Praxis Archives – Page 98 of 179

The Nucleon–Nucleon Interaction and the Nuclear Many-Body Problem: Selected Papers of Gerald E Brown and T T S Kuo

By Gerald E Brown et al. (eds.)
World Scientific
Hardback: £87 $140
E-book: $182

These selected papers provide a comprehensive overview of some key developments in the understanding of the nucleon–nucleon interaction and nuclear many-body theory. With their influential 1967 paper, Brown and Kuo prepared the effective theory that allowed the description of nuclear properties directly from the underlying nucleon–nucleon interaction. Later, the addition of “Brown-Rho scaling” to the one-boson-exchange model deepened the understanding of nuclear matter saturation, carbon-14 dating and the structure of neutron stars.

Neutron Physics for Nuclear Reactors: Unpublished Writings by Enrico Fermi

By S Esposito and O Pisanti (eds.)
World Scientific
Hardback: £76 $111
E-book: $144

This unique volume gives an accurate and detailed description of the functioning and operation of basic nuclear reactors, as emerging from previously unpublished papers by Enrico Fermi. The first part contains the entire course of lectures on neutron physics delivered by Fermi at Los Alamos in 1945, as recorded in notes by Anthony P French. Here, the fundamental physical phenomena are described comprehensively, giving the appropriate physics underlying the functioning of nuclear piles. The second part contains the patents issued by Fermi (and co-workers) on the functioning, construction and operation of several different kinds of nuclear reactor.

Measurements and their Uncertainties: A Practical Guide to Modern Error Analysis

By Ifan Hughes and Thomas Hase
Oxford University Press
Hardback: £39.95 $85
Paperback: £19.95

This hands-on guide is primarily intended to be used in undergraduate laboratories in the physical sciences and engineering. It assumes no prior knowledge of statistics and introduces the necessary concepts where needed. Key points are shown with worked examples and illustrations. In contrast to traditional mathematical treatments, it uses a combination of spreadsheet and calculus-based approaches, suitable as a quick and easy on-the-spot reference.

Risk – A very short Introduction

By Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany
Oxford University Press
Hardback: £7.99

Amazing. A book that should be read by everyone who is still thinking of investing in hedge funds or believing that the stock market is rational. The subject is well explained, covering risk types that we are all familiar with, as well as some that most of us probably never think of as risk. What I especially like is the large number of recent events that are discussed, deep into the year 2011.

The range of human activity covered is vast, and for many areas it is not so much risk as decision making that is discussed. There are many short sentences that were perfectly clear to me but still unexpected such as “people are [deemed] adequately informed when knowing more would not affect their choices”.

The language is clear and pleasant to read, though here and there I sensed that the authors struggled to remain within the “very short” framework. That also means that you should not expect to pick up the 162-page book after dinner and finish it before going to bed. Much of it invites reflection and slow savouring of the ideas, effects and correlations that make risks and deciding about them so intimately intertwined with our human psyche.

A very pleasant book indeed.

Dark Energy: Theory and Observations

By Luca Amendola and Shinji Tsujikawa
Cambridge University Press
Hardback: £45

Introducing the relevant theoretical ideas, observational methods and results, this textbook is ideally suited to graduate courses on dark energy, as well as supplement advanced cosmology courses. It covers the cosmological constant, quintessence, k-essence, perfect fluid models, extra-dimensional models and modified gravity. Observational research is reviewed, from the cosmic microwave background to baryon acoustic oscillations, weak lensing and cluster abundances.

The Infinity Puzzle: How the quest to understand quantum field theory led to extraordinary science, high politics and the world’s most expensive experiment

By Frank Close

Oxford University Press
Hardback: £16.99

Frank Close is a prolific author – Neutrino, Antimatter, Nothing, The New Cosmic Onion, Void, The Particle Odyssey, Lucifer’s Legacy and more, have already appeared this century. The Infinity Puzzle is his ingenious name for the vital but recondite procedure called “renormalization” in physics-speak, but his latest book covers much more ground than just this.

Setting off to trace the evolution of quantum field theory in the 20th century, Close needs to run, leaping from Niels Bohr to Paul Dirac without pausing at Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. However, he occasionally pauses for breath: his descriptions of difficult ideas such as gauge invariance and renormalization are themselves valuable. Equally illuminating are the vivid portraits of some of the players, many major – Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow, Gerard ’t Hooft and John Ward – as well as others, such as Ron Shaw, who played smaller roles. Other key contributors, notably Steven Weinberg, appear on the scene unheralded.

The core of the book is the re-emergence in the 1960s of field theory, which had lapsed into disgrace after its initial triumph with quantum electrodynamics. Its new successes came with a unified electroweak theory and with quantum chromodynamics for the strong interactions.

