The Desert’s Edge
GEORGE sat in the third row of the SSC’s large lecture theater. The room was about one-fourth full. The speaker was a distinguished theorist, a Nobel laureate and holder of an endowed chair on physics at an ivy-league university. He waved the laser-spot pointer at the diagram projected on the tall screen at the front of the room. He was discussing the Energy Desert and once again raising the possibility that particle physics, as practiced at the SSC, was about to come to an end.
George had heard this argument before. The progress of particle physics had been driven by a succession of ever more powerful accelerators beginning with E. O. Lawrence’s original cyclotron and culminating with the SSC. The field had advanced in a series of carefully orchestrated leaps, quantum jumps from each particle accelerator to the next new and more powerful one. And like clockwork, again and again new phenomena, completely unexpected discoveries, had appeared when each new accelerator began to produce its higher energy particle beams. One of the wisdoms of science is that to see what none have seen before you must look where none have looked before. That maxim was epitomized by the unbroken chain of remarkable discoveries that had emerged from experimental particle physics from the 1930’s onward. But the chain could break.
The pessimistic argument that the speaker was presenting was that, in his esteemed judgment, the chain of new discoveries was indeed about to break, the series was about to terminate. With the wisdom of hindsight one could see that the great discoveries of particle physics had all been consequences of the fundamental underlying structures of matter, the quarks and leptons and the “carrier” particles that mediated the fundamental forces. The set of these particles now seemed almost complete. All the expected quarks and leptons had been found, culminating with the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab in 1994-95. The Higgs particle, presently being sought in different ways by several experimental groups at the SSC, might be the last piece in the cosmic puzzle. The next generation of particles might lie vastly higher in energy, at the “Planck scale,” the mass scale set by the smallest possible black holes, the domain where gravity and the three other forces of nature must unite into a single force.
If that was so, the SSC was the end of the line for accelerator-based particle physics. There was little point in building an even more powerful machine. From the SSC at the edge of the desert, a vast energy wasteland stretched from the Higgs to the Planck scale, a great energy region where nothing of interest would happen, where no new particles would be discovered. Where the dance of theory with experiment to produce new knowledge was about to come to an end.
The QCD Standard Model worked too well, the speaker declared. There would be few surprises in the energy region that the SSC had opened to exploration. Experimental particle physics was reaching its logical conclusion. He advised the younger physicists in the audience to begin preparing for an alternative career.
George thought of the violet track with its 29 clusters of jets, and he laughed. Others near him glanced curiously in his direction. He knew something that the speaker had come to doubt. The universe is indeed a far stranger place than is dreamed of in our philosophies.
George’s cellphone made a chirp. It would have to be of some importance, he thought, because he had set the threshold at a fairly high urgency level. As unobtrusively as he could, he squeezed down the aisle past several sets of knees, shrugged at the speaker in apology, and walked up the aisle to the rear door.
When he was in a quiet place, he pressed the receiver button of the device. “George,” said Wolfgang, “I wanted you to know that there was a cancellation in the superconducting metallurgy group’s schedule. We have time on their X-ray fluorescence microprobe on Monday morning at 7. Is that OK with you? If it is, I will prepare an insert now, so it will be ready to go on Monday.”
“Monday morning is fine,” said George. “I could even have some results in time for the group meeting at 10 AM. I’m scheduled to report on our progress then. I just hope this works, Wolfgang. If those speckles on the pixel chip aren’t the problem, we’ll have to go back to square zero.”
“Just one step at a time,” said Wolfgang, “as they used to tell us in the East German Army.”