The God Particle

by Leon Lederman

  LEDERMAN: Anything else?

  DEMOCRITUS: Oh, hell, yes. You should have been here when the on-line data showed this crazy event with six jets and eight electron pairs. By now they have seen several squarks, gluinos, as well as the photino...

  LEDERMAN: Supersymmetry?

  DEMOCRITUS: Yes, as soon as the machine energies went above 20 TeV, these little guys poured out.

  Democritus called to someone in heavily accented Persian, and we were soon handed mugs of steaming fresh yak milk. When I asked for a display screen to see events, someone clamped a virtual-reality helmet over my head, and events, constructed from the data by God-knows-what-kind of computer, flashed before my eyes. I noticed that these 2020 physicists (the preschool kids of my era) still needed to be pictorially spoon-fed the information. A tall, young black woman with a spectacular Afro hairdo, carrying what looked like a computer notepad, sauntered over. Ignoring Democritus, she looked me over with some amusement. "Blue jeans, just like my grandfather used to wear. With that outfit you must be from UN headquarters. Are you inspecting us?"

  "No," I said. "I'm from Fermilab, and I've been out of the business for a few years. What's going on?"

  The next hour passed in a dazing blur of explanations of neural networks, jet algorithms, top quark and Higgs calibration points, vacuum-deposited diamond semiconductors, femtobytes, and—worse—twenty-five years of experimental progress. She was from Michigan, a product of the prestigious Detroit High School of Science. Her husband, a Kazakhstani postdoc, was employed by the University of Quito. She explained that the machine had a radius of only one hundred miles, this modest size made possible by a 1997 breakthrough in room-temperature superconductors. Her name was Mercedes.

  MERCEDES: Yeah, the Super Collider R&D group stumbled on these new materials while they were tracking down some weird effects in the niobium alloys. One thing led to another, and suddenly we had this cruciferous material that begins superconducting at 50 degrees Fahrenheit, about the temperature of a cool day in autumn.

  LEDERMAN: What is the critical field?

  MERCEDES: Fifty tesla! If I remember my history, your Fermilab machine was at four tesla. Today there are twenty-five companies making or growing the stuff. The economic impact in FY 2019 is about three hundred billion dollars. The super-train, which floats between New York and Los Angeles, cruises at two thousand miles per hour. Huge clumps of steel wool, energized by the new stuff, now provide pure water to most of the cities of the world. Every week we read about some new application.

  Democritus, sitting quietly up until now, bored in on the central question.

  DEMOCRITUS: Have you seen anything inside quarks?

  MERCEDES: [shaking her head, smiling] That was my Ph.D. thesis. The best measurement came out of the last Super Collider experiment. The radius of the quark is less than an incredibly small 1021 centimeters. As far as we can tell, quarks and leptons are as good an approximation to points as you can get.

  DEMOCRITUS: [jumping up and down, clapping, laughing hysterically] Atomos! Finally!

  LEDERMAN: Any surprises?

  MERCEDES: Well, with Susy and the Higgs, a young theorist from CUNY—a guy named Pedro Monteagudo—has written a new Susy-GUT equation that successfully predicts the Higgs-generated masses of all the quarks and leptons. Just as Bohr explained the energy levels in the hydrogen atom.

  LEDERMAN: Yeow! Really?

  MERCEDES: Yeah, the Monteagudo equation has taken over from Dirac, Schrodinger, and all points west. Look at my T-shirt.

  As if I needed such an invitation. But as I focused on the curious hieroglyphic displayed there, I felt a fuzzy, earthquake-like dizziness, and it all faded.

  ***

  "Shit." I was back home, groggily lifting my head off my papers. I noticed one photocopy of a news headline: CONGRESSIONAL FUNDING FOR THE SUPER COLLIDER IN DOUBT. My computer modem was beeping, and an E-mail message was "inviting" me to Washington for a Senate hearing on the SSC.

  GOOD-BYE

  You and I, dear colleague, have come a long way from Miletus. We have traversed the road of science from then and there to here and now. Regretfully we have sped past many of the milestones, major and minor. But we have paused at a few of the important sights: at Newton and Faraday, Dalton and Rutherford, and, of course, at McDonald's for a hamburger. We see a new synergy between inner and outer space, and like a driver on a forested winding road, we see occasional glimpses, obscured by trees and fog, of a towering edifice: an intellectual construct 2,500 years in the making.

  Along the way I have tried to insert some irreverent details about the scientists. It is important to distinguish between the scientists and the science. Scientists, more often than not, are people, and as such they span the enormous range of variability that makes people so ... so interesting. Scientists are serene and ambitious; they are driven by curiosity and ego; they exhibit angelic virtue and immense greed; they are wise beyond measure and childish well into their dotage; intense, obsessed, laid-back. Among the subset of humans called scientists, there are atheists, agnostics, the militandy apathetic, the deeply religious, and those who view the Creator as a personal deity, either all-wise or somewhat bumbling, like Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.