Embedded in this core is a scrutiny of spontaneous symmetry breaking as a physics tool. Here Close presents the series of overlapping contributions that led to the emergence of what is now universally called the “Higgs mechanism”, together with the various claims and counterclaims.

Electroweak unification gained recognition through the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: in 1979 with Glashow, Salam and Weinberg; and in 1999 with ’t Hooft and Martinus Veltman. Having assigned credit where he sees fit, Close also confiscates much of that accorded to Salam, stressing the latter’s keen ambition and political skills to the detriment of enormous contributions to world science. (His International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste was launched with initial support from IAEA, not from UNESCO, as stated in the book.)

In this electroweak saga, Close gives an impression that understanding weak interactions was at the forefront of people’s minds in the mid-1960s, when many were, in fact, initially blinded by the dazzle of group theory for strong interactions and the attendant quark picture. In those days, spontaneous symmetry breaking became muddled with ideas of approximate symmetries of strong interactions. Many struggled to reconcile the lightness of the pion with massless Goldstone bosons. Close mentions Weinberg’s efforts in this direction and the sudden realization that he had been applying the right ideas to the wrong problem.

As the electroweak theory emerged, its protagonists danced round its renormalization problems, whose public resolution came in a 1971 presentation in Amsterdam by ’t Hooft, carefully stage-managed by Veltman, which provides a dramatic prologue to the book. For the strong interactions, Close sees Oxford with Dick Dalitz as a centre of quark-model developments but there was also a colourful quark high priest in the form of Harry Lipkin of the Weizmann Institute.

With the eponymous puzzle resolved, the book concludes with discoveries that confirmed the predictions of field theory redux and the subsequent effort to build big new machines, culminating in the LHC at CERN. The book’s end is just as breathless as its beginning.

The Infinity Puzzle is illustrated with numerous amusing anecdotes, many autobiographical. It displays a great deal of diligent research and required many interviews. At some 400 pages, it is thicker than most of Close’s books. Perhaps this is because there are really two books here. One aims at the big audience that wants to understand what the LHC is and what it does, and will find the detailed field-theory scenarios tedious. On the other hand, those who will be enlightened, if not delighted, by this insight will already know about the LHC and not need explanations of atomic bar codes.

Council solicits opinion to chart the future of European particle physics

CCnew1_01_12 — The historic city of Cracow will be the setting for the Open Symposium for updating the European Strategy for Particle Physics.
Image credit: Krzysztof Nahlik/dreamstime.com.

During its December meetings, CERN Council announced that an Open Symposium will be held in Cracow on 10–13 September 2012 for the purpose of updating the European Strategy for Particle Physics. Council adopted Europe’s current strategy for the field in July 2006 with an understanding that it be brought up to date at appropriate intervals of typically five years.

The Open Symposium is part of a process designed to get the maximum input from the particle-physics community, as well as from other stakeholders both inside and outside Europe, as Europe’s strategy forms part of a global whole. Opinion will be solicited from the individual scientists who carry out the research, the communities that stand to benefit and the research ministries that will foot the bill. With help from the local organizing committee, the Open Symposium will be arranged by a preparatory group appointed by Council and provide an opportunity for the global particle-physics community to express its views on the scientific objectives of the strategy.

Submissions will be solicited for written statements from individual physicists, groups of scientists representing specific interests – such as an experiment or a topic of theoretical research – together with contributions from institutions and organizations, such as funding agencies and science ministries. After discussion in the Open Symposium, these statements will be made available to the European Strategy Group tasked by Council with drafting the updated strategy document under the chair of the Scientific Secretary of the Strategy Session of Council.

Council will discuss the draft of the updated European strategy in March 2013 and will hold a special session in Brussels in early summer 2013 to adopt the updated strategy. It is also expected that the update of the strategy will become an agenda item for the EU Council of Ministers meeting to be held at the same time.

• Further information on the update of the European Strategy of Particle Physics, including announcements and details for participation at the Open Symposium, may be found as it becomes available at https://europeanstrategygroup.web.cern.ch/EuropeanStrategyGroup/.

Serbia set to join CERN as associate member state

At its 161st meeting at CERN on 16 December, the CERN Council unanimously voted to admit the Republic of Serbia to associate membership as the pre-stage to membership of CERN. This status will come into force following the signing of the related agreement by the two parties and notification to CERN of ratification by the Serbian parliament.

Serbian scientists have an involvement with CERN that dates back to the origins of the organization: Yugoslavia was a founder member state of CERN in 1954 and remained a member state until 1961. Serbian physicists have long been active in the ISOLDE facility and through the 1980s and 1990s were active in the DELPHI experiment at the Large Electron–Positron collider.

Serbia formally came back into the fold through a co-operation agreement in 2001, leading to involvement in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. Serbian industry participated in the construction of both detectors and the country is also active in Grid computing.

