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Red state coal towns still power the West Coast. We can't just let them die

Sammy Roth

 Los Angeles Times
Tue, April 16, 2024 

The Colstrip coal plant lights up the night, generating power mostly for Oregon and Washington. 

LONG READ

In the early mornng light, it's easy to mistake the towering gray mounds for an odd-looking mountain range — pale and dull and devoid of life, some pine trees and shrublands in the foreground with lazy blue skies extending up beyond the peaks.

But the mounds aren't mountains.

They're enormous piles of dirt, torn from the ground by crane-like machines called draglines to open paths to the rich coal seams beneath. And even though we're in rural southeastern Montana, more than 800 miles from the Pacific Ocean, West Coast cities are largely to blame for the destruction of this landscape.


Workers at the Rosebud Mine load coal onto a conveyor belt, which carries the planet-wrecking fuel to a power plant in the small town next door. Plant operators in Colstrip burn the coal to produce electricity, much of which is shipped by power line to homes and businesses in the Portland and Seattle areas. It's been that way for decades.

"The West Coast markets are what created this," Anne Hedges says, as we watch a dragline move dirt.

An aerial view of the coal mine outside Colstrip that feeds the town's power plant. 

She sounds frustrated, and with good reason.

Hedges and her fellow Montana environmentalists were happy when Oregon and Washington passed laws requiring 100% clean energy in the next two decades. But they're furious that electric utilities in those states are planning to stick with coal for as long as the laws allow, and in some cases making deals to give away their Colstrip shares to co-owners who seem determined to keep the plant running long into the future.

"Coal is not dead yet," Hedges says. "It's still alive and well."

That's an uncomfortable reality for West Coasters critical of red-state environmental policies but not in the habit of urging their politicians to work across state lines to change them — especially when doing so might involve compromise with Republicans.

One example: California lawmakers have refused to pass bills that would make it easier to share clean electricity across the West, passing up the chance to spur renewable energy development in windy red states such as Montana and Wyoming — and to show them it's possible to create construction jobs and tax revenues with renewable energy, not just fossil fuels.

Instead, California has prioritized in-state wind and solar farms, bowing to the will of labor unions that want those jobs.

It's hard to blame Golden State politicians, and voters, for taking the easy path.

But global warming is a global problem — and whether we like it or not, the electric grid is a giant, interconnected machine. Coal plants in conservative states help fuel the ever-deadlier heat waves, fires and storms battering California and other progressive bastions. The electrons generated by those plants flow into a network of wires that keep the lights on across the American West.

Also important: Montana and other sparsely populated conservative states control two U.S. Senate seats each, and at least three electoral votes apiece in presidential elections. Additional federal support for clean energy rests partly in their hands.

Those are the practical considerations. Then there are the ethical ones.

For years, the West's biggest cities exported their emissions, building distant coal generators to fuel their explosive growth. Los Angeles looked to Delta, Utah. Phoenix turned to the Navajo Nation. Albuquerque turned to the Four Corners region.

That wave of coal plants — some still standing, some demolished — created well-paying jobs, lots of tax payments and a thriving way of life for rural towns and Native American tribes. All are now struggling to map out a future without fossil fuels.

Mule deer roam through the town of Colstrip, not far from the power plant.

What do big cities owe those towns and tribes for producing our power and living with our air and water pollution? Can we get climate change under control without putting them out of business? What's their role in the clean energy transition?

If they refuse to join the transition, how should we respond?

A team of Los Angeles Times journalists spent a week in Montana trying to answer those questions.

We explored the town of Colstrip, hearing from residents about how the coal plant and mine have made their prosperous lives possible. We talked with environmental activists who detailed the damage coal has caused, and with a fourth-generation rancher whose father fought in vain to stop the power plant from getting built — and wrote poems about his struggle.

Coal is going to die, sooner or later. For the sake of myself and other young people, I hope it's sooner.

And for the sake of places like Colstrip, I hope it's the beginning of a new chapter, not the end of the story.

Coal pays the bills. For now

For a community of 2,000 people, Colstrip doesn't lack for nice things.

The city is home to 32 public parks and a gorgeous community center, complete with child care, gym, spin classes, tanning booth and water slide. The spacious health clinic employs three nurses and two physical therapists, with a doctor coming to visit once a week. There's an artificial lake filled with Yellowstone River water and circled by a three-mile walking and biking trail.

Everybody knows where the good fortune comes from.

The high school pays homage to the source of Colstrip's wealth with the hashtag #MTCOAL emblazoned on the basketball court's sparkling floor. A sign over the entrance to campus celebrates the town's 2023 centennial: "100 Years of Colstrip. Powered by Coal, Strengthened by People."

"We have nothing to hide," Jim Atchison tells me. "We just hope that you give us a fair shake."

Jim Atchison steps out of his office in Colstrip. 

I couldn't have asked for a better tour guide than Atchison, who for 22 years has lived in Colstrip and led the Southeast Montana Economic Development Corp. He's soft-spoken and meticulous, with a detailed itinerary for our day and a less ironclad allegiance to coal than many of the locals we'll meet.

They include Bill Neumiller, a former environmental engineer at the power plant. We start our day with him, watching the sun rise over the smokestacks across the lake. He moved to Colstrip 40 years ago, when the coal plant was being built. He enjoys fishing in the well-stocked lake and teaching kids about its history, in his role as president of the parks district.

The plant, he says, pays the vast majority of the city's property taxes.

"It's been a great place to raise a family," he says.

So many people have similar stories — the general manager of a local electrical contractor, the administrator of the health clinic. I especially enjoy chatting with Amber and Gary Ramsey, who have run a Subway sandwich shop here for 30 years.

"It takes us two to three hours to get through the grocery store, because you know everybody," Gary says.

He didn't plan to spend his life here. Sitting at a table at Subway, he tells us he grew up in South Dakota and went to college in North Dakota before taking a job teaching math and coaching wrestling in Colstrip. He planned to stay for a year or two.

Then he met Amber, who was working part-time as a bartender and doing payroll at the coal plant.

"Forty years later, I'm still here," he says. "We raised our kids here."

The power plant's smokestacks are visible from miles away in the town of Colstrip. 

John Williams was one of the first Montana Power Co. employees to move to Colstrip, as planning for the plant's construction got started. Today he's the mayor. He's well-versed in local history, from the first coal mining in the 1920s — which supplied railroads that later switched to diesel — to the economic revitalization when the Portland and Seattle areas came calling.

Unlike many of the other Colstrip lifers who share their stories, several of Williams' kids have left town. But one of his sons lives in a part of Washington where some of the electricity comes from Colstrip. Same for another son who lives in Idaho.

