Outdoor Lunch
IT WAS a pleasantly warm Spring day in Meyrin. Roger Coulton had decided to sit outside under the pale green of the trees outside the CERN cafeteria as he ate his lunch. He glanced at the croquet lawn in front of him. The grass had been transformed from an ugly brown to an emerald green in the past few weeks, and later this afternoon the serious CERN devotees would be there playing their quaint game, like Alice and the Queen of Hearts.
Through the trees he could see the upthrust rock slab of the Saleve and behind it other mountains surrounding Geneva. The sun was shining, and there was no wind to disturb his papers.
He frowned at the symbols on the pages of the laser-printed Mathematica notebook before him on the round white table. Neatly type-set in a sub-dialect of the language of mathematics, they laid out the anatomy of a failed idea. For the past two months Roger had felt like a drowning man trying desperately to stay afloat. He had been grasping for some variation of his basic approach that might save his new procedure for calculating particle masses from first principles. He was becoming very sure that his efforts were futile. His new procedure was beautiful, elegant, brilliant, and wrong.
In theoretical physics it was not unusual to spend time exploring a few blind alleys. That was part of the game. But this particular idea had looked so promising. In his recent seminars he had been able to use it to impress his colleagues. He was about to move to a new job, a big upward step, and his newly elevated position was due in no small part to the impression made in his interview seminar discussing his new approach. He still could not quite bring himself to believe that his beautiful idea was wrong.
A shadow fell across the papers and remnants of his meal. Roger squinted up at a tall, broad shouldered figure outlined in the yellow alpine sunlight and the green of translucent leaves.
“Hello,” the man said. “I believe you’re Roger Coulton. I was at the talk you gave at Les Houches last March. Very nice work.” The face was vaguely familiar. He had sandy blond hair, a white-streaked beard, and the rugged tan characteristic of the high-altitude UV-laden sunlight of mountain climbs. His accent marked him as American, probably from the midwest. He was holding a marbled-white CERN cafeteria tray and smiling. “I’m George Griffin. I’m an experimentalist with the LEM collaboration at the Superconducting Super Collider. You’re obviously working, and I don’t want to bother you, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to say hello.”
Roger waved his hand in a gesture of welcome and moved his backpack from the other chair. “Please sit down, George,” he said, feeling somewhat relieved to be distracted from his troubles. “I was not, I regret to say, doing anything useful.” He gathered his papers and put them back into the pack. He glanced around the outdoor seating area of the cafeteria. It was becoming crowded, and he was alone at this table. Roger liked to talk to experimentalists. It was a good way of hearing the news about experimental results early, and they usually didn’t want to discuss the details of his recent theoretical work.
George sat down across from him, poured beer from a brown Kronenberg bottle into a glass, and took an appreciative sip. “It’s a great cafeteria that serves beer at lunch time,” he said. “The good folk of Ellis County, Texas would never permit such civilized customs, even if they were allowed by the uptight image-conscious Department of Energy bureaucrats. Imagine the reports their safety task forces would write about the hazards of Alcohol in the Workplace.”
Roger shook his head. “The UK science bureaucracy stands second to none in the tediousness of their safety,” he said. “I moved here from England as soon as the opportunity was offered, and I’ve lived here for three years. The physics is excellent, the pay is twice what I’d get in the UK, the food is wonderful, and the scenery is beautiful.”
“But you’ll soon be leaving CERN to learn about the Waxahachie way of life at first hand,” George said. “You’ve accepted the Senior Fellow position with the SSC’s Particle Theory Group? I’m surprised that you were willing to move.” He waved his hand toward the south where the Alps, punctuated by Mont Blanc, ringed Geneva.
I was a bit surprised, myself, Roger thought. “It wasn’t an easy decision. But ultimately physics decided it. I realized that the CERN LHC simply does not have enough energy to address the most interesting physics questions. Now that the SSC is at last coming into operation, it’s where the action is for theorists as well as experimentalists, so I’m going there.” And hoping the change will blast me out of my present morass, he thought.
“Are you leaving soon?” George asked.
“I move to Texas in a few days,” said Roger. “My boxes of books and papers are already on their way. It’s going to be an adventure for me, living in the States. Especially in Texas. I misspent my early youth watching old cowboy videos.”
“It’s going to require a certain change in life-style,” George said. “Are you married? Where do you live here at CERN?”
“I’m single,” said Roger. “In the UK I had rooms at Cambridge before coming to CERN.” Roger, felt a twinge that might have been guilt. He never mentioned King’s Lynn, where he’d spent the first ten years of his life in near poverty. “Now I have a nice flat in a housing complex in St. Genis, across in France. It’s near a wooded area with a path beside a stream where I like to walk, and my flat has a pleasant view of the Jura Mountains. As a theorist it would have appealed to me to live in a town named Thoiry, which is just down the road, but I couldn’t afford the rents there. How’s the housing situation at the SSC? Where do people live?”
“Hmm,” George mused. “How can I explain Texas? Let’s consider it as a problem in conformal mapping. Instead of Geneva you have Dallas -- very tall buildings, like Geneva a banking and insurance center, a few small lakes but no big ones, no mountains at all, or even significant hills. It’s very flat, with rich black topsoil over limestone. Good farm land, especially for growing cotton. Can’t say much for the wine.