Following notification of ratification, Serbia will join Israel as an associate member state of CERN. After a maximum period of five years, Council will decide on the admission to full membership.

Events that match companies and researchers

Beam diagnostics, beam-profile measurements and quality-assurance methods are of the utmost importance for every accelerator or facility, and especially for radiotherapy beams. While researchers strive for better instruments and methods, industrial companies look towards the research community for turning clever ideas and working prototypes into commercial products with improved accuracy and efficacy.

To foster the transfer of technologies based on high-energy physics, the HEPTech network has launched a series of workshops called “Industry – Academia matching events”. These include summary talks from both industry and the research community, with a poster gallery and live demonstrations. These are aimed at maximizing contact and collaboration between industrial companies and those researchers active in a particular field. The first event, on silicon photomultipliers, was held in February 2011 (p33).

The second event, on the technology and the opportunities for beam instrumentation and measurement, took place on 10–11 November. It was held at GSI Darmstadt, home to much of the early work on heavy-ion radiotherapy. Some 84 participants, including representatives from 18 industrial companies, gathered at the new GSI Conference Building. The next event is planned to take place at DESY this spring and will focus on position-sensitive silicon detectors. It will be organized by the collaboration for Advanced European Infrastructures for Detectors and Accelerators (AIDA) with the support of HEPTech.

Towards a more confident future

CCvie1_01_12 — Image credit: Roger Eriksson/ESS AB.

Gloom and despondency about the economic climate fill the newspapers to saturation point. The eurozone is, once again, destined to fragment and disappear – there is a depressingly strong sensation that many people never wanted it to thrive in the first place and would be delighted (not openly of course) should it disappear. Interestingly, the issue of the real climate has fallen off the radar screens for the moment. There is no doubt that these issues and many others – most notably the atrocious inequality of living standards worldwide – are of immense importance as we enter another new year. As one year follows another, are we, as a society, content to accept that these problems are insoluble and, if not, how are we – international scientists, engineers and administrators – able to contribute best?

In my view there is a strong element of lack of confidence floating around but confidence is what is needed now. Science has, in the past and increasingly so today, often been the source of inspiration, meaning and confidence in people’s lives. The moon landing is an obvious example – vision creates the confidence and the confidence creates the reality. The all-important and necessary details follow from the vision and not the other way around as many people today believe.

When we stand back and look at big-science facilities today we are justified in feeling awed. The LHC has been a lesson in determination and belief. Well done to all! The space telescopes as well as the ground-based telescopes provide breathtaking images and insights, and move the whole human race away from superstition towards a more realistic and healthy view of our place in the universe.

Today, the fragmentation of science into different disciplines, which was very evident in the second and third quarters of the previous century, is in reverse. Collaboration across these boundaries is today evident and productive, and this will surely continue. When I went to the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble in 1999 I came into contact with the incipient grouping of the then seven large European science laboratories, which became EIROforum. Not the snappiest name in the universe, it has to be said, but a surprisingly effective and egalitarian organization in which not only the minnows certainly benefited but also the big-hitters gained. In many ways the international organizations mirror the national/international dilemma of the EU’s Directorate-General for Research and there was a natural affinity, which opened doors, increased influence and created togetherness between the different players. I was a big fan of EIROforum and remain so. It has added an extra dimension.

However, the European Spallation Source (ESS), which I now head up, is not yet ready to join this group of eight laboratories. The ESS sits plum in the middle of the size-scale between the cosmic scale of the telescopes and the submicroscopic scale of the LHC; it deals with materials science in all of its complexity and in all of its diversity. The ESS is not yet operational and it will not be such until the end of this decade when it will be the world’s most intense source of slow neutrons for the investigation of materials – from bio membranes and drug-delivery mechanisms to magnetic structures and metallurgical properties. But, crucially, the ESS is driven by the same engine that drives the LHC: a high-intensity proton linear accelerator, with its superconducting niobium accelerating cavities. And collaboration between the ESS and CERN is thriving.

Costs are important, however, and the spending of taxpayers’ contributions to scientific endeavours carries with it immense responsibility. This also, it must be said, applies to the spending of investors’ contributions in private companies. Not before time it is becoming increasingly recognized that there are not two distinct colours of money in our economies. The capital cost of the ESS (€1.5 bn) could be funded comfortably from the bonuses awarded to US bankers – for 24 days! (All in 2008 values.)

To put this figure into context with other public building projects – the proposed 160 km high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham is expected to cost €20 bn. Travellers would barely have reached the outskirts of London before the cash registers had exceeded the €1.5 bn figure for the ESS.

So let us keep matters in perspective and press our governments to stand by their promises made in Lisbon in 2000 and in Barcelona to lift the percentage of European GDP spent on science from the 1.85% then to 3% (by 2010). The figure remains below 1.9% today. Science has a role in society!

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