It's hard for Williams to imagine a viable future for his home without the power plant.

"I believe they are intimately tied together," he says.

And what about climate change, I ask?

Nearly everyone in Colstrip has a version of the same answer: Even if it's real, it's not nearly as bad as liberals claim. And without coal power, blackouts will reign. West Coast city-dwellers don't understand how badly they need us here in Montana.

Atchison is an exception.

Yes, he's dubious about climate science. And yes, he wants to save the mine and power plant. His office is plastered with pro-coal messages — a sign that says, "Coal Pays the Bills," a magnet reading, "Prove you're against coal mining: Turn off your electricity."

But he knows the market for coal is shrinking as the nation's most populous cities and most profitable companies increasingly demand climate-friendly energy. So he's preparing for a future in which Colstrip has no choice but to start providing it.

"We have one horse in the barn now," Atchison says. "We need to add two or three more horses to the barn."

A conveyor belts carries coal from the Rosebud Mine to the Colstrip power plant. 

Ever since President Obama started trying to tighten regulations on coal power, Atchison has been developing and implementing an economic diversification strategy for Colstrip. It involves expanding broadband capacity, building a business innovation center and broadening the local energy economy beyond coal. The transmission lines connecting Colstrip with the Pacific Northwest are an especially valuable asset, capable of sending huge amounts of clean electricity to the Pacific coast.

"Colstrip is evolving from a coal community into an energy community," Atchison says. "We're changing. We're not closing."

Already, Montana's biggest wind farm is shipping electricity west via the Colstrip lines. A Houston company is planning another power line that would run from Colstrip to North Dakota. Federal researchers are studying whether Colstrip's coal units could be replaced with advanced nuclear reactors, or with a gas-fired power plant capable of capturing and storing its climate pollution.

West Coast voters and politicians could speed up the evolution, for Colstrip and other coal towns. Instead of just congratulating themselves for getting out of coal, they could fund training programs and invest in clean energy projects in those towns.

They'll never fully replace the ample jobs, salaries and tax revenues currently provided by coal. But nothing lasts forever. One hundred years is a pretty good run.

Some inconvenient truths

"Great God, how we're doin'! We're rolling in dough,

As they tear and they ravage The Earth.

And nobody knows...or nobody cares...

About things of intrinsic worth."

—Wally McRae, "Things of Intrinsic Worth" (1989)

Growing up outside Colstrip in the 1970s could lead to strange moments for Clint McRae, the son of a cowboy poet.

He was a teenager then, and Montana Power Co. was working to build public support for Units 3 and 4 of the coal plant. One day his eighth-grade teacher instructed everyone who supported the new coal-fired generators to stand on one side of the classroom. Everyone opposed should stand on the other side.

McRae was the only student opposed.

"And then [the teacher] gave a lecture about how important the construction of these plants was and handed out bumper stickers that said, 'Support Colstrip Units 3 and 4,'" McRae tells me, shaking his head. "It was terribly uncomfortable."

Rancher Clint McRae was raised outside Colstrip and has followed in his father's footsteps. 

Later, his mom was doing laundry and found a pro-coal bumper sticker in his pants pocket. She showed it to his cattle rancher father, Wally, "and I guess he went over there [to the school] and kicked ass and took names," McRae says with a laugh.

Fifty years later, he's carrying on his dad's legacy.

We spend a morning in the Colstrip area on McRae's sprawling ranch, admiring sandstone rock formations and herds of black angus cows. The scenery is harsh but elegant, rolling hills and pale green grasses and pink-streaked horizon lines.

"This country has a sharp edge to it," McRae says, quoting a photographer who visited the property years ago.

The land has been in his family since the 1880s, when his great-grandfather immigrated from Scotland. He hopes his youngest daughter — who recently moved back home with her husband — will be the fifth generation to raise cattle here.

"And we just had a grandchild seven months ago, and she's the sixth," he says.

Rancher Clint McRae contemplates the environmental threats facing his family's land. 

McRae wears a cowboy hat and drives a pickup truck. He tells me right away that he's "not the kind of person who participates in government programs unless I absolutely have to." He's certainly got no qualms about making a living selling beef.

But McRae and his forebears defy stereotypes.

His father, Wally, not only raised cows but was also a celebrated poet, appointed by President Clinton to the National Council on the Arts. In the 1970s, he joined with other ranchers to help found Northern Plains Resource Council, an advocacy group. They were moved to act by a utility industry plan for nearly two dozen coal plants between Colstrip and Gillette, Wyo.

"I and others like me will not allow our land to be destroyed merely because it is convenient for the coal company to tear it up," Wally McRae said, as quoted in a 50th-anniversary book published by Northern Plains.

Now in his late 80s and retired from the ranch, Wally's got every reason to be proud of his son.

Clint has fought to limit pollution from the coal plant his dad couldn't stop — and to ensure the cleanup of dangerous chemicals already emitted by the plant and mine. He's written articles calling for stronger regulation of coal waste, and slamming laws that critics say would let coal companies pollute water with impunity. Like his father, he's a member of Northern Plains.

McRae wants me to know that even though he and his dad "damn sure have a difference of opinion" with many of the people who live in town, "it was never personal." The coal-plant employees are friends of his. He doesn't want them to lose their jobs.

"Our kids went to school together, played sports together," he says.

Rancher Clint McRae opens a gate on his family's land outside Colstrip.

But even though McRae believes "we can have it both ways" — coal generation coupled with environmental protection — he's not optimistic. And history suggests he's right to be skeptical. Various analyses have found rampant groundwater contamination from coal plants, including Colstrip. Air pollution is another deadly concern. A peer-reviewed study last year estimated that fine-particle emissions from coal plants killed 460,000 Americans between 1999 and 2020.

Then there's the climate crisis.

McRae doesn't want to talk about global warming — "that's not my bag," he says. But he's seen firsthand what it can look like.

In August 2021, the Richard Spring fire tore across 171,000 acres, devastating much of his ranch and nearly torching both of his family's houses. He was on the front lines of the fast-moving blaze as part of the local volunteer firefighting crew. Temperatures topped 100 degrees, adding to the strain of dry conditions and fierce winds. McRae had never seen anything like it.

Two and a half years later, he's still building back up his cattle numbers and letting the grass regrow.

"It burned all of our hay. It was awful," he says.

McRae has a strong sense of history. As we drive toward the Tongue River, which forms a boundary of his ranch, he points out where members of the Arapaho, Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne tribes camped before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, a few years ahead of his great-grandfather's arrival in Montana. A few minutes later he stops to show off a series of tipi rings — artifacts of Indigenous life that he's promised local tribes he'll protect.

