CHANGES QUANTUM REALITY

Scientists prepare CERN collider restart in hunt for 'dark matter'

A man works in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel is pictured at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, France, on Mar 2, 2017. 

(Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

A view through a glass of people working in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022. 

Head of the Operations Group in the Beam Department Rende Steerenberg gestures during an interview with Reuters in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022.

People work in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Control Centre in Meyrin near Geneva, Switzerland, on Apr 13, 2022. 

Photos: REUTERS/Pierre Albouy

21 Apr 2022

PREVESSIN, France: Scientists at Europe's physics research centre will this week fire up the 27 kilometre-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the machine that found the Higgs boson particle, after a shutdown for maintenance and upgrades was prolonged by COVID-19 delays.

Restarting the collider is a complex procedure, and researchers at the CERN centre have champagne on hand if all goes well, ready to join a row of bottles in the control room celebrating landmarks including the discovery of the elusive subatomic particle a decade ago.

"It's not flipping a button," Rende Steerenberg, in charge of control room operations, told Reuters. "This comes with a certain sense of tension, nervousness."

Potential pitfalls include the discovery of an obstruction; the shrinking of materials due to a nearly 300 degree temperature swing; and difficulties with thousands of magnets that help keep billions of particles in a tight beam as they circle the collider tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border.

Steerenberg said the system had to work "like an orchestra".

"In order for the beam to go around all these magnets have to play the right functions and the right things at the right time," he said.

The batch of LHC collisions observed at CERN between 2010-2013 brought proof of the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson particle which, along with its linked energy field, is thought to be vital to the formation of the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

But plenty remains to be discovered.

Physicists hope the resumption of collisions will help in their quest for so-called "dark matter" that lies beyond the visible universe. Dark matter is thought to be five times more prevalent than ordinary matter but does not absorb, reflect or emit light. Searches have so-far come up empty-handed.

"We are going to increase the number of collisions drastically and therefore the probability of new discoveries also," said Steerenberg, who added that the collider was due to operate until another shutdown from 2025-2027.

Source: Reuters/ec

No one in physics dares say so, but the race to invent new particles is pointless

In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it

‘The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of the particles theoretical physicists have hypothesised, even though many were confident it would.’ A technician works on the LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph: Laurent Gilliéron/AP

Sabine Hossenfelder

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 26 Sep 2022

Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.

The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.

Kudos to zoologists, I’ve never heard of such a conference. But almost every particle physics conference has sessions just like this, except they do it with more maths. It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions, giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy

Experimental particle physicists know of the problem, and try to distance themselves from what their colleagues in theory development do. At the same time, they profit from it, because all those hypothetical particles are used in grant proposals to justify experiments. And so the experimentalists keep their mouths shut, too. This leaves people like me, who have left the field – I now work in astrophysics – as the only ones able and willing to criticise the situation.

There are many factors that have contributed to this sad decline of particle physics. Partly the problem is social: most people who work in the field (I used to be one of them) genuinely believe that inventing particles is good procedure because it’s what they have learned, and what all their colleagues are doing.

But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science.

In the past, predictions for new particles were correct only when adding them solved a problem with the existing theories. For example, the currently accepted theory of elementary particles – the Standard Model – doesn’t require new particles; it works just fine the way it is. The Higgs boson, on the other hand, was required to solve a problem. The antiparticles that Paul Dirac predicted were likewise necessary to solve a problem, and so were the neutrinos that were predicted by Wolfgang Pauli. The modern new particles don’t solve any problems.

In some cases, the new particles’ task is to make a theory more aesthetically appealing, but in many cases their purpose is to fit statistical anomalies. Each time an anomaly is reported, particle physicists will quickly write hundreds of papers about how new particles allegedly explain the observation. This behaviour is so common they even have a name for it: “ambulance-chasing”, after the anecdotal strategy of lawyers to follow ambulances in the hope of finding new clients.

Ambulance-chasing is a good strategy to further one’s career in particle physics. Most of those papers pass peer review and get published because they are not technically wrong. And since ambulance-chasers cite each other’s papers, they can each rack up hundreds of citations quickly. But it’s a bad strategy for scientific progress. After the anomaly has disappeared, those papers will become irrelevant.

This procedure of inventing particles and then ruling them out has been going on so long that there are thousands of tenured professors with research groups who make a living from this. It has become generally accepted practice in the physics community. No one even questions whether it makes sense.

 At least not in public.

I believe there are breakthroughs waiting to be made in the foundations of physics; the world needs technological advances more than ever before, and now is not the time to idle around inventing particles, arguing that even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain. As a former particle physicist, it saddens me to see that the field has become a factory for useless academic papers.



Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook.

