put the inscription: “Mais ou en est ce léger sourire” (Eluard, about Nuesch, his late wife). After Margaret’s death, we all kept in touch because Murray has one remarkable quality: faithfulness in friendship.
• I am grateful to my wife, Schu, and to Murray for suggestions and corrections.
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