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Community => Recreation Commons => Our researchers have made a breakthrough! => Topic started by: Buster's Uncle on October 13, 2014, 06:18:46 pm

Title: Crash Course in Science
Post by: Buster's Uncle on October 13, 2014, 06:18:46 pm

Crash Course in Science
Ralph Gardner Jr. Gets Some Clues About How the Universe Works at Brookhaven National Laboratory
The Wall Street Journal
By Ralph Gardner Jr.  Oct. 12, 2014 10:35 p.m. ET




(http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-DG338_NYGARD_G_20141012183105.jpg)
Physicist Angelika Drees gives a tour of the underground particle accelerator at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, N.Y. Craig Warga for The Wall Street Journal



It took almost two hours Thursday morning in stop-and-go Long Island Expressway traffic to reach Brookhaven National Laboratory. Science has never been my strong suit, but I think a comparison can be made between the daily failures of suburban traffic engineering and some of what has been accomplished at Brookhaven.

While it was unusual for me to reach speeds above 30 miles an hour for much of the trip, Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider—essentially a 2.4-mile racetrack for atomic particles, and the only one in the nation—is capable of making the journey in one second. Not once, but 80,000 times traveling at 99.995% of the speed of light.

Imagine how fast you could get to the Hamptons.

And just to take the traffic analogy one step further, flawed though it may be, the purpose of the collider is to create a crash, where beams of ions traveling in opposite directions collide in the middle, creating a shower of subatomic particles that help raise our understanding of the universe’s fundamental forces.

“Right below the PHENIX logo,” is where the collision takes place, explained Edward O’Brien, an experimental physicist and the director of operations for PHENIX. One of two detectors operating at Brookhaven, it stands for Pioneering High-Energy Nuclear Interaction Experiment.

Dr. O’Brien was pointing at a thin, easily overlooked tube between magnets several stories high, whose job is to focus the beam, like the lens on a camera.

We live in a special-effects age where daily reality often seems trumped by the virtual world. Thus, I’m happy to report that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) generates not only photons and muons but also awe.

In the same way that the flying buttresses of Chartres or Notre Dame defined the cutting-edge technology of its time, one’s reaction standing at the base of the RHIC, with 4-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls and labyrinth of tubes and wires connecting to a control room where scientists analyze the data, is something like reverence.

Its purpose is to mimic conditions “when the universe was one-millionth-of-a-second old after the big bang,” Dr. O’Brien explained—the collisions generating temperatures of 4 trillion degrees Celsius, 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.

Though none was occurring on the day of my visit. If they had been we wouldn’t have been allowed to enter the collider, which has all sorts of safety features, such as trip wires and oversize red buttons labeled “Magnet Crash.”

“Your bank card would get wiped immediately,” he said.


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Digital storage equipment at the lab’s PHENIX facility. Craig Warga for The Wall Street Journal


The RHIC runs roughly six months a year, January through June, and is shut down the other six months for maintenance, repairs and upgrades. During what’s known as “Summer Sundays” in August, Brookhaven—a 5,300-acre campus with almost 3,000 scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff, operated by the Department of Energy—is open to the public. Group tours can also be arranged September through May.

Brookhaven also does research in nanotechnology and life sciences, and houses the National Synchrotron Light Source, beams of light that allow scientists to study everything from superconductivity to the chemical composition of human bones, which could help in the understanding of arthritis and osteoporosis.

The discoveries of the heavy ion collider have been even more fundamental. “We were shocked” when the collisions created what appeared to be a liquid rather than a gas, Dr. O’Brien explained, and what the universe may have been made of momentarily 13 billion years ago.

And not just any liquid, but one with the most “perfect” properties ever observed. “It had no viscosity, no drag,” the scientist said. “That was totally unexpected. We started to measure properties never seen before in nature.”

Being in the presence of such cutting-edge science, and really cool equipment, inevitably leads to discussions of existence and being.

“The universe is more elusive than we thought 20 or 30 years ago,” said Gene Van Buren, a physicist working on STAR, the other particle detector at Brookhaven. It stands for Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC. “It’s hiding things. It’s almost more frustrating than awe.”

Nonetheless, he said, the research may eventually lead to breakthroughs as profound as that of harnessing electricity.

The scientists don’t feel competitive, or that their thunder was stolen by CERN in Switzerland which operates a newer, bigger particle collider. Many of Brookhaven’s scientists, an international group, travel between Long Island and CERN.

“It’s a collegial approach,” Dr. O’Brien said.

Among them is Angelika Drees, a German physicist who worked at CERN before coming to Brookhaven where she runs the accelerator itself—two rings of supercold, superconducting magnets that guide the protons, or “heavy ions,” into collisions. She also conducts her own experiments.

“If there’s a problem the engineering people can’t fix they call me,” she said as we traveled the tunnel where the beams are housed, coming across the occasional cricket. The goal is to create a perfect vacuum. “We want the particles to interact only with each other.”

In her spare time Dr. Drees plays with car engines, shoes horses and lets her children think they understand computers and cellphones better than she does. “I hand it to them, but I can figure it out,” she said.


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