Kerstin Perez is searching the cosmos for signs of dark matter

“There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about,” says the particle physicist.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office
Publication Date: January 2, 2022
PRESS INQUIRIES

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” Kerstin Perez says.
Credits:Photo: Adam Glanzman


Kerstin Perez is searching for imprints of dark matter. The invisible substance embodies 84 percent of the matter in the universe and is thought to be a powerful cosmic glue, keeping whole galaxies from spinning apart. And yet, the particles themselves leave barely a trace on ordinary matter, thwarting all efforts at detection thus far.

Perez, a particle physicist at MIT, is hoping that a high-altitude balloon experiment, to be launched into the Antarctic stratosphere in late 2022, will catch indirect signs of dark matter, in the particles that it leaves behind. Such a find would significantly illuminate dark matter’s elusive nature.

The experiment, which Perez co-leads, is the General AntiParticle Spectrometer, or GAPS, a NASA-funded mission that aims to detect products of dark matter annihilation. When two dark matter particles collide, it’s thought that the energy of this interaction can be converted into other particles, including antideuterons — particles that then ride through the galaxy as cosmic rays which can penetrate Earth’s stratosphere. If antideuterons exist, they should come from all parts of the sky, and Perez and her colleagues are hoping GAPS will be at just the right altitude and sensitivity to detect them.

“If we can convince ourselves that’s really what we’re seeing, that could help point us in the direction of what dark matter is,” says Perez, who was awarded tenure this year in MIT’s Department of Physics.

In addition to GAPS, Perez’ work centers on developing methods to look for dark matter and other exotic particles in supernova and other astrophysical phenomena captured by ground and space telescopes.

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” she says. “There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about. And I’ve chosen different experimental methods to go after them.”

Building up

Born and raised in West Philadelphia, Perez was a self-described “indoor kid,” mostly into arts and crafts, drawing and design, and building.

“I had two glue guns, and I remember I got into building dollhouses, not because I cared about dolls so much, but because it was a thing you could buy and build,” she recalls.

Her plans to pursue fine arts took a turn in her junior year, when she sat in on her first physics class. Material that was challenging for her classmates came more naturally to Perez, and she signed up the next year for both physics and calculus, taught by the same teacher with infectious wonder.

“One day he did a derivation that took up two-thirds of the board, and he stood back and said, ‘Isn’t that so beautiful? I can’t erase it.’ And he drew a frame around it and worked for the rest of the class in that tiny third of the board,” Perez recalls. “It was that kind of enthusiasm that came across to me.”

So buoyed, she set off after high school for Columbia University, where she pursued a major in physics. Wanting experience in research, she volunteered in a nanotechnology lab, imaging carbon nanotubes.

“That was my turning point,” Perez recalls. “All my background in building, creating, and wanting to design things came together in this physics context. From then on, I was sold on experimental physics research.”

She also happened to take a modern physics course taught by MIT’s Janet Conrad, who was then a professor at Columbia. The class introduced students to particle physics and the experiments underway to detect dark matter and other exotic particles. The detector generating the most buzz was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The LHC was to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, and was expected imminently to come online.

After graduating from Columbia, Perez flew west to Caltech, where she had the opportunity to go to CERN as part of her graduate work. That experience was invaluable, as she helped to calibrate one of the LHC’s pixel detectors, which is designed to measure ordinary, well-known particles.

“That experience taught me, when you first turn on your instrument, you have to make sure you can measure the things you know are there, really well, before you can claim you’re looking at anything new,” Perez says.

Front of the class

After finishing up her work at CERN, she began to turn over a new idea. While the LHC was designed to artificially smash particles together to look for dark matter, smaller projects were going after the same particles in space, their natural environment.

“All the evidence we have of dark matter comes from astrophysical observations, so it makes sense to look out there for clues,” Perez says. “I wanted the opportunity to, from scratch, fundamentally design and build an experiment that could tell us something about dark matter.”

With this idea, she returned to Columbia, where she joined the core team that was working to get the balloon experiment GAPS off the ground. As a postdoc, she developed a cost-effective method to fabricate the experiment’s more than 1,000 silicon detectors, and has since continued to lead the experiment’s silicon detector program. Then in 2015, she accepted a faculty position at Haverford College, close to her hometown.

“I was there for one-and-a-half years, and absolutely loved it,” Perez says.

While at Haverford, she dove into not only her physics research, but also teaching. The college offered a program for faculty to help improve their lectures, with each professor meeting weekly with an undergraduate who was trained to observe and give feedback on their teaching style. Perez was paired with a female student of color, who one day shared with her a less than welcoming experience she had experienced in an introductory course, that ultimately discouraged her from declaring a computer science major.

Listening to the student, Perez, who has often been the only woman of color in advanced physics classes, labs, experimental teams, and faculty rosters, recognized a kinship, and a calling. From that point on, in addition to her physics work, she began to explore a new direction of research: belonging.

She reached out to social psychologists to understand issues of diversity and inclusion, and the systemic factors contributing to underrepresentation in physics, computer science, and other STEM disciplines. She also collaborated with educational researchers to develop classroom practices to encourage belonging among students, with the motivation of retaining underrepresented students.