McRae is acutely aware that this wasn't always ranchland — and that it probably won't be forever.

"It's gonna change," he says. "Whether we embrace it or not."

The wind and the water

Sturgeon. Bubbles. Salamander. Jimmy Neutron.

Those are "call signs" for some of the 13 employees at the Clearwater wind farm, where 131 turbines are spread across 94 square miles of Montana ranchland a few hours north of Colstrip. The nicknames are scrawled on a whiteboard in the trailer office.

Raptor. Goose. Sandman.

Clearly, they have fun here. And it's an industry where you can make good money.

Turbines spin at sundown at NextEra Energy's Clearwater wind farm, which sends power from Montana to Oregon and Washington.

Clearwater's operator, Florida-based NextEra Energy, won't disclose a salary range. But as of 2022, the median annual wage for a U.S. wind turbine technician working in electric power was $59,890, compared with $46,310 for all occupations nationally.

"If someone wants to stay close to home and still have a good career, we provide them that opportunity," Alex Vineyard says.

Vineyard lives in nearby Miles City and manages Clearwater for NextEra, America's largest renewable energy company. Clad in a hard hat, sweater vest and orange work gloves, he drives to a nearby turbine and walks up a staircase to show us the machinery inside. The tower is 374 feet high, meaning the tips of the blades reach 582 feet into the air.

Not far from here, hundreds of construction laborers are finishing the next two phases of the Clearwater project.

Alex Vineyard manages the Clearwater wind farm for NextEra, America's largest renewable energy company.

"You can see where we build wind sites. It's not downtown L.A.," Vineyard says, the sunset casting a brilliant orange glow behind him. "Generally it's rural areas — and there are limited opportunities for kids in those areas. Not a lot of great careers."

Wind will never replace coal. The construction jobs are temporary, the permanent jobs far fewer.

But they're better than nothing. A lot better.

As much as West Coast megacities owe it to coal towns like Colstrip to bring them along for the clean energy ride, coal towns like Colstrip owe it to themselves to take what they can get — and not let stubbornness or politics condemn them to oblivion.

Fortunately, they've got the power grid on their side.

In today's highly regulated, thoroughly litigated world, long-distance power lines are incredibly hard to build. They can take years if not decades to secure all the necessary approvals — if they can get those approvals at all. As a result, wind and solar developers prize existing transmission lines, like those built to carry power from Colstrip and other coal plants to big cities.

The Clearwater wind farm offers a telling case study.

Two of Colstrip's four coal units shut down in 2020 due to poor economics, opening up precious space on the plant's power lines. That open space made it easier for NextEra to sign contracts to sell hundreds of megawatts of wind power to two of Colstrip's co-owners, Portland General Electric and Puget Sound Energy — and thus get Clearwater built.

An electrical substation flanks the Colstrip power plant. 

Montana wind is especially useful for Oregon and Washington because it blows strongest during winter, when those states need lots of energy to stay warm. On that front, Clearwater has been a huge success. During its first winter, it had a capacity factor of 60%, meaning it produced 60% of all the power it could possibly produce, if there were enough wind 24/7.

Sixty percent is a lot — "like a home run," Puget Sound Energy executive Ron Roberts says.

He and his colleagues want more. Puget Sound plans to build more Montana wind turbines to serve its Washington customers — again taking advantage of the Colstrip power lines.

West Coast states need to keep investing in exactly this type of project if they hope to persuade their conservative neighbors to stop fighting to save coal. The more they can bring the benefits of wind and solar power to the rest of the West, the better.

And what about those low-wind, cloudy days when wind turbines and solar panels aren't enough to avoid blackouts?

Carl Borgquist has a plan for that.

I meet up with him near Gordon Butte — a flat-topped landmass that juts up 1,025 feet from the floor of Montana's Musselshell River valley, four hours west of Colstrip but just over five miles from the coal plant's power lines. There are already wind turbines atop the butte, built by the landowning Galt family with Borgquist's help.

Borgquist assures me as we drive to the top that I'll soon understand why this steep butte is perfect for energy storage.

"It will intuitively make sense, the elegance and simplicity of gravity as a storage medium," he says.

Carl Borgquist admires the views from atop Gordon Butte, where he's got plans for a pumped storage project to augment Montana wind power. 

There will be two reservoirs — one up on the butte, another 1,000 feet below. They'll be filled with water from a nearby creek.

During times of day when there's extra power on the Western electric grid — maybe temperatures are moderate in Portland and Seattle, but Montana winds are blowing strong — the Gordon Butte project will use that extra juice to pump water uphill, from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir. During times of day when the grid needs more power — maybe there's a record heat wave, and not enough wind to go around — Gordon Butte will let water flow downhill, generating electricity.

It's called pumped storage, and it's not a new concept. But compared with other proposals across the parched West, this one is almost miraculously noncontroversial. No environmentalists making hay over water use. No nearby residents crying foul.

Borgquist still needs to sign up a utility customer, or he would have already flipped Gordon Butte to a developer better suited to build the $1.5-billion project, which will employ 300 to 500 people during construction. But Borgquist is confident that before too long, one or two of the Pacific Northwest electric utilities preparing to ditch Colstrip will see the light.

"I've been waiting for the market to catch up to me," he says.

Let's hope it catches up soon. Because even though pumped storage won't keep us heated and cooled and well-lit every hour of every day, neither will wind, or solar, or batteries, or anything else. No one technology will solve all our climate problems.

The sooner we learn that lesson, the sooner we can move on to the hard part.

The Colstrip power lines run near Gordon Butte, carrying coal-fired electricity — and increasingly wind energy — from Montana to Oregon and Washington.

The art of the deal

I find myself wandering the halls of the state Capitol in Helena. Christmas is a few weeks away, and there's a spectacular tree beneath the massive dome, flanked by murals of white settlers and Indigenous Americans.

On a whim, I step into Gov. Greg Gianforte's office and ask if he's in. Gianforte has fought to keep the Colstrip plant open, and I want to ask him about it. I'm also curious to meet a man who easily won election despite having assaulted a journalist.

One of his representatives takes down my contact info. I never get an interview.

Despite the state's deep-red turn in recent years, Montanans have a history of environmental consciousness, owing to their love of fishing, hunting and the great outdoors (as seen in the film "A River Runs Through It"). They approved a new state constitution in 1972 that enshrined the right to a "clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations."

To the frustration of Gianforte and his supporters, that right may include a stable climate.