  The range of abilities among scientists is also huge. This is okay because science needs the mixers of cement as well as the master architects. We count among us minds of awesome power those who are only monstrously clever, those possessed of magic hands, uncanny intuition, and that most vital of all scientific attributes: luck. We also have jerks, assholes, and those who are just dumb ... dumb!

  "You mean relative to you others," my mother once protested.

  "No, Mom, dumb like anyone is dumb."

  "So how did he get a Ph.D.?" she challenged.

  "Sitzfleisch, Mom." Sitzfleisch: the ability to sit through any task, to do it again and again until the job is somehow done. Those who give out Ph.D.'s are human too—sooner or later they give in.

  Now, if there is any unifier to this collection of human beings we call scientists, it is the pride and reverence with which each of us adds our contribution to that intellectual edifice: our science. It may be a brick, fitted meticulously and cemented into place, or it may be a magnificent lintel (to stress out the metaphor) gracing columns placed there by our masters. We build with a sense of awe, heavily tinged with skepticism, guided by what we found when we arrived, bringing all our human variables, coming to this effort from all directions, each carrying our own cultural dress and language, but somehow finding instant communication, instant understanding, and empathy in the common task of building the tower of science.

  It is time to let you go back to your real life. For the past three years I have been yearning for a time when this would be over. Now I admit that I will miss you, colleague reader. You have been my constant companion on airplanes, in very quiet, late-night writing sessions. I have pictured you as retired history teacher turf accountant, college student, wine merchant, motorcycle mechanic, high school sophomore, and, when I need cheering up, an incredibly beautiful contessa who wants to run her hands through my hair. Like a reader finishing a novel, reluctant to leave the characters behind, I will miss you.

  THE END OF PHYSICS?

  Before I go, I have a statement to make on this ultimate T-shirt business. I may have given the impression that the God Particle, once understood, will provide the ultimate revelation: how the universe works. This is the domain of the really-deep-thinkers, the particle theorists who are paid to really think deep. Some of them believe that The Road to reductionism will come to an end; we will essentially know it all. Science will then concentrate on complexity: super buckyballs, viruses, the morning traffic jam, a cure for hatred and violence ... all good stuff.

  There is another view—that we are like children (in the metaphor of Bentley Glass) playing on the shore of a vast ocean. This view allows for the truly endless frontier. Behind the God Particle is revealed a world of splendid, blinding beauty,
but one to which our mind's eye will adapt. Soon we will perceive that we do not have all the answers; what is inside the electron, quark, and black hole will draw us ever on.

  I think I favor the optimists (or are they pessimists giving up job security?), those theorists who believe we will "know it all," but the experimentalist in me prevents summoning up the requisite arrogance. The experimental road to Oz, the Planck mass, to that epoch less than 10−40 seconds after The Event makes our total voyage from Miletus to Waxahachie look like a pleasure cruise on Lake Winnebago. I think not only of accelerators girdling the solar system and detector edifices to match, not only of the billions and billions of hours of sleep my students and theirs will lose, but 1 worry about the necessary sense of optimism that our society must summon if this quest is to continue.

  What we really do know and will know much better in a decade or so can be measured by the SSC energy: 40 trillion volts. But important things must also happen at energies so high as to make our forthcoming SSC collisions seem docile. There are still boundless possibilities for complete surprises. Operating under new laws of nature as unimaginable today as quantum theory (or the cesium atomic clock) would have been to Galileo, we could find ancient civilizations existing inside quarks. Gasp! Before the men in white coats arrive, let me switch to another frequently raised question.

  It is astonishing how often otherwise competent scientists forget the lessons of history, namely, that the major impacts of science on society have always come from the kind of research that drives the quest for the a-tom. Without taking anything away from genetic engineering, materials science, or controlled fusion, the quest for the a-tom has paid for itself many millionfold, and there is no sign so far that this has changed. The investment in abstract research, at less than one percent of the budgets of industrial societies, has performed much better than the Dow Jones average has for over three hundred years. Yet from time to time we are terrorized by frustrated policy makers who want to focus science on the immediate needs of society, forgetting or perhaps never understanding that most of the major advances in technology that have influenced the quality and quantity of human life have come out of pure, abstract, curiosity-driven research. Amen.

  OBLIGATORY GOD ENDING

  Looking for inspiration on how to wind up this book, I studied the endings of a few dozen science books written for a general audience. They are always philosophical, and the Creator almost always appears in the favorite image of the author or in the image of the author's favorite author. I have noticed two kinds of closing summaries in popular science books. One kind is characterized by humility. The downgrading of humankind usually begins by reminding the reader that we are many times removed from centrality: our planet is not the center of the solar system, and the solar system is not the center of our galaxy, nor is our galaxy anything special as galaxies go. If this isn't enough to discourage even a Harvard man, we learn that the very material we and the things around us are made of consists of only a small sample of the fundamental objects in the universe. Then these authors note that humankind and all of its institutions and monuments matter very little to the continued evolution of the cosmos. The master of the humbling assessment may be Bertrand Russell:

  Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

  Brief and powerless is Man's life, on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pidless and dark....