In 2016, she accepted an offer to join the MIT physics faculty, and brought with her the work on inclusive teaching that she began at Haverford. At MIT, she has balanced her research in particle physics with teaching and with building a more inclusive classroom.

“It’s easy for instructors to think, ‘I have to completely revamp my syllabus and flip my classroom, but I have so much research, and teaching is a small part of my job that frankly is not rewarded a lot of the time,’” Perez says. “But if you look at the research, it doesn’t take a lot. It’s the small things we do, as teachers who are at the front of the classroom, that have a big impact.”

PATHFINDERS – HOW MUCH DOES DARK MATTER?

SOCIALIST STANDARD no-1435-march-2024

Pure science, from a capitalist point of view, is a bit like kissing frogs. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before one turns into a handsome princely profit. Sometimes – rarely – a technical project offers a large and obvious return on investment (ROI), even though the payout might be years or even decades away. With nuclear fusion, for example, the potential ROI is enormous and alluring, but while the boffins swear the idea works in theory, the technical challenges of putting the sun in a box are immense and not always known in advance, which usually means spiralling costs. The €5bn price tag for the experimental Iter fusion plant in southern France has more than quadrupled to €22bn, and now the schedule has been put back a further ten years. This puts European state investors in something of a sunk-cost bind. The risk of fusion never working is not as bad as it working, and China or Russia getting the jump on it. The British state recently managed to Brexit itself out of the Iter project, but Euro-governments generally see no option but to continue shovelling money into it.

Nothing about science is guaranteed. Even if it works, it might never result in any marketable technology. One project that paid off is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, the rarest kind of all-level success story. As is commonly known, protons and neutrons are not fundamental particles, but are made up of combinations of quarks. Such combinations go by the name of hadrons, and smashing them together at super-high speed to see what pops out seemed like a very good idea, from the boffins’ point of view. From a government funding point of view, the ultimate composition of matter promised no ROI that mattered, but since one can never be sure, and because this was leading-edge research, they rolled the dice anyway.

CERN proved to be a smashing success, discovering more than 50 new hadrons, not to mention the Higgs boson in 2012 (tinyurl.com/yeyn92vk). It also unexpectedly spawned a side-bonanza for capitalism that had nothing to do with hadrons, or even physics. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN, came up with the worldwide web, which revolutionised capitalism.

So, CERN has become the poster child for capitalist science in Europe. But the hard questions of physics remain intractable. The ‘standard model’ has gaping holes. Assuming that Einstein’s theory of gravity is correct even at the largest scales, there should be around another 30 percent of ‘stuff’ in the universe to explain why galaxies don’t spin themselves to bits. No current device can detect this ‘dark matter’. Furthermore, nobody can explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, except with a putative ‘dark energy’ which represents 70 percent of ‘stuff’ but also can’t be detected.

Since smashing stuff together seems to work, experimental physicists have proposed an obvious solution – smash even more stuff together even more violently with a vastly bigger installation. They want to build the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a €20bn monster that would make the LHC look like a desktop pinball game (tinyurl.com/mr2vj67j). But this proposal to find fundamental answers raises fundamental questions about what investors are willing to stump up for.

The problem is, if the FCC enthusiasts are saying €20bn now, and if Iter is anything to go by, the actual cost could end up being multiples of this estimate. Euro ministers are choking on their lattes at the idea, and even some physicists are calling it ‘reckless’ and questioning whether ‘bigger, faster, harder’ is the best way to go. The biggest possible Earth-based collider could anyway never achieve more than a fraction of the colossal energies released in cosmic rays, meaning such exotic conditions will always be out of reach. And what if dark matter turns out not to exist, and is instead, like phlogiston, a supposition based on a wrong theory? Then, obviously, the FCC won’t find it. Would the boffins then demand even bigger and more expensive colliders, one after another, until they’ve got one the size of the solar system? Besides, with the climate crisis, pandemics, AI and other more immediate concerns, aren’t there bigger priorities for science budgets right now?

Government money comes from taxes on profits, which the rich get by exploiting us workers. We don’t get any say in how governments spend this cash, but the rich certainly do have an influence. And it’s a moot question how much the nature of reality actually matters to them, especially when the costs keep going up. Will they get tired of stuffing coins into the fruit machine of physics and watching the lemons whizz by?

Workers, meanwhile, have a more pressing concern, to get rid of capitalism and the rule of the rich. But a socialist society will still have to answer the fundamental question, which is how badly we want to know and how hard we are collectively prepared to work to find out. There’s always the possibility that people in socialism will not be willing to construct mega-colliders, despite what physicists say, and will decide to put their creative efforts into other things like space exploration, or undersea cities, or transhumanism, or rewilding the planet, or creating great art. But there’s no doubt that human beings do value the quest for knowledge for its own sake, in any society that claims to be civilised. The specific problem for science in capitalism is that it has to follow capitalism’s skewed money-agenda, where lofty goals may be celebrated, but the decisive factor is usually the bottom line, the factional advantage, and that all-important ROI.