This time last year, a Montana judge revoked the permit for a gas-fired power plant being built by the state's largest electric utility, NorthWestern Energy, along the banks of the Yellowstone River. The judge ruled that the state agency charged with approving the gas plant had failed to consider how the facility's heat-trapping carbon emissions would contribute to the climate crisis.

NorthWestern Energy says this gas-fired power plant on the Yellowstone River is needed to help keep the lights on for homes and businesses. 

Legislators responded by rushing to pass a law that barred state agencies from considering climate impacts.

The Yellowstone River gas plant moved forward, but the law didn't last long. A few months after it passed, another judge ruled in favor of 16 young people suing the state over global warming, agreeing that the legislation violated their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment.

"This is such a solvable problem," says Hedges, the Montana environmentalist critical of coal mining. "It's just that nobody wants to solve it."

Hedges is a leader of the Montana Environmental Information Center, where she's spent three decades battling for clean air, clean water and a healthy climate. It was her advocacy group, along with the Sierra Club, that sued Montana over the state's approval of the Yellowstone River gas plant, setting off the chain of increasingly consequential court rulings.

But as mad as she is at Gianforte — and at the local utility company executives who insist they need coal to keep the lights on in Montana — Hedges is at her most caustic when discussing the Pacific Northwest environmentalists who, in her view, have failed to do everything they can to get the Colstrip power plant shut down.

That includes the Sierra Club, which, Hedges says, has shifted its focus too quickly from shutting down coal plants to blocking the construction of new gas plants — even in places such as Montana, where coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, isn't dead yet.

Hedges' frustration also includes the Washington state lawmakers who passed a much-lauded bill, signed by Gov. Jay Inslee, requiring electric utilities to stop buying coal power by 2025 — only to sit idly by as some of those utilities then made arrangements to give away their shares in the Colstrip plant to coal-friendly co-owners rather than negotiate agreements to shut the coal units.

"So they're not actually decreasing carbon dioxide emissions even a little tiny bit. They are allowing this plant to continue, instead of using their vote to close this source of pollution. It's maddening," Hedges says.

A lone tumbleweed blows through piles of coal at the Rosebud Mine outside Colstrip, a few miles from the power plant. Coal is prepped for transport at the mine. Coal is transferred to a truck at the mine. 

Washington officials say they tried to get Colstrip shut down but were stymied by the plant's complicated six-company ownership structure, and by the Montana Legislature's staunch support for coal. Sierra Club activists, meanwhile, say they're still pushing for Colstrip's closure, and for coal shutdowns across the country — even as they also oppose the construction of gas plants.

"From a climate perspective, gas is just as bad as coal," says Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign.

To avoid a future of ever-more-dangerous fires, floods and heat, we need to ditch both fossil fuels — fast.

This is the hard part. This is the part that will require compromise — for conservatives who believe anything smacking of climate change is woke liberal propaganda, and for liberals who want nothing to do with conservatives spouting that belief.

So how do we do it? How do we stop clashing and start cooperating?

First off, West Coasters need to engage in good faith with the people who have supplied their power for decades — and strike deals that might persuade those red staters to move on from coal. Deals like building more wind farms in Montana and not as many back home, even if that means fewer union jobs and lower tax revenues for California, Oregon and Washington.

It's great that the coastal states are targeting 100% clean energy, but it's not enough. They must bring the rest of the West along for the ride, or it won't matter. Every solar farm in California is undermined by every ton of coal burned at Colstrip.

The lesson for folks who live in Colstrip and other Western coal towns, might be even more difficult to swallow.

L.A. and Phoenix and Portland have funded your comfortable lifestyles a long time. Now they want something different.


If Colstrip wants to stick around, it needs to start offering something different.

Climate activist Anne Hedges stands in a public park near the Colstrip power plant. 

It's easy to see why that's a scary prospect. After we finish exploring the coal mine with Hedges, we drive into town and stop at one of the immaculately maintained public parks. The power plant's two active smokestacks aren't far, looming 692 feet over a swing set and red-and-blue bench with the letters "USA" carved into the backing.

"The climate doesn't care who owns the power plant," Hedges says, as steam and carbon and soot spew from the stacks.

The climate won't care any more when Houston-based Talen Energy — which operates the plant, and which didn't respond to requests for a tour or interview — becomes the facility's largest owner next year, acquiring Puget Sound Energy's shares.

Our ability to solve this problem doesn't depend on which company is profiting off all that coal.

What it does depend on is our willingness to make hard choices, ranchers and miners and activists setting aside their differences and writing the West's next chapter together, rather than fighting so long and so hard that the tale ends badly for everyone.

Change is scary. But it's inevitable. Cowboy poet Wally McRae learned that the hard way.

Maybe 50 years from now, his great-grandchildren will wax poetic about the beauty of Colstrip without coal.

The early-morning sky glows red over the town of Colstrip. 

(PHOTOS: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

CERN proposes $17 billion particle smasher that would be 3 times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider

Ben Turner
Thu, February 8, 2024 

A schematic map showing a possible location for the Future Circular Collider.

Researchers at the world's biggest particle accelerator have put forward proposals to build a new, even larger atom smasher.

The $17 billion Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be 57 miles (91 kilometers) long, dwarfing its predecessor, the 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva.

Physicists want to use the FCC's increased size and power to probe fringes of the Standard Model of particle physics, the current best theory that describes how the smallest components of the universe behave. By smashing particles at even higher energies (100 tera electron volts, compared with the LHC's 14), the researchers hope to find unknown particles and forces; discover why matter outweighs antimatter; and probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two invisible entities believed to make up 95 percent of the universe.

Related: Our universe is merging with 'baby universes,' causing it to expand, new theoretical study suggests

"The FCC will not only be a wonderful instrument to improve our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics and nature," Fabiola Gianotti, CERN's director-general, said at a news conference Monday (Feb. 5). "It will also be a driver of innovation, because we will need new advanced technologies, from cryogenics to superconducting magnets, vacuum technologies, detectors, instrumentation — technologies with a potentially huge impact on our society and huge socioeconomic benefits."

Atom smashers like the LHC collide protons together at near light speed while looking for rare decay products that could be clues to new particles or forces. This helps physicists scrutinize their best understanding of the universe's most fundamental building blocks and how they interact, described by the Standard Model of physics.

Though the Standard Model has enabled scientists to make remarkable predictions — such as the existence of the Higgs boson, discovered by the LHC in 2012 — physicists are far from satisfied with it and are constantly looking for new physics that might break it.