  To which I say softly, Wow! The guy has a point. Steven Weinberg put it more succinctly: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." Now we are surely humbled.

  There are also those who go all the way in the other direction, who view the effort to understand the universe as not at all humbling but exalting. This group yearns to "know the mind of God" and says that by so doing we become a crucial part of the whole process. Thrillingly, we are restored to our rightful place at the center of the universe. Some philosophers of this ilk go so far as to say that the world is a product of the human mind's constructions; others, a bit more modest, say that our mind's very existence, even on the infinitesimal speck of an ordinary planet, must be a crucial part of the Grand Plan. To which I say, very softly now, that it's nice to be needed.

  But I prefer a combination of the two approaches, and if we're going to work God in here somewhere, let's call on the folks who have given us so many memorable images of Her. So here is the script for the last scene in Hollywood's loving transmutation of this book.

  ***

  The hero is the president of the Astrophysics Society, the only person ever to win three Nobel Prizes. He stands at night on the beach, legs planted wide, shaking his fist at the jeweled blackness of the sky. Anointed by his humanity, aware of mankind's most powerful achievements, he shouts at the universe above the sound of crashing waves. "I have created you. You are the product of my mind—my vision and my invention. It is I who provide you with reason, with purpose, with beauty. Of what use are you but for my consciousness and my constructions, which have revealed you?"

  A fuzzy swirling light appears in the sky, and a beam of radiance illuminates our man-on-the-beach. To the solemn and climactic chords of the Bach B Minor Mass, or perhaps the piccolo solo of Stravinsky's "Rites," the light in the sky slowly configures itself into Her Face, smiling, but with an expression of infinite sweet sadness.

  Fade to black. Roll credits.

  Acknowledgments

  We believe it was Anthony Burgess (or was it Burgess Meredith?) who proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit an author from including in his acknowledgments a thank you to his wife for typing the manuscript. Our wives don't do typing, so you are spared that here. There are thanks to be given, however.

  Michael Turner a theorist and cosmologist, pored over the manuscript for subtle errors in theory (and some not so subtle); he caught many, fixed them, and steered us back on course. Given the experimental bias of the book, it was as if Martin Luther had asked the pope to proofread his ninety-five theses. Mike, if there are residual errors, blame the editors.

  The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (and its patron saint in Washington, the U.S. Department of Energy) provided much of the inspiration and not a little of the mechanical support.

  Willis Bridegam, librarian of Amherst College, made special resources of the Robert Frost Library and the Five College system available to us. Karen Fox provided creative research.

  We suspect that Peg Anderson, our manuscript editor became so embroiled in the subject that she asked all the right questions, and in so doing, she earned her battlefield commission as an honorary M.S. in physics.

  Kathleen Stein, Omnis incomparable interview editor assigned the interview from which sprang the germ of the book. (Or was it a virus?)

  Lynn Nesbit had more faith in the project than we did.

  And John Sterling, our editor sweated the whole thing out. We hope that whenever he sits down in a warm bath, he'll think of us, and scream something appropriate.

  Leon M. Lederman

  Dick Teresi

  A Note on
History and Sources

  When scientists talk about history, one must be alert. It isn't history as a professional, scholarly historian of science would write it. One could call it "fake history." The physicist Richard Feynman called it conventionalized myth-history. Why? Scientists (certainly this scientist) use history as part of pedagogy. "See, here is a sequence of scientific events. First there was Galileo, then Newton and this apple..." Of course, that isn't the way it happens. There are crowds of others who help and hinder. The evolution of a new concept in science can be enormously complicated—and was even in the days before faxes. A quill pen can do plenty of damage.

  In Newton's time there was a dense literature of published articles, books, correspondence, lectures. Priority battles (who gets the credit for being the first to make a discovery) go back long before Newton. Historians sort all of this out and create a vast and rich literature about the people and concepts. However; from the point of view of storytelling, myth-history has the great virtue of filtering out the noise of real life.

  As for sources, when one sums up the knowledge gained over five decades working in physics, it is difficult to pin down the precise source of every fact, quote, or piece of information. There may, in fact, be no source for some of the best stories in science, but they have become such a part of the collective consciousness of scientists that they are "true," whether or not they ever happened. Still, we hit some books, and for the benefit of the reader here are some of the better ones. This is by no means a complete list, nor do we mean to imply that the following publications are the original or best sources for the information cited. I list them in no particular order except the whim of an experimentalist...