PJS

Surprise! Protons Contain a Subatomic Particle That’s Heavier Than the Proton Itself

Robert Lea - Yesterday 

POP MECH

But when the charm quark is present, it still only accounts for around half of the proton’s mass. How can that be?

New research shows that protons contain intrinsic charm quarks.

This is despite the fact that subatomic charm quarks are about 1.5 times more massive than the proton, itself.

When charm quarks are present, they carry about half of the proton’s mass.

Protons are particles that exist in the nucleus of all atoms, with their number defining the elements themselves. Protons, however, are not fundamental particles. Rather, they are composite particles made up of smaller subatomic particles, namely two “up quarks” and one “down quark” bound together by force-carrying particles (bosons ) called “gluons.”

This structure isn’t certain, however, and quantum physics suggests that along with these three quarks, other particles should be “popping” into and out of existence at all times, affecting the mass of the proton. This includes other quarks and even quark-antiquark pairs.

Indeed, the deeper scientists have probed the structure of the proton with high-energy particle collisions, the more complicated the situation has become. As a result, for around four decades, physicists have speculated that protons may host a heavier form of quark than up and down quarks called “intrinsic charm quarks,” but confirmation of this has been elusive.

Now, by exploiting a high-precision determination of the quark-gluon content of the proton and by examining 35 years’ worth of data, particle physics data researchers have discovered evidence that the proton does contain intrinsic charm quarks.

What makes this result more extraordinary is that this flavor of quark is one-and-a-half times more massive than the proton itself. Yet when it is a component of the proton, the charm quark still only accounts for around half of the composite particle’s mass.
The Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics

This counter-intuitive setup is a consequence of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the subatomic world. This requires thinking of the structure of a particle and what can be found within it as probabilistic in nature.

“There are six kinds of quarks in nature, three are lighter than the proton [up, down, and strange quarks] and three are heavier [charm, up, and down quarks],” Stefano Forte, NNPDF Collaboration team leader and professor of theoretical Physics at Milan University, tells the Nature Briefing podcast. “One would think that only the lighter quarks are inside the proton, but actually, the laws of quantum physics allow also for the heavier quarks to be inside the proton.”

Forte — the lead author of a paper published earlier this month in the journal Nature, describing the research—and his team set out to discover if the lightest of these heavier quarks, the charm quark, is present in the proton.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other particle accelerators smash protons against each other (and other particles, like electrons) at high energies, what emerges is a shower of particles. This can be used to “reconstruct” the composition of the original particle and the particles that comprised it, collectively known as “partons.”

Each of these partons carries away a portion of the overall momentum of the system — the momentum distribution—with this share of momentum known as the momentum fraction.

Forte and colleagues fed 35 years of data from particle accelerators, including the world’s largest and most powerful machine of this kind, the LHC, to a computer algorithm that pieces proton structure back together by looking for a “best fit” for its structure at high-energies. From here, the team calculated the structure for the proton when it is at rest.

This resulted in the first evidence that protons do indeed sometimes have charm quarks. These are labeled “intrinsic” because they are part of the proton for a long time and are still present when the proton is at rest, meaning it doesn’t emerge from the high-energy interaction with another particle.

“You have a chance, which is small but not negligible, of finding a charm quark in the proton, and when you do find one, it so happens that that charm quark is typically carrying about half of the proton mass,” Forte says on the podcast. “This is quantum physics, so everything is probabilistic.”
The “Intrinsic” Charm Quark Scenario

Romona Vogt is a high-energy physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, who wrote a “News and Views” piece for Nature to accompany the new research paper.

She explains to Popular Mechanics how charm quarks could be connected to proton structure and how the intrinsic charm quark scenario differs from the standard scenario that sees protons comprised of just two up and one down quarks joined by gluons.

“Charm quarks come in quark-antiquark pairs in both the standard scenario and the intrinsic charm one,” Vogt says. “In the standard scenario, a gluon radiates this pairing during a high-energy interaction. Because of the charm quark’s mass, it is too heavy to be part of the ‘sea’ of light up, down, and strange quarks.”

This means the charm quark doesn’t have a large role when physicists calculate the standard parton momentum distribution functions until momentum reaches a threshold above mass.

“That’s very different from the intrinsic charm scenario where the charm distribution carries a large fraction of the proton momentum,” Vogt adds. “Because in the intrinsic charm quark scenario, the quark-antiquark pair is attached to more than one of the up and down quarks in the proton they travel with. That’s why the charm quarks appear at large momentum fractions.

“The proton is more or less ‘empty’ in this scenario or has a small size configuration because the proton is just up, up, down quarks and charm quark pairs with no other quarks at low momentum fractions in the minimal model of intrinsic charm.”