This is because the model, despite being our most comprehensive one yet, includes enormous gaps, making it totally incapable of explaining where the force of gravity comes from, what dark matter is made of, or why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

To unlock these new frontiers, physicists at CERN will use the sevenfold increase in beam energy of the FCC to accelerate particles to even higher speeds.

But the detector, despite having taken a promising step forward, is far from built. The proposals put forward by CERN are part of an interim report on a feasibility study set to be finished next year. Once it's complete and if the detector plans go ahead, CERN — which is run by 18 European Union member states, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Serbia, Israel and the U.K. — will likely look for additional funding from nonmember states for the project.

Despite the high hopes for what the new collider could find, some scientists remain skeptical that the expensive machine will encounter new physics.

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"The FCC would be more expensive than both the LHC and LIGO [Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] combined and it has less discovery potential," Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, wrote in a 2019 post on the platform X, formerly Twitter. "It would, at the present state of knowledge and technology, not give a good return on investment. There are presently better avenues to pursue than high energy physics."

Member states will meet in 2028 to decide whether to greenlight the project. Then, the first phase of the machine — which would collide electrons with their animatter counterparts, positrons — would come online in 2045. Finally, in the 2070s, the FCC would begin slamming protons into one another.

How the Large Hadron Collider's successor will hunt for the dark universe

Robert Lea

SPACE.COM
Thu, February 8, 2024 

Planning is well underway for the successor to the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The new "atom smasher," named the Future Circular Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will smash particles together with so much energy, in fact, that scientists say it may be capable of investigating our universe's most mysterious entities: Dark energy and dark matter.

LHC operators at CERN revealed the results of a "midterm review" of their FCC Feasibility Study to the press on Monday (Feb. 5). The feasibility study began in 2021 and is set to conclude in 2025. The findings thus far constitute three years of work, with scientists and engineers from across the globe determining the placement of the new accelerator's ring, the implementation of the FCC facility, concepts for detectors and funding aspects.


The FCC will run under the jurisdiction of France and Switzerland, just like the LHC currently does, but the future accelerator will stretch 56.5 miles (90.7 kilometers), making it over three times the length of CERN's current particle accelerator, which is 16.8 miles (27 kilometers) long. The LHC is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

Related: Dark matter may be hiding in the Large Hadron Collider's particle jets

A small stretch of the near 17-mile-long LHC particle accelerator which will be dwarfed by the FCC. (Image credit: Robert Lea)

The FCC will operate in the same way as the LHC, accelerating charged particles around a loop, using superconducting magnets, then smashing them together as they approach the speed of light.

Scientists can probe fundamental physics by observing showers of secondary particles created when particles like protons slam together. But whereas the LHC can attain energies of around 13 terra electronvolts (TeV) when operating at full power, CERN says the FCC should be able to reach energies as great as 100 TeV.

"Our aim is to study the properties of matter at the smallest scale and highest energy," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti said at the interim report presentation in Geneva on Tuesday (Feb 6.)
Why do particle accelerators need more power?

The crowning achievement of the LHC thus far is undoubtedly the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the force-carrying particle of a field called the Higgs Field, which permeates the universe and dictates most other particles' masses.

The breakthrough sighting of the Higgs Boson by two LHC detectors was announced on July 4, 2012, and is credited with completing the Standard Model of particle physics, which is humanity's best description of the universe, its particles and their interactions on a subatomic scale.

Yet, the Standard Model still requires some tweaking — and, since 2012, scientists have been using the LHC to search for physics beyond the model to make those adjustments. Success has been limited. This search will get a boost when the LHC's high luminosity upgrade is completed, which will mean the particle accelerator can perform more collisions and offer scientists more opportunities to spot exotic physics.

THE GOD DAMN PARTICLE

A Higgs boson decays recorded in a particle collision recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC on May 18, 2012. (Image credit: ATLAS)



The two main outliers of the Standard Model (aka, why some of those tweaks are necessary) are dark matter and dark energy.

Sometimes collectively known as the "dark universe," these phenomena constitute such large mysteries for scientists because dark energy accounts for around 68% of the universe's energy and matter, while dark matter accounts for around 27% of these continents. But neither can be seen because they don't interact with light, and no one has been able to pin them down through other forms of direct detection, either. That means that the matter and energy we understand and can account for comprise no more than 5% of the universe's contents, and we have little idea what around 95% of the universe actually is.

And probing these aspects of the universe may require smashing particles together with much more energy than the high-luminosity LHC is capable of.

To begin with, dark matter can't be "standard matter" like the atoms that make up the stuff we see around us on an everyday basis, like stars, planets and our bodies. Remember how it doesn't interact with light? Well, protons, neutrons and electrons — collectively known as "baryons" — do. So, dark matter must be something else.

Currently, the only way scientists can infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity and the effect this has on baryonic matter and, in turn, light.

Dark energy is even more problematic. It's the force that scientists see driving the acceleration of the universe's expansion.

It concerns a period of expansion separate from the universe's initial inflation, which was triggered by the Big Bang. After that early expansion slowed to a near halt, in a later epoch, the universe unexplainably started to expand again. This expansion rate is actually speeding up to this day, with dark energy used to account for that action.

Yet, as we've discussed, scientists don't actually know what dark energy is.

To see why that is troubling, imagine pushing a child on a swing. The Big Bang is akin to your first and only push that gets the swing in motion. The swing may keep going for a short while, even without any action from you, then it will come to a half. Then, imagine that it suddenly begins motion again despite you just standing there. And not only that, but it swings faster and faster, reaching higher and higher points. This is similar to what dark energy is doing to the very fabric of space.

CERN hopes the high-energy collisions of the FCC could reveal the nature of this ongoing, late-universe push and the particles that make up dark matter.

However, it will be some time before this future particle accelerator is ready to embark on its investigation of the dark universe.
The timeline and cost of the Future Circular Collider

In 2028, three years after the completion of the FCC feasibility study, CERN member states will convene to decide if the FCC will get the go-ahead. Should the future collider get greenlit, CERN says, construction will begin in the mid-2030s.

The FCC will be completed in stages. The first stage is a electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) that will slam together negatively charged electrons, their positive antiparticle counterparts, known as positrons, and other light particles. CERN adds that FCC-ee should start operations in 2045.

The second machine of the FCC will be a proton colliding accelerator (FCC-hh) sitting alongside the FCC-ee in the same evacuated tunnel buried under the French-Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva. This part would come online no sooner than 2070, according to CERN.

