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Statement
by Dr. S. Peter Rosen
at a Town Meeting of
EPP 2010: Elementary Particle Physics in the 21st Century
Washington, DC
November 30, 2004
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today. I want to emphasize that I am speaking not as a government official, but as an individual physicist who has been active in the field of elementary particle physics for more than 45 years, and the views expressed are entirely my own and not those of the Office of Science at DOE.
In my time in the field, I have seen Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) emerge from Nuclear Physics and blossom into a beautiful science of remarkable clarity and depth. I have seen the standard model develop from the discovery of parity non-conservation in 1956 to quarks and asymptotic freedom, which will be formally honored in Stockholm in ten days or so. Throughout this period many, if not most, of the major discoveries and theoretical concepts were made in these United States and this country has truly been a world leader of EPP. Today, as you have heard from this morning's speakers, we live in revolutionary times with exciting prospects for new discoveries which may have an even greater impact on our understanding of the Universe than those of the past 40 to 50 years. You have undertaken the formidable task of charting a course forward for Elementary Particle Physics in this country, and I would urge you to adopt the goal of keeping the United States a world leader in the field.
As we prepare to celebrate the World Year of Physics in 2005, it is particularly appropriate that we reaffirm this goal. It is my strong belief that being a world leader in EPP is an important element in our national scientific strength, and therefore in our overall strength as a nation. Elementary Particle Physics produces new knowledge, inspires the next generation, and produces spin-offs that change the way we do all of science and live our daily lives.
I argue this point of view from the particular perspective of someone who is a child of the Second World War, and who came to this country from England in the 1950's because, at that time, this was the center of the nuclear and particle world. Europe was still rebuilding itself after the devastation of the Second World War and CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, was barely three years old. The United States had not always been the center of nuclear and particle physics: prior to the Second World War, Europe had been the center of this field, and this could have been a problem for the U.S. were it not for certain aspects of the history of that period .
Why is it important to be in a world leadership position? Because you never know when, and how, apparently arcane knowledge will have significant practical applications, with all their attendant consequences. The point is amusingly made in a recent novel, "A Hole in Texas," by the well-known author, Herman Wouk. The idea of a Higgs Boson Bomb is outlandish and very funny, but the possibility that some other world power might gain a key technological superiority is not.
The point can also be made historically, in that the originators of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics did not recognize the practical power of the atom on Earth until Leo Szilard had the brainstorm of the chain reaction while crossing a London Street in 1937! In that instant, the world changed, and it became essential for the forces of freedom that the United States be the first to develop atomic power.
Today no one knows whether quarks and gluons will have practical applications here on Earth. If they do, it is quite possible that the person who will have the "Szilard moment" is not even born yet. But we must be ready in case it comes.
There are, of course, many other reasons why we should play a world leadership role. Among them is that there is genuine public interest in understanding the world in which we live and humankind’s role in it. The great popularity of Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe,” both as a book and as a three-part NOVA television series, testifies to this, as does the steady stream of newspaper articles about cosmology, astrophysics and particle physics. Even the Style section of the Washington Post, the arbiter of capital taste, discussed the “Cosmic Question” of whether the universe will end in the “big rip” or the “big crunch” on its front page a week ago Sunday (November 21, 2004).
This interest helps to inspire young people to pursue the field. In my own case, many years ago, the possibilities opened by the atom at the end of the Second World War inspired me to forsake the cloistered world of pure mathematics and take up nuclear physics. Many members of my generation were similarly inspired. But much more to the point is: Where will the next Einstein come from, and what intellectual challenges will he or she take up? Will we be able to seize upon his or her insights and build on them?
Another reason we should aspire to remain a world leader is that the pursuit of Elementary Particle Physics presents us with tremendous scientific and technological challenges, and the solutions developed for them can have paradigm-shifting consequences for other sciences, and for our way of life. Accelerators and electron storage rings have become important tools for biology: who would have foreseen that biologists would become the fastest growing community of synchrotron light source users, or that NIH would contribute half the cost of upgrading SPEAR 3, the machine where the charmed quark and third charged lepton were discovered? Think of the impact of the World Wide Web, originally invented to transport electronically vast bodies of particle physics data from CERN to the U.S. Can we compute its economic impact as a fraction of the gross domestic product? Is it 1% or 1/100 of 1%, or so small as to be negligible?
Today, grid computing, the next
major phase of the WWW revolution is being driven
to a significant extent by the distributed data
storage, access, and analysis needs of BaBar,
the Tevatron and LHC. Who knows what impact
it will have on the way we do science, on industry,
and on our daily lives?
An interesting aspect of the scientific challenges presented by EPP is that technological solutions are often invented in the U.S., but exploited to their fullest elsewhere. For example, the principle of strong focussing, which enabled us to increase the energy of proton accelerators by a factor of five, was invented in the U.S., but the first machine to make use of it, the Proton Synchrotron, or PS for short, was built at CERN. Fortunately, the first American strong focussing machine, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, was only a year behind the PS, and so no major physics opportunities were lost.
That happy outcome has not been repeated in the case of underground water Cerenkov detectors. The idea of deploying such detectors was inspired by the search for proton decay, and the first one, consisting of 10,000 tons of continuously purified water, was located in a salt mine outside Cleveland, Ohio. Japanese physicists began with a much smaller detector, 3,000 tons in size, but eventually they built a detector seventeen times larger, while we closed the Cleveland one down.
The scientific pay-off for Japan has been enormous, especially in the area of neutrino physics, and it culminated with M. Koshiba, the founder of the Japanese effort, being one of three recipients of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. Even though American physicists played a significant role in building and operating the Japanese detectors, they receive much less credit than their Japanese colleagues. Therein lies a warning for Americans participating in the LHC.
In summary, I am saying that EPP produces new knowledge, inspires the next generation, and produces spin-offs that change the way we do all of science and live our daily lives. I am firmly convinced that being a world leader in EPP is an integral part of our national strength, scientifically, economically, and security-wise, and I hope that you will agree with me.
Thank you for your kind attention.
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