Vogt suggests that the NNPDF Collaboration’s results could lead other researchers to ask if other quarks could play a role in the composition of protons.

“One question these findings might raise is whether or not there are other intrinsic quark scenarios, like intrinsic bottom and intrinsic strangeness,” she says.

RIP

UT Austin Mourns Death of World-Renowned Physicist Steven Weinberg


Physicist Steven Weinberg, January 28, 2008. Credit: Larry Murphy, The University of Texas at Austin

Jul 24, 2021

AUSTIN, Texas — Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a professor of physics and astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, has died. He was 88.

One of the most celebrated scientists of his generation, Weinberg was best known for helping to develop a critical part of the Standard Model of particle physics, which significantly advanced humanity’s understanding of how everything in the universe — its various particles and the forces that govern them — relate. A faculty member for nearly four decades at UT Austin, he was a beloved teacher and researcher, revered not only by the scientists who marveled at his concise and elegant theories but also by science enthusiasts everywhere who read his books and sought him out at public appearances and lectures.

“The passing of Steven Weinberg is a loss for The University of Texas and for society. Professor Weinberg unlocked the mysteries of the universe for millions of people, enriching humanity’s concept of nature and our relationship to the world,” said Jay Hartzell, president of The University of Texas at Austin. “From his students to science enthusiasts, from astrophysicists to public decision makers, he made an enormous difference in our understanding. In short, he changed the world.”

“As a world-renowned researcher and faculty member, Steven Weinberg has captivated and inspired our UT Austin community for nearly four decades,” said Sharon L. Wood, provost of the university. “His extraordinary discoveries and contributions in cosmology and elementary particles have not only strengthened UT’s position as a global leader in physics, they have changed the world.”

Weinberg held the Jack S. Josey – Welch Foundation Chair in Science at UT Austin and was the winner of multiple scientific awards including the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics, which he shared with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Lee Glashow; a National Medal of Science in 1991; the Lewis Thomas Prize for the Scientist as Poet in 1999; and, just last year, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, Britain’s Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, which presented him with the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2004.

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands receives Nobel laureates: Paul Berg, Christian de Duve, Steven Weinberg, Queen Beatrix, Manfred Eigen, Nicolaas Bloembergen. Photo taken on 31 August 1983. Credit: Rob C. Croes / Anefo. Creative Commons Netherlands license.

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

Weinberg leveraged his renown and his science for causes he cared deeply about. He had a lifelong interest in curbing nuclear proliferation and served briefly as a consultant for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He advocated for a planned superconducting supercollider with the capabilities of the LHC in the United States — a project that ultimately failed to receive funding in the 1990s after having been planned for a site near Waxahachie, Texas. He continued to be an ambassador for science throughout his life, for example, teaching UT Austin students and participating in events such as the 2021 Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative in April and in the Texas Science Festival in February.

“When we talk about science as part of the culture of our times, we’d better make it part of that culture by explaining what we’re doing,” Weinberg explained in a 2015 interview published by Third Way. “I think it’s very important not to write down to the public. You have to keep in mind that you’re writing for people who are not mathematically trained but are just as smart as you are.”

By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.

Weinberg wrote hundreds of scientific articles about general relativity, quantum field theory, cosmology and quantum mechanics, as well as numerous popular articles, reviews and books. His books include “To Explain the World,” “Dreams of a Final Theory,” “Facing Up,” and “The First Three Minutes.” Weinberg often was asked in media interviews to reflect on his atheism and how it related to the scientific insights he described in his books.

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”

Weinberg was a native of New York, and his childhood love of science began with a gift of a chemistry set and continued through teaching himself calculus while a student at Bronx High School of Science. The first in his family to attend college, he received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a doctoral degree from Princeton University. He researched at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, before serving on the faculty of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, since 1982, UT Austin.

He is survived by his wife, UT Austin law professor Louise Weinberg, and their daughter, Elizabeth.


With Steven Weinberg’s death, physics loses a titan

He advanced the theory of particles and forces, and wrote insightfully for a wider public


By Tom Siegfried
Contributing Correspondent


Steven Weinberg in his office at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018.

Mythology has its titans. So do the movies. And so does physics. Just one fewer now.

Steven Weinberg died July 23, at the age of 88. He was one of the key intellectual leaders in physics during the second half of the 20th century, and he remained a leading voice and active contributor and teacher through the first two decades of the 21st.

On lists of the greats of his era he was always mentioned along with Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann and … well, just Feynman and Gell-Mann.

Among his peers, Weinberg was one of the most respected figures in all of physics or perhaps all of science. He exuded intelligence and dignity. As news of his death spread through Twitter, other physicists expressed their remorse at the loss: “One of the most accomplished scientists of our age,” one commented, “a particularly eloquent spokesman for the scientific worldview.” And another: “One of the best physicists we had, one of the best thinkers of any variety.”

