Big Science and India

ISBN-13: 9781479391943 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 356 str.

Ry Deshpande

Opis

On 4 July 2012 Director-General Rolf Heuer of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva) made an announcement about the discovery of a particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs Boson. According to the theory given 45 years ago we have an explanation as how matter acquires its mass. It involves this boson. Since then there has been a determined chase to track it down in the laboratory. Experiments carried out by two teams using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN statistically confirm the predictions. "It's really an incredible thing," exclaims Higgs himself, and Heuer adds his congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement. In the introductory remark he said, "It was a global effort, it is a global effort, it is a global success." This essentially sums up the new scientific culture that has come to us in the wake of the Second World War where Science has become Big in which have joined all the major segments of the Society in a global way. This is an altogether new and welcome phenomenon in the long history of mankind and actually it is that we celebrate in such a pursuit, a pursuit founded on the principle of empirical rationalism. But what are bosons? They are entities which mediate between material particles, are associated with interactions between masses. There is matter, there are interactions. Those particles which follow Fermi-Dirac Statistics are called Fermions; those that follow Bose-Einstein Statistics are Bosons. This was some 80-90 years ago. The question that is to be asked then is: In the material creation are these two separate entities, Fermions and Bosons? Or is there something yet higher from which the two emerge, come into existence, manifest? That is the search Physics is seized with. There are three elementary bosons called gauge bosons: the photon (electromagnetic force), the W and Z bosons (the weak force) and the gluons (the strong force). Then there are two additional, the Graviton and the Higgs. The LHC is engaged with the Higgs. Yes, a Higgs-like particle has been observed and the discovery made known publicly on 4 July. It is a matter of jubilation, with Time as the Chief Guest. But it seems that, fundamentally, we're not at a much different place in 2012 than we were, say, in 1954. That was the point when the hunt for anti-particles was hot. The pursuit was to see if anti-proton existed. The Berkeley Bevatron, the largest machine conceived and built at that time, did demonstrate its existence. A whole new branch of physics sprang up with that. The present-day supertera-effort involved in the LHC is an aspect of it, though vast in magnitude in quality much the same. What the CERN director says about the global effort and global success is perfectly agreeable, and that is an outcome belonging to a social-cultural milieu which is new to the world. Surely, in terms of science it is an entry into a new domain, of interactions and exchanges, forces and fields, with the round Newtonian marbles being left far behind. But it could be pretty strongly argued that the anti-proton was already built into the Bevatron; possibly, the Higgs is built into the LHC. If it is so, the discovery should not come as a surprise. If so, the credit for the discovery should go to them who built the machine and not so much to the teams who 'observed' the events. Michael Angelo would already see an exquisite statue in a block of Carrara marble. The process would be simply sculpting it out. A physicist already 'sees' in a machine what he wants to see. It seems it is the power of mind which makes things material. If we've instruments other than mind... the prospects will be incredible.

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