“Instead of the Genevois Calvinists and the French Catholics you will encounter hard-shell Southern Baptists and other sub-species of Texas fundamentalists. You’ll love them. Narrow minded, gossipy, very strict about the appearance of rectitude, uprightness, and Christian living but somewhat more relaxed in private, behind closed doors. They also have a strong work ethic, which is good for the SSC Lab.
“Lots of evangelists around, moving from town to town and making a big show of hell-fire religion. You’ll drive past their big circus tent revivals, hear them on the radio, and find it difficult to avoid them on the local TV stations. There are lots of small churches in the countryside and some very big ones in Dallas and Fort Worth. Dallas is known is some quarters as the very Buckle of the Bible Belt.”
“Delightful,” Roger said and laughed, then frowned as he considered the prospect of experiencing American-style fundamentalist Christianity at close range. Griffin seemed to be going through a familiar spiel, one he’s probably delivered many times before, but that was good. Roger was interested.
“Instead of Meyrin,” George continued, “you will have Waxahachie, the town nearest the SSC Campus and approximately at the center of the ring. Waxahachie might be best described as Texas-Victorian. It was a cotton boom-town around 1900. It has a wonderful Victorian courthouse, and many lovely old gingerbread houses of that boom period still decorate the town. After World War I, the cotton boom faded and Waxahachie went into hibernation until about 1988 when the SSC came along. Now it’s a boom town again, but this time it’s a physics boom town.”
“That’s a bit difficult to imagine,” said Roger, draining the last sip of apple juice from his glass, and turning it upside down on the tray. The small yellow wasps were beginning to take an interest in it.
“And I suppose St. Genis maps into Maypearl to the west of the SSC campus,” George continued. “Maypearl is certainly the low rent district, but I wouldn’t recommend living there. It’s a depressed cotton-gin town, not very pleasant unless you like beer joints populated by migrant workers, sharecroppers, and mean unemployed drunks.”
“So where do people live who work at the SSC?” Roger asked.
“Be prepared to buy a car and drive it,” said George. “There’s essentially no public transportation, and the places you will need to go are far apart. As for housing, as usual, it’s a matter of taste. Some have apartments in De Soto or South Dallas, where there’s something of a singles scene. A few are buying and remodeling the classic gingerbread houses in Waxahachie. Others live in newer houses on one of the lakes to the south, with maybe a dock and a boat for water skiing. Then there are those who have bought into the Texas mystique and have set themselves up as mini-cattle-barons on a hundred acre spread, with a couple of horses, a dozen head of prime livestock, a few ranch hands to do the actual work, and an air-conditioned ranch house. The land around Waxahachie isn’t too expensive, so you could buy into that kind of setup for the equivalent of a few year’s salary. For example, your new boss Bert Barnes, the head of the SSC Theory Group, has become a Gentleman Rancher in that style. Stetson, high-heel boots, and all. You’re going to love his barbecues.” George combed his fingers through his beard, as if appreciating the thought.
“I don’t think I’m quite ready for gentrification,” said Roger, who had already met Bert and had already formed an opinion. “What’s the culture like in Dallas proper. Can one find films and theater, book shops and coffee houses and intelligent conversation?”
George smiled. “You must understand that I’m a faculty member at the University of Washington, so I live in Seattle, which is about 2700 kilometers northwest of Dallas. But over the past few years, while the SSC was getting started, I’ve come to know the Dallas area fairly well. I think you may have a problem, Roger. Dallas is a big city, but its culture, like its religion, tends to be concentrated at the surface.
“The Dallas big-rich support the showy cultural forms, the symphony, the opera, the ballet, the usual repertory theater company, and a well-appointed art museum with some minor works of first rank painters and major works of third rank ones. They like culture they can point to and be seen at. They like big names, but they’re not all that picky about the quality of the end product.
“The center of Dallas is a complex of sterile office buildings staffed by a mobile population that vanishes at 5 PM. You’ll find the film scene at the suburban shopping malls, with movie theaters that have a dozen screens and can occasionally spare one of them for the odd foreign film. The book shops are mainly chain franchises, and they’re also at the malls. Come to think of it, that’s probably where the coffee houses are too, so that the housewives can pause on shopping expeditions to grab a quick espresso or latte. Perhaps you’ll need to locate near a shopping mall, Roger.”
Roger winced. He wondered if George might be having a joke at his expense, and looked closely at him.
“Seriously,” said George, apparently getting the message, “there’s intelligent conversation to be had, but you’ll have to go looking for it. There are some big universities in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Arlington, and there are supposed to be good bookstores, coffee houses, and student pubs near them.” George paused and stroked his beard again. “Look, Roger, I’m making it sound worse than it is. There are good and interesting people living around the SSC, and you just have to find them yourself. Culturally Dallas isn’t London, or even Seattle, but it’s a city with an enormous vitality and frontier exuberance that’s quite fascinating in its own way.”