Weinberg’s Nobel Prize, awarded in 1979, was for his role in developing a theory unifying electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. That was an essential contribution to what became known as the standard model of physics, a masterpiece of explanation for phenomena rooted in the math describing subatomic particles and forces. It’s so successful at explaining experimental results that physicists have long pursued every opportunity to find the slightest deviation, in hopes of identifying “new” physics that further deepens human understanding of nature.

Weinberg did important technical work in other realms of physics as well, and wrote several authoritative textbooks on such topics as general relativity and cosmology and quantum field theory. He was an early advocate of superstring theory as a promising path in the continuing quest to complete the standard model by unifying it with general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Early on Weinberg also realized a desire to communicate more broadly. His popular book The First Three Minutes, published in 1977, introduced a generation of physicists and physics fans to the Big Bang–birth of the universe and the fundamental science underlying that metaphor. Later he wrote deeply insightful examinations of the nature of science and its intersection with society. And he was a longtime contributor of thoughtful essays in such venues as the New York Review of Books.

In his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory, Weinberg expressed his belief that physics was on the verge of finding the true fundamental explanation of reality, the “final theory” that would unify all of physics. Progress toward that goal seemed to be impeded by the apparent incompatibility of general relativity with quantum mechanics, the math underlying the standard model. But in a 1997 interview, Weinberg averred that the difficulty of combining relativity and quantum physics in a mathematically consistent way was an important clue. “When you put the two together, you find that there really isn’t that much free play in the laws of nature,” he said. “That’s been an enormous help to us because it’s a guide to what kind of theories might possibly work.”

Attempting to bridge the relativity-quantum gap, he believed, “pushed us a tremendous step forward toward being able to develop realistic theories of nature on the basis of just mathematical calculations and pure thought.”

Experiment had to come into play, of course, to verify the validity of the mathematical insights. But the standard model worked so well that finding deviations implied by new physics required more powerful experimental technology than physicists possessed. “We have to get to a whole new level of experimental competence before we can do experiments that reveal the truth beneath the standard model, and this is taking a long, long time,” he said. “I really think that physics in the style in which it’s being done … is going to eventually reach a final theory, but probably not while I’m around and very likely not while you’re around.”

He was right that he would not be around to see the final theory. And perhaps, as he sometimes acknowledged, nobody ever will. Perhaps it’s not experimental power that is lacking, but rather intellectual power. “Humans may not be smart enough to understand the really fundamental laws of physics,” he wrote in his 2015 book To Explain the World, a history of science up to the time of Newton.

Weinberg studied the history of science thoroughly, wrote books and taught courses on it. To Explain the World was explicitly aimed at assessing ancient and medieval science in light of modern knowledge. For that he incurred the criticism of historians and others who claimed he did not understand the purpose of history, which is to understand the human endeavors of an era on its own terms, not with anachronistic hindsight.

But Weinberg understood the viewpoint of the historians perfectly well. He just didn’t like it. For Weinberg, the story of science that was meaningful to people today was how the early stumblings toward understanding nature evolved into a surefire system for finding correct explanations. And that took many centuries. Without the perspective of where we are now, he believed, and an appreciation of the lessons we have learned, the story of how we got here “has no point.”

Future science historians will perhaps insist on assessing Weinberg’s own work in light of the standards of his times. But even if viewed in light of future knowledge, there’s no doubt that Weinberg’s achievements will remain in the realm of the Herculean. Or the titanic.



 Tom Siegfried is a contributing correspondent. 

He was editor in chief of Science News from 2007 to 2012 

and managing editor from 2014 to 2017.


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A New Cold War Could Slow the Advance of Science

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research laboratory

 for particle physics.

Credit...Leslye Davis for The New York Time

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
By Michael Riordan
Aug. 22, 2022, 

Dr. Riordan is a physicist who writes about science, technology and public policy. He is the author of “The Hunting of the Quark” and a co-author of “Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider.”

ORCAS ISLAND, Wash. — One of the many unfortunate consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the collateral damage to international scientific cooperation. The past two decades may have represented the apex of this cooperation. Now it appears to be coming to at least a pause, if not an end.

In the years immediately after the Cold War ended in 1991, Russian scientists turned increasingly to Europe and the United States to remain involved in frontier research. Through the efforts of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Space Station Freedom became the International Space Station, which included major contributions from Canada, Japan, European nations and Russia as partners.

Between 1993 and 1996, the Russian agency responsible for atomic energy signed agreements with the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN, and contributed money, equipment and brainpower to the Large Hadron Collider Project. That project led to the discovery in 2012 of the Higgs boson, a heavy subatomic particle that imbues other elementary particles with mass. Its existence had been predicted a half-century earlier.