Related Stories:

— Massive galaxy with no dark matter is a cosmic puzzle

— Researchers dig deep underground in hopes of finally observing dark matter

— Euclid 'dark universe' telescope captures 1st full-color views of the cosmos (images)

At the CERN press conference, Gianotti laid out some of the costs of the FCC, saying that the first FCC-ee stage alone would cost an estimated $17 billion USD.

CERN's Director general justified the cost by adding that the FCC is the only machine that would allow humanity to make the big jump in studying matter needed to crack the secrets of the dark universe.

A four-legged ‘Robodog’ is patrolling the Large Hadron Collider

Mack DeGeurin
Thu, February 8, 2024 

CERT’s four-legged Robodog can maneuver through cramped spaces and use sensors to spot fires, leaks, or other hazards.


Traversing through the dark, underground areas of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland isn't for the faint of heart. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator violently smashes protons and other subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light, which can emit radiation at levels potentially harmful to humans. If that weren't enough, long stretches of compact, cluttered areas and uneven surface areas throughout the facility make stable footing a necessity.

Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are turning to four-legged, dog-inspired robots to solve that problem. This week, CERN showed off its recently developed CERNquadbot robot which they said successfully completed its first radiation survey in CERN’s North Area, the facility's largest experimental area. Looking forward, CERN plans to have its “Robodog” trot through other experiment caves to analyze areas and look for hazards.

Why does CERT need a robot dog?

The hazardous, sometimes cramped confines of the LHC’s experiments caverns pose challenges to both human workers and past robot designs alike. Temporary radiation levels and other environmental hazards like fires and potential water leaks can make some areas temporarily inaccessible to humans. Other past CERT robots, while adept at using strong robotics arms to carry heavy objects over distance, struggle to traverse over uneven ground. Stairs, similarly, are a nonstarter for these mostly wheeled and tracked robots.

That’s where CERT’s robot dog comes in. CERTquadbot’s four, dog-like legs allow it to traverse up and down and side to side, all while adjusting for slight changes on the ground's surface. A video of the robot at work shows it tic-tacking its four metal legs up and down as it navigates through what looks like pavement and a metal grated floor, all the while using onboard sensors to analyze its surroundings. A human operator can be seen nearby directing the robot using a controller. For a touch of added flair, the robot can also briefly stand up on its two hind legs. The Robodog had to use all of its various maneuverability during its recent test-run up the North area, which was reportedly filled with obstacles.

“There are large bundles of loose wires and pipes on the ground that slip and move, making them unpassable for wheeled robots and difficult even for humans,” CERN’s Controls, Electronics and Mechatronics robotics engineer Chris McGreavy said in a statement.

Thankfully for the CERN scientists, the Robodog rose to the occasion. And unlike other living dogs, this one didn’t need a tasty treat for a reward.

“There were no issues at all: the robot was completely stable throughout the inspection,” McGreavy added.

https://youtu.be/cbcpJZicJ2w?si=35A_xHeZ7si6lhtX

Now with the successful test completed, CERN says it's upgrading the robot and preparing it and its successors to deploy in experiment caves, including the ALICE detector which is used to study quark-gluon plasma. These areas often feature stairs and other complex surfaces that would stump CERN’s other, less maneuverable robots. Once inside, the robot dogs will monitor the area for hazards like fire and water leaks or quickly respond to alarms.

CERN directed PopSci to this blog post when we asked for more details regarding the robot.

Dog-inspired dogs are going where humans can’t

Four-legged quadruped robots have risen in popularity across numerous industries in recent years for their ability to nimbly access areas either too cumbersome or dangerous for humans and larger robots to access. Boston Dynamics’ “Spot,” possibly the most famous quadruped robot currently on the market, has been used to inspect dangerous offshore oil drilling sites, explore old abandoned mining facilities, and even monitor a major sports arena in Atlanta, Georgia. More controversially, law enforcement officials in New York City City and at the southern US border have also turned to these quadruped style robots to explore areas otherwise deemed too hazardous for humans.

Still, CERN doesn’t expect its new Robodog to completely eliminate the need for the other models in its family of robots. Instead, the various robots will work together in tandem, using their respective strengths to fill in gaps with the ultimate goal of hopefully speeding up the process of scientific discovery.

THAT GOD(DAMN) PARTICLE

ATLAS and CMS Collaborations Find First Evidence of Rare Higgs Boson Decay

ATLAS and CMS combined their datasets from the second run of the LHC

ByAditya Saikrishna
May 27, 2023

Photo Credit: Twitter/CMSExperiment

SWITZERLAND: Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have achieved another breakthrough in particle physics as the ATLAS and CMS collaborations joined forces to provide the first evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson and a photon.

This rare decay process could shed light on particles beyond the Standard Model and deepen our understanding of the nature of the Higgs boson.

The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 opened new avenues for research in particle physics. Since then, scientists have meticulously explored its properties and investigated its various decay processes.

At the recent Large Hadron Collider Physics conference, ATLAS and CMS presented their joint efforts to uncover the elusive decay of the Higgs boson into a Z boson and a photon.- Advertisement -

The decay of the Higgs boson into a Z boson and a photon resembles a degeneration into two photons. However, these decays do not occur directly but involve an intermediate “loop” of “virtual” particles that researchers cannot observe directly.

These virtual particles could include yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson, potentially challenging the predictions of the Standard Model.

According to the Standard Model, around 0.15% of Higgs bosons with a mass of approximately 125 billion electronvolts should decay into a Z boson and a photon

However, theories extending beyond the Standard Model propose different decay rates. Scientists gain valuable insights into physics beyond the Standard Model and the characteristics of the Higgs boson itself by measuring the decay rate.

Previously, both ATLAS and CMS independently conducted extensive searches for the Higgs boson decay using data from proton-proton collisions at the LHC.

Employing similar strategies, they identified the Z boson through its decay into pairs of electrons or muons, heavier counterparts of electrons. The team found these Z boson decays in approximately 6.6% of the cases.

In their searches, ATLAS and CMS looked for collision events associated with the Higgs boson decay, represented by a narrow peak in the combined mass distribution of the decay products against a smooth background.

The collaborations categorized events based on the characteristics of the Higgs boson’s production processes and implemented advanced machine-learning techniques to distinguish between signal and background events.

In a new study, ATLAS and CMS combined their datasets from the second run of the LHC (2015-2018) to maximize the statistical precision of their search.

The collaboration resulted in the first evidence of the Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson and a photon, with a statistical significance of 3.4 standard deviations.

While the standard deviation falls short of the conventional requirement of 5 standard deviations for claiming an observation, the measured signal rate is 1.9 standard deviations above the Standard Model prediction.

