Megascience Blues: What the Death of America’s Biggest Particle Accelerator Means

The story of Fermilab is a story about keeping calm and collected on the vanguard of knowledge. Yeah, Robert Wilson, the lab's founding director, was an impassioned, divisive figure, wrangling with the public over where to build the National Accelerator Laboratory, as Fermilab was first known in 1967. But the story's been told with a certain restraint ever since – and rightly so, to a degree. The frontier's been covered with all fieldwork's rigor and repeatability, even as physicists on the lab's Collider Detector and DZero experiments racked up landmark discoveries into the fundamental nature of matter. There was bottom quark detection in mid-1977, top quark detection in early 1995, tau neutrino observation in 2000, precise top quark measurement and B_s oscillation observation in 2006, and in 2009 a significantly narrowed mass range for the so-called Standard Model Higgs boson, believed to endow matter with mass.

And the narrative is still being written as the lab readies to probe the holographic universe, mount a 4-ton, 570-megapixel camera to a telescope in the Chilean Andes to hunt dark energy, roll out plans for a high-flux proton accelerator (pdf) and bolster existing experiments to create and investigate skittish neutrinos.

The DZero experiment in 1990, by Reidar Hahn

CDF researchers observed a curious peak last month in a data set comprising some 10,000 proton- and antiproton-beam collisions. The team noted collisions producing both a pair of jets of nimble particles – think electrons – and the more heavyset W boson, an elementary, force-carrying particle that referees the weak interaction, in about 250 more events than initially anticipated. Their paper (pdf) could hint at physics lurking beyond the Standard Model, in the form perhaps of some hitherto undetected fundamental particle. Or possibly, even, an entirely new force of nature.

The science press flooded Fermilab. The attention almost baffled Rob Roser, CDF spokesman. Roser's been working on the Collider Detector since 1995. He and I caught up shortly after the announcement broke. "In physics," he said, "we're very particular about what we claim as a discovery. This is not a discovery." But it's welcomed, whatever it is. "This is nice," he continued. "It shows you we have a very powerful data set. We're still continuing to look at it. We'll look at it over the next few years or so."

The peak makes imminent shuttering of Fermilab's beleaguered Tevatron collider all the more bittersweet. It's a bummer the machine is coming to port as American science skids toward 2012, when "other science and laboratories" will be doled a scant .39 percent of the yearly federal budget. (That's $29.5 billion – a 12 percent bump over 2010, to be sure, but still breakfast for defense spending, which is due up for 19.3 percent, or $553 billion, of the budget.)

Tevatron’s control room in 1995, by Fred Ullrich

Powering down the experiment may only cloud the trajectory of what's left of a national enterprise. Our space shuttle program is folding. SETI, a cluster of radio telescopes listening for aliens, is going on indefinite hiatus. Scads of post-docs are being told, Hey, sorry, we just don't have the money to accommodate you.

The recent Higgs kerfuffle at CERN's ATLAS experiment — there was a rumor that the bedeviling particle had been spotted — likely won't put any eleventh-hour spin on an accomplished, puzzling chapter in the history of American particle physics. An ATLAS report dispels that recently leaked memo, which alleged a Higgs event, or resonance.

But some physicists would argue the Higgs hunt is less a race than a friendly, professional competition, anyway. Fermilab and CERN are sort of sparring partners, not the cold, detached rivals in today's parachute reportage. Some physicists may be on projects at both Batavia and Geneva. Some may even say they saw the hit coming. Dmitri Denisov, DZero spokesman, told me in January "there was some far-from-zero chance it would be hard to find money on short notice in the current climate." Roser said it's nothing new to have a group of scientists with more ideas than funds.

Still, considering the ideas, time, brainpower, and careers, the sheer emotional investment that goes into near round-the-clock collider physics experiments, I like to think the Tevatron has avenged the mammoth, aborted, Reagan-approved Super Conducting Super Collider, the canceled project that would have bested CERN, now overrun with weeds in a field outside Dallas.

In a prescient bit of apocrypha, the late Karl Popper says the best science is science that keeps us asking questions even as we think we're solving problems already posed: "Good tests kill flawed theories. We remain alive to guess again." CDF, DZero, the Tevatron itself – all good tests. "Fermilab isn't turning off," Roser said, adding that it'll remain the leading American particle physics institution, shifting focus to the Intensity Frontier. Researchers and post-docs will be straining oceans of data long after the Tevatron beams down. A massive door closing opens others. Cool and collected, the story pivots.

In Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience Hoddeson, Kolb, and Westfall argue, among other things, that the National Accelerator Laboratory, as Fermilab was first known, marked the end of Big Science and the flash-point for what the authors call Megascience:

In most writings 'big science' refers to large-scale research conducted in the decades following World War II, when the funding for science in the United States was widely experienced as unlimited, allowing the research to grow very rapidly, with many parameters (e.g. size, cost, numbers of collaborators, time scales) increasing exponentially. Megascience, however, …evolved in a time when the government's funding for science was slowing down. While many parameters still grew, they did so more slowly than in the first two postwar decades, causing dramatic changes in the nature of the research.#

Beaming up was an arduous, fervid process. Fermilab gives the exhaustive rundown, but here's a crude outline: After much political and regional-institution quibbling, the Atomic Energy Commission reviews proposals for around 200 sites in 46 states in July 1965. After some more quibbling the candidate sites whittle down to Weston, IL, a swath of prairie east of Chicago. It wasn't the most racially progressive area. And in nearby South Barrington, once a possible site, Science magazine reported that folks grumbled: about how a bunch of physicists running around would "disturb the moral fiber of the community."

To this prairie conservatism, Wilson, the lab's first director, brought high-art sensibilities. It's said he first sketched designs for the new machine in a life drawing class in Paris in the mid 60s. He obsessed over frontier rhetoric, though, favoring small scale, lone-wolf experimentation when nearly the rest of American science was riding out the last waves of the post-WWII consortium-research boom.

Robert Wilson, courtesy Fermilab

Now, nearly a half-century later, does the end of Fermilab's flagship test officially close off the last stretch of pristine frontier? Possibly, yeah. I should say "end," in quotation marks, though, because by any metric the CDF experiment vindicates Fermilab. Roser and Denisov and countless others are still alive enough to guess again, no? This isn't so much peak science, then, as it's another step toward post-Megascience, in which fickle government support further legitimizes bootstrapping schemes, and the long, staid march forward simply doesn't end so long as there's a will to keep digging. Here's to keeping the guessing good.

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