And during the 1990s, Russian scientists from Lomonosov Moscow State University joined the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which in 2016 announced striking evidence of mergers of ultramassive black holes. The discovery confirmed the prediction in Einstein’s general theory of relativity that cataclysmic events like the merger of two black holes — in this case, about 1.3 billion light years away — create ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.

But Russia recently decided to terminate its participation in the space station after 2024, and CERN will no longer allow Russian institutes to participate in collider experiments after its contracts with Russia expire that year. What’s more, the European Space Agency has excluded Russia from its planned ExoMars rover project, despite the yearslong delays that will likely result. And notwithstanding Russia’s efforts in support of the X-ray laser project known as European XFEL in Germany, which has opened new opportunities for research in materials science, biology and physics, scientists and institutions based in Russia cannot (at least for now) perform new experiments at this facility.

Scientific research has advanced to such an extent since the end of the Cold War that such large, expensive international projects are the only way to push back the frontiers in many disciplines. Individual nations no longer have sufficient financial and intellectual resources to pursue the science unilaterally. The current retreat from Russian involvement in these big projects can in this way easily curtail scientific progress — as well as impair international relations more broadly.

CERN was established in a suburb of Geneva in the early 1950s to promote peaceful cooperation among European nations, which had experienced two disastrous wars during the previous 40 years. Organizers viewed nuclear and high-energy physics as promising disciplines that invited cooperation. And it succeeded. With the discovery in the early 1980s of the W and Z bosons, which together are responsible for one of the four fundamental forces that govern the behavior of matter in the universe, CERN established itself as the world’s premier laboratory for high-energy physics. To many European leaders, it had become the highest expression of continental unity — reason enough to approve its multibillion euro LHC project in the 1990s.

After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the funding of many of its institutes for scientific research collapsed. CERN became the principal venue where Russian high-energy physicists could continue doing cutting edge research. And CERN had begun to seek additional LHC funding from well beyond its European member nations. Physicists from Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research joined the gargantuan Compact Muon Solenoid experiment on this collider, contributing to its design and making sophisticated contributions. They could take due credit for their part in the breakthrough Higgs boson discovery — perhaps the pinnacle of international scientific achievement. Russia became an important player in a “world laboratory” knit together by the internet and Web, which now includes Canada, China, India, Japan, the United States and many other non-European nations.

Part of the rationale for establishing CERN was to promote international understanding among researchers working toward common scientific goals. It has proved a wonderful polyglot place. Although English and French dominate conversations in labs, offices and the cafeteria, national differences seem to melt away amid vigorous technical exchanges and good food.

But this scientific camaraderie begins to dissolve when one of the participant nations savagely attacks another. During the first month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Russian scientists signed a petition opposing the attack, taking great risks to their careers and livelihoods. In contrast, Russian scientific institutes have toed the Kremlin line — dependent as they are on its continued support.

Collaborations on the basis of individual relationships may continue with some Russian scientists. This intellectual exchange is certainly valuable. But one can easily imagine that pullbacks and withdrawals will continue on other large scientific projects, if they haven’t already, to the detriment of international relations generally. That would be an unfortunate aspect of a renewed bifurcation of the world order much like what happened during the Cold War. But I sincerely hope that the strong scientific bonds established during the last three decades will survive and help re-establish broader East-West relations.

Plans for collider ‘to smash particles together to unveil Universe’s mysteries’

Nina Massey, PA Science Correspondent
Mon, 5 February 2024 



Researchers are developing plans for a new collider that could smash particles together at a greater force than currently possible in a bid to shed light on some of the Universe’s biggest mysteries.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research’s (Cern) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will complete its mission around 2040, and experts are looking at what could replace it.

Early estimates suggest the new machine, called the Future Circular Collider (FCC), would cost around £13.7 billion (15 billion Swiss Francs).

It is expected to be installed in a tunnel measuring some 91 kilometres in circumference at a depth of between 100 and 400 metres on French and Swiss territory.

Using the highest energies, it will smash particles together in the hope that new findings will change the world of physics, and understanding of how the Universe works.

On Monday, Cern announced that a mid-term feasibility study did not find a “technical showstopper”.

Among other things, the review was also able to identify the ideal location for the infrastructure of the project, and the size of the proposed tunnel.

In 2012, the LHC detected a new particle called the Higgs Boson, which provides a new way to look at the Universe.

However, dark matter and dark energy have remained elusive, and researchers hope the new collider will be able to answer some of science’s greatest unanswered questions.

Cern’s director general, Professor Fabiola Gianotti, said: “The FCC will be an unprecedented instrument to explore the law of physics and of nature, at the smallest scales and at the highest energies.”

She added: “[It] will allow us to address some of the outstanding questions in fundamental physics today in our knowledge of the fundamental constituents of matter and the structure and evolution of the Universe.”

Addressing critics who suggest the project is very expensive, and there are no guarantees it will answer outstanding questions about the Universe, Eliezer Rabinovici, president of the Cern council, said the aim was to build “discovery machines”, and not “confirmation machines”.