Pamela Ferrari, an ATLAS physics coordinator, emphasized the significance of rare Higgs decays, stating that each particle has a unique relationship with the Higgs boson and searching for it is a high priority.

Florencia Canelli, a CMS physics coordinator, highlighted the potential implications of new particles on rare Higgs decay modes and expressed optimism about future advancements using the ongoing third run of the LHC and the forthcoming High-Luminosity LHC.

This collaborative effort by ATLAS and CMS brings us one step closer to unravelling the mysteries surrounding the Higgs boson and provides an insightful test of the Standard Model.

With further advancements and precision expected in future experiments, scientists anticipate probing even rarer Higgs decays, potentially uncovering new particles and revolutionizing our understanding of the universe’s fundamental building blocks.

Freeman Dyson's Solution to the Problem of Evil

Dyson’s principle of maximum diversity says that without hardship and suffering, life would be too dull
By John Horgan on May 8, 2018

Dyson's principle of maximum diversity decrees that "when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which made life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death." Credit: Randall Hagadorn, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ US

Freeman Dyson, at the age of 94, is still disturbing the universe. He has a new book out, Maker of Patterns, a collection of annotated letters that tells his life story through the 1970s. He continues writing splendid essays for The New York Review of Books. His latest, in the May 10 issue, ends with the Dysonian sentence, “Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents.”

Hoping to do a Q&A with him, I sent him a dozen questions. I asked, for example, about his assertions that the environmental movement has been “hijacked by a bunch of climate fanatics” and that “paranormal phenomena are real.” (See my 2011 post on Dyson’s “bunkrapt” ideas.) He ignored all the questions except for one about the Singularity. Here is our exchange:

Horgan: You have speculated about the long-term evolution of intelligence since the 1970s. What do you think about the predictions of Ray Kurzweil and others that we are on the verge of a radical transformation of intelligence, or “Singularity”?

Dyson: The Kurzweil singularity is total nonsense. For better or for worse, human nature is a tough beast, designed to prevail over technological revolutions and natural disasters. It changed only a little in response to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, not to mention ice-ages. It is absurd to imagine it changing radically in a single century.

That’s not enough for a column, so I thought I’d dust off a profile I wrote after interviewing Dyson in 1993 at the Institute for Advanced Study. In the profile, which ended up in The End of Science, I tried to convey Dyson’s personality, and his vision of humanity’s ultimate purpose and destiny. Here is an edited version:

Freeman Dyson is a slight man, all sinew and veins, with a cutlass of a nose and deep-set, watchful eyes. His demeanor is cool, reserved--until he laughs. Then he snorts through his nose, shoulders heaving, like a 12-year-old schoolboy hearing a dirty joke. It is a subversive laugh, the laugh of a man who envisions space as a haven for “religious fanatics” and “recalcitrant teenagers,” who insists that science at its best is “a rebellion against authority.”

Dyson was once at the forefront of the search for a unified theory of physics. In the early 1950s, he contributed to the construction of the quantum theory of electromagnetism. Other physicists have told me that Dyson deserved a Nobel Prize for his work, or at least more credit. They have also suggested that disappointment, as well as a contrarian streak, nudged Dyson away from particle physics and toward pursuits unworthy of his powers.

When I mentioned this assessment to Dyson, he gave me a tight-lipped smile and responded, as he often did, with an anecdote. Lawrence Bragg, he noted, was “a sort of role model.” After Bragg became the director of the University of Cambridge's legendary Cavendish Laboratory in 1938, he steered it away from nuclear physics, on which its mighty reputation rested, and into new territory.


“Everybody thought Bragg was destroying the Cavendish by getting out of the mainstream,” Dyson said. “But of course it was a wonderful decision, because he brought in molecular biology and radio astronomy. Those are the two things which made Cambridge famous over the next 30 years or so.”

Dyson, too, has spent much of his career swerving away from the mainstream. He veered from mathematics, his focus in college, into quantum theory, and then into solid-state physics, nuclear engineering, arms control, climate studies and speculation about humanity’s destiny.

He wrote his 1979 paper “Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” in response to Steven Weinberg’s infamous remark that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” No universe with intelligence is pointless, Dyson retorted. He argued that in an open, eternally expanding universe, our descendants could resist heat death and endure virtually forever through shrewd conservation of energy.

Dyson did not think biological intelligence would soon yield to artificial intelligence. In his 1988 book Infinite in All Directions, he conjectured that genetic engineers might someday “grow” spacecraft “about as big as a chicken and about as smart,” which could flit on sunlight-powered wings through the solar system and beyond, acting as our scouts. (Dyson called them “astrochickens.”) Civilizations concerned about dwindling energy supplies could capture the radiation of stars by constructing energy-absorbing shells--sometimes called Dyson spheres--around them.

Eventually, Dyson predicted, intelligence might spread through the entire universe, transforming it into one great mind. He asked, “What will mind choose to do when it informs and controls the universe?” The question, for Dyson, has theological significance. “I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God,” he wrote. “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be considered to be either a world-soul or a collection of world souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage in his development. We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind.”

Dyson insisted that “no matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory.” The quest for knowledge would be--must be—“infinite in all directions.” In other words, even a God-like intelligence cannot know everything.

Dyson admitted to me that his vision of the future reflected wishful thinking. When I asked if science is infinite, he replied, “I hope so! It's the kind of world I’d like to live in.” If minds make the universe meaningful, they must have something to think about. Science must, therefore, be eternal. Contrary to what Weinberg and other physicists have suggested, there can be no “final theory” that answers all our questions.

“The only way to think about this is historical,” Dyson explained. Two thousand years ago some “very bright people” invented something that, while not science in the modern sense, was obviously its precursor. “If you go into the future, what we call science won't be the same thing anymore, but that doesn't mean there won't be interesting questions.”

Dyson hoped Godel’s incompleteness theorem might apply to physics as well as to mathematics. “Since we know the laws of physics are mathematical, and we know that mathematics is an inconsistent system, it’s sort of plausible that physics will also be inconsistent”--and therefore open-ended. “So I think these people who predict the end of physics may be right in the long run. Physics may become obsolete. But I would guess myself that physics might be considered something like Greek science: an interesting beginning but it didn't really get to the main point. So the end of physics may be the beginning of something else.”

In Infinite In All Directions Dyson addressed, obliquely, the only theological issue that really matters, the problem of evil. If we were created by a loving, all-powerful God, why is life so painful and unfair? The answer, Dyson suggested, might have something to do with “the principle of maximum diversity.” This principle, he explained, “operates at both the physical and the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which made life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.”