Roger swatted at the yellow wasps. “I can see,” he said, “that I’m in for a period of adjustment.” He looked upward at the sunshine filtering through the trees. Griffin seemed to have come to the end of his Texas observations. “Permit me to change the subject,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me a bit about the experimental program at the SSC and the big detectors. During my visit there two months ago, I only talked to the theorists. I’d rather not be so uninformed about the SSC’s experimental program when I show up there and begin telling the experimentalists what physics they should do.”
George smiled. “The most important thing I can say about the SSC,” he said, “is that the damned thing, after years of political battles, DOE bureaucratic interference, budget fights, technical glitches, and magnet tinkering, is finally up and running. I consider that a miracle. The whole project was almost killed by the U. S. Congress several times in the mid-1990s. It was very close. Only a major effort spanning the whole eight years of the Bush Administration, particularly by Allan Bromley, Bush’s Science Advisor, and John Deutsch, his Energy Secretary, saved the SSC from an ugly premature death. Bromley and Deutsch engineered the one billion dollar Japanese contribution to the SSC, and at their instigation many of us in particle physics made frequent pilgrimages to DC to talk to congressional staff about the value of the project. I was at Fermilab working on CDF at the time, and for a while we were spending more time lobbying for the SSC than discovering the top quark. Have you ever tried explaining particle physics to a lawyer?”
Roger laughed. “I have trouble enough explaining it to my colleagues,” he said. He sensed that Griffin was giving him another familiar spiel. “But how well is the machine running? I’ve heard the luminosity is low.”
“The beam luminosity did start out very low four months ago, when they first reached full energy. The machine team is still working on some beam instabilities that occur while ramping up to full energy, but the luminosity is building up to the design values on a nice curve. The two major detector systems, SDC and LEM, are both working well, and both are now taking data.”
“Ah, yes, you should remind me of what the acronyms stand for,” said Roger. “To be properly admitted to the high priesthood, one must first memorize all of the holy acronyms.”
George grinned. “SDC stands for Solenoidal Detector Collaboration. It’s a big barrel-shaped superconducting solenoid coil with elaborate wire chambers on the inside and layers of calorimeters and muon detectors on the outside. It collects data mainly for the hadronic sector, the heavy charged particles from the collision. LEM stands for Lepton and Electro-Magnetic Processes, the processes it’s designed to detect.
“I should add, for your cultural edification, that some of our rivals have had the temerity to suggest that LEM stands for Jake’s Large Empire of Minions or the Loony Excursion Module. It’s a large open-geometry superconducting toroid for detecting leptons and photons.
“LEM is working fine at the moment, but some of the electronic components are already failing. We’re worried. Some of the radiation hardened detector circuits are turning out to be not as radiation-hard as we’d expected, and we badly need to replace them with better ones. I’m here at CERN to compare notes on radiation damage problems with people in the LHC detector groups. One of their experts, Wolfgang Spiegelmann, is going to spend next month working with us at Waxahachie.”
“Anything, ah ... interesting in the data you’ve collected so far?” Roger asked.
“Well, we haven’t yet discovered any Higgs bosons with LEM, if that’s what you mean. Neither has the SDC, but we’re all looking hard. The students claim that Jake Wang has already written the paper announcing the discovery of the Higgs. He only has to fill in a few numbers and paste in some graphs when we actually find it. He expects his Nobel Prize any month now.” He smiled and combed his beard again.
Roger looked across at George. “Of course!” he said. “I’d overlooked that minor detail. You must work with Jake.” He smiled sympathetically, realizing that he had probably hit upon yet another of Griffin’s favorite topics of conversation.
George shook his head. “I don’t think you understand, Roger. Nobody works with Jake. I work for Jake, just as everyone else in the LEM collaboration does. All of Jake’s detector projects have started with the letter L, all have produced excellent physics, and all of them have left a trail of broken minds and bodies in their wake.
“The story goes that a prominent particle physicist suffered an unexpected heart attack, dropped dead, and immediately found himself standing before Saint Peter at the Gates of Heaven. Saint Peter carefully examined his earthly record, asked some pointed questions about several referee reports the physicist had written, and finally decided to admit him to heaven. As he was passing through the Pearly Gates, the man noticed to his right an enormous particle detector that looked like LEM, and standing before it was a solemn oriental man in a gray tailored business suit, checking papers on a clipboard against some details of the detector.
‘Why, that’s Jake Wang over there,’ said the physicist. ‘Is he dead too? I saw him at the SSC just last week.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Saint Peter. ‘That’s God. Sometimes he likes to play at being Jake Wang.’”
Roger laughed. “I heard the same story at Cambridge about Disraeli, but I think it probably fits your friend Jake better. Even in England I’d heard stories about his rages and personality quirks.”
“Yes,” said George. “Unfortunately, all of those stories are true. Of course, it is possible to adjust to him. In fact, there are many time-tested ways of adjusting to Jake ...” He smiled. “A nervous breakdown, alcoholism, heavy tranquilization, a quick drink of strychnine, a change of profession ...” He smiled.
Roger raised an eyebrow. “That bad ... ?” he said.
George shrugged. “It’s the price that fate has extracted from me in exchange for my involvement in the best experiment on the best accelerator in the world. Usually, I think it’s worth it.”