Prof Gianotti added: “We build the facility, and experimental facilities not to run behind the prediction, [or] correct calculation.

“Our goal is to address open questions, then of course, theories develop, and ideas on how to answer those questions.

“But nature may have chosen a completely different path. So our goal is to look at the open question and try to find an answer, whichever answer, nature has decided out there.

“It’s true that at the moment, we do not have a clear theoretical guidance on what we should look for, but it is exactly at times where we lack theoretical guidance – which means we do not have a clear idea of how nature may answer the open question – that we need to build instruments.

“Because the instruments will allow us to make a big step forward towards addressing the question, or also telling us what are the right questions to ask.”

If approved, the FCC could be running by the early to mid 2040s.

Professor Tim Gershon, elementary particle physics group, University of Warwick, said: “The so-called Future Circular Collider is Cern’s proposal to address this challenge.

“It will provide the ability to measure the properties of the Higgs Boson in unprecedented precision, and in so doing to look at the Universe in new ways.

“It is hoped that this will provide answers to some of the most important fundamental questions about the Universe, such as what happened in its earliest moments.

“The latest report on the ongoing FCC feasibility studies is encouraging – in the most optimistic scenario the new collider could start to produce data in just over two decades from now.

“But there is still a very long way to go.”

Europe’s Energy Crisis Could Force The Large Hadron Collider To Be Idled

By Charles Kennedy - Sep 05, 2022, 

• A combination of factors is feeding into a major energy crisis in Europe at the moment, forcing households to ration their power and industrial companies to shut plants.
• Now, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator may have to be idled to ensure grid stability in France and Switzerland.
• The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, will shut down other accelerators first, claiming that it could reduce its power use by 25% without idling the LHC.

The energy crisis in Europe is not only disrupting businesses and household finances, but it’s also hitting at the heart of crucial scientific research and experiments. 

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, the world’s largest particle physics lab and home of the Large Hadron Collider, could shut down some accelerators and could even idle the LHC to ensure grid stability in the nearby French and Swiss regions amid the severe energy crisis in Europe, Serge Claudet, chair of the CERN energy management panel, told The Wall Street Journal. 

Europe is experiencing an unprecedented energy crisis amid halted Russian gas supply via the Nord Stream pipeline, low nuclear power generation in France, a power crisis in Switzerland, and sky-high gas and power prices.    

Large European industrial companies have already announced plant or production line closures due to soaring gas and energy prices, while governments in Europe are drafting plans to potentially ration gas supply to industries according to their specific priorities.  

The crisis became much worse at the end of last week, when Russian gas giant Gazprom said after three-day maintenance on Friday that Nord Stream would remain shut until “operational defects in the equipment are eliminated”, upping the ante in its gas war against Europe. 

For most governments in Europe, the indefinite suspension of Russian gas flows through the main pipeline to Germany wasn’t a surprise; they had expected such a move from Putin. But this doesn’t make the EU’s task of ensuring lights and heating on this winter any easier. Switzerland and France – whose grids CERN uses to power its supercollider and seven other particle accelerators to study matter and two decelerators to study antimatter – are among the worst hit.   

Switzerland has admitted that the country might have to resort to using oil for electricity generation this winter as Europe is dealing with low levels of Russian natural gas supply, which could be cut even further or cut off altogether.

In France, year-ahead power prices surged to $1,001 (1,000 euro) per megawatt-hour for the first time ever last month. French power prices have now soared tenfold over the past year, as drought and hot weather this summer have added to France’s nuclear power generation problems at the worst possible moment. EDF will restart all its nuclear reactors in the country this winter, French Energy Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said last week. Currently, more than half of EDF’s reactors are out of operation either because of maintenance or technical issues. 

One of EDF’s largest clients is none other than CERN, which uses 1.3 terawatt hours of electricity annually. That’s enough power to fuel 300,000 UK homes for a year. At peak consumption, usually from May to mid-December, CERN uses about 200 MW, which is about a third of the amount of energy used to feed the nearby city of Geneva in Switzerland. 

May to mid-December is the period of active work at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, which discovered ten years ago the existence of the Higgs boson that gives mass to the elementary particles. The collider was just restarted this July after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus for upgrades. 

However, due to the energy crisis, CERN is now considering how it could idle the world’s most powerful collider. 

“Our concern is really grid stability, because we do all we can to prevent a blackout in our region,” Claudet told the Journal.  

CERN and its power supplier, EDF, are now discussing the possibility of implementing daily warnings for power grid instability at the research complex to determine when it would need to conserve energy and use less electricity, the head of CERN energy management panel told the WSJ. The organization will shut down other accelerators first, before possibly having to resort to a shutdown of the world’s largest particle accelerator, he added. With the shutdown of some of the other accelerators, CERN could thus lower its power use by 25%.  

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com