When I asked Dyson about the principle of maximum diversity, he downplayed it. “I never think of this as a deep philosophical belief,” he said. “It's simply, to me, just a poetic fancy.” Perhaps Dyson was being modest, but to my mind, the principle of maximum diversity has profound implications. It suggests that, even if the cosmos was designed for us, we will never figure it out, and we will never create a blissful paradise, in which all our problems are solved. Without hardship and suffering--without “challenges,” from the war between the sexes to World War II and the Holocaust--life would be too boring. This is a chilling answer to the problem of evil, but I haven’t found a better one.

Postscript: After I emailed this column to Dyson, he replied: Dear John Horgan, Thank you for sending your summary of my more oracular statements. I find the summary accurate and thoughtful. I have nothing to add or subtract, except for one correction. The “Time Without End” paper is obsolete because it assumed a linearly expanding universe, which the cosmologists believed to be correct in 1979. We now have strong evidence that the universe is accelerating, and this makes a big difference to the future of life and intelligence. I prefer not to speculate further until the observational evidence becomes clearer. 

Yours sincerely, Freeman Dyson.


Freeman Dyson, global warming, ESP and the fun of being "bunkrapt"
By John Horgan on January 7, 2011

Should a scientist who believes in extrasensory perception—the ability to read minds, intuit the future and so on—be taken seriously? This question comes to mind when I ponder the iconoclastic physicist Freeman Dyson, whom the journalist Kenneth Brower recently profiled in The Atlantic's December issue.

"The Danger of Cosmic Genius" explores Dyson’s denial that global warming will wreak havoc on Earth unless we drastically curtail carbon emissions. Dyson questions the computer models on which these scary scenarios are based, and he suggests that the upside of global warming—including faster plant growth and longer growing seasons in certain regions—may outweigh the downside.

This article resembles Nicholas Dawidoff's 2009 profile of Dyson in The New York Times Magazine—with a crucial difference. Whereas Dawidoff teased us with the possibility that Dyson could be right about global warming, Brower declares right off the bat that Dyson is "dead wrong, wrong on the facts, wrong on the science." Brower's goal is to explain how "someone as smart as Freeman Dyson could be so dumb."

Brower has known Dyson for decades. Brower's 1978 book The Starship and the Canoe was an affectionate study of Dyson and his equally quirky son George, a kayak-designer who in the 1970s lived in a tree in the Pacific Northwest. In his Atlantic article, Brower recounts Dyson's brilliant contributions to particle physics (he helped formulate quantum electrodynamics), nuclear engineering (he designed a method of space transport based on repeated nuclear explosions) and other fields.

Brower weighs several explanations for Dyson's stance on global warming: Brower rejects one obvious possibility, that Dyson, at 87, has "gone out of his beautiful mind"; by all accounts, Dyson's intellect is still formidable (and I found it to be so three years ago when I attended a three-day conference with Dyson in Lisbon). Brower gives more weight to the notion that Dyson—one of whose books is titled The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books, 2006)—has always been a provocateur who loves tweaking the status quo. I emphasized this contrarian aspect of Dyson's personality in my 1993 profile of him for Scientific American, titled "Perpendicular to the Mainstream".

Brower's favorite theory is that Dyson possesses a kind of religious faith in the power of science and technology to help us overcome all problems. We can bioengineer ourselves and other species, Dyson asserts, to help us adapt to a warmer world; if Earth becomes uninhabitable, we can colonize other planets, perhaps in other solar systems. "What the secular faith of Dysonism offers is, first, a hypertrophied version of the technological fix," Brower wrote, "and, second, the fantasy that should the fix fail we have someplace else to go."

This analysis makes sense to me. Dyson's worldview seems both oddly retro, in a Jules Verne-ish or even Jetsons-esque way, and hyper-futuristic, so much so that humanity's current problems—notably global warming—fade into insignificance. His remarkable 1979 paper, "Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe," calculates how intelligent beings, perhaps in the form of clouds of charged particles, can ward off heat death—the polar opposite of global warming!—even after all the stars in the cosmos have dimmed.

Much more damaging to Dyson's credibility, however, is his belief in extrasensory perception, sometimes called "psi". Dyson disclosed this belief in his essay "One in a Million" in the March 25, 2004, New York Review of Books, which discussed a book about ESP. His family, Dyson revealed, included two "fervent believers in paranormal phenomena," a grandmother who was a "notorious and successful faith healer" and a cousin who edited the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Dyson proposed that "paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science." No one has produced empirical proof of psi, he conjectured, because it tends to occur under conditions of "strong emotion and stress," which are "inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures." This explanation reminds me of the physicist Richard Feynman's quip that string theorists don't make predictions; they make excuses.

Dyson even offered an explanation for what the parapsychologist Joseph Rhine called the "decline effect," which I discussed in a previous post. "In a typical card-guessing experiment," Dyson wrote, "the participants may begin the session in a high state of excitement and record a few high scores, but as the hours pass, and boredom replaces excitement, the scores decline." When I ran into Dyson three years ago in Lisbon, he cheerfully affirmed his belief in psi and reiterated his explanations for why it hasn't been empirically demonstrated.

I disagree with Dyson that global warming is no big deal—I urge doubters to read Storms of My Grandchildren (Bloomsbury, 2009) by the climatologist James Hansen—and that ESP is real. Yes, some researchers still claim to have found tentative evidence for psi, as The New York Times reported in a page-one story last week. But if ESP existed, surely someone would have provided definitive proof of it by now and claimed James Randi's $1-million prize for "anyone who can show under proper observing conditions evidence of any paranormal, supernatural or occult power or event."

Despite this lack of evidence, lots of people—including scientists—share Dyson's belief in ESP, just as many share his lack of concern about global warming. And let's not forget that many leading scientists—notably Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health—believe in a God who performs miracles, like resurrecting the dead. Eminent physicists also postulate the existence of parallel universes, higher dimensions, strings and other phenomena that I find as incredible as psi.

In his 1984 book, The Limits of Science, the biologist Peter Medawar coined the term "bunkrapt" to describe people infatuated with "bunk," meaning religious beliefs, superstitions and other claims lacking empirical evidence. "It is fun sometimes to be bunkrapt," Medawar wrote. That's a nice way of putting it. The gleeful rebel Dyson, it seems to me, embodies our bunkrapt era, when the delineation between knowledge and pseudo-knowledge is becoming increasingly blurred; genuine authorities are mistaken for hucksters and vice versa; and we all believe whatever damn thing we want to believe.

Photo of Dyson courtesy Wiki Common

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.
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