Read Online The Best Australian Science Writing 2012 by Elizabeth Finkel - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elizabeth Finkel
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from âfield-effect transistorsâ.
Practically speaking, we are all recipients of the revolution in thinking that the field idea has wrought, and anyone who uses a mobile phone or computer has reason to be grateful that physicists have come to understand this enigmatic aspect of our world. Psychically, however, we have paid a price, for the outcome of this intellectual upheaval is a description of our world that almost no one can understand. Fields have become, in effect, the black-box controls of our universe, the theoretical equivalents of themicrochip processors that control our cars. Just as the engine of the 21st century car has become a technological marvel that is inaccessible to backyard mechanics, so the 21st century universe has become an inaccessible wonder, a triumph of theory that can only be grasped by an expertly trained professional class. One way to think about what Jim Carter is doing is that he insists on a universe he can comprehend. As with the old Chryslers and Cadillacs that grace his front yard, Jim demands a cosmos he can figure out for himself.
* * * * *
Of all the things that human beings now do, theoretical physics is probably not one we tend to think of as accessible to a lone tinkerâs insight, not in the age of string theory and multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators. Since World War II theoretical physics has become a multinational industry wrapped around some of the most complicated facilities our species has ever constructed: the Hubble Space Telescope, the CERN accelerator, the LIGO gravity wave detector, the Ice-Cube neutrino detector at the South Pole, each of which bears a billion-dollar price-tag and each of which has huge technical crews devoted to its operation. These days, when research papers in experimental particle physics are published there are often several hundred scientists listed as authors, for that is the size of the teams it now takes to do many major physics experiments. Such vast collaborative enterprises have become essential for the progress of theoretical physics, which relies on experimental verification of its predictions to retain its credibility; without such machines, contemporary physics theory is in danger of becoming a mathematical game. It is a mark of the scienceâs enormous success that indeed it now takes so much equipment and so many people to find something that is not already explained. The very abstraction ofcurrent theory stands as a testimony to just how much physicists do understand, for it is only because they have explained so much that they find themselves now, on the fringes of the unknown, in truly bewildering territory.
Yet however exciting it may be to participate in such grandscale adventures, a yearning remains in some physicistsâ hearts for a smaller-scale, more personal kind of science. Dr Ken Libbrecht, a physicist I know at Caltech who heads one of the gravity-wave teams, retreats in his spare time from the stage of Big Science to a tiny laboratory where he builds machines to study how snowflakes form. It is something he can do on his own, he explains. On holiday from what he calls his âday jobâ with the LIGO team, snowflakes provide a frontier of research that he can explore by himself. In this field he is the unequivocal world leader, and, surprisingly, very little is known about the physics of ice crystallisation. Libbrecht once joked to me that with the papers he works on about gravity waves the list of authors may take up more pages than the article itself; simply keeping track of everyoneâs names is a significant challenge for a group leader. With snowflakes the headline is his alone and, whatâs more, he is following in the footsteps of scientific giants: Michael Faraday and Johannes Kepler, two of the most important physicists in history, both did research on snowflakes.
Ken Libbrecht isnât the only Caltech physicist who gets a kick from what we might call handmade science.
Practically speaking, we are all recipients of the revolution in thinking that the field idea has wrought, and anyone who uses a mobile phone or computer has reason to be grateful that physicists have come to understand this enigmatic aspect of our world. Psychically, however, we have paid a price, for the outcome of this intellectual upheaval is a description of our world that almost no one can understand. Fields have become, in effect, the black-box controls of our universe, the theoretical equivalents of themicrochip processors that control our cars. Just as the engine of the 21st century car has become a technological marvel that is inaccessible to backyard mechanics, so the 21st century universe has become an inaccessible wonder, a triumph of theory that can only be grasped by an expertly trained professional class. One way to think about what Jim Carter is doing is that he insists on a universe he can comprehend. As with the old Chryslers and Cadillacs that grace his front yard, Jim demands a cosmos he can figure out for himself.
* * * * *
Of all the things that human beings now do, theoretical physics is probably not one we tend to think of as accessible to a lone tinkerâs insight, not in the age of string theory and multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators. Since World War II theoretical physics has become a multinational industry wrapped around some of the most complicated facilities our species has ever constructed: the Hubble Space Telescope, the CERN accelerator, the LIGO gravity wave detector, the Ice-Cube neutrino detector at the South Pole, each of which bears a billion-dollar price-tag and each of which has huge technical crews devoted to its operation. These days, when research papers in experimental particle physics are published there are often several hundred scientists listed as authors, for that is the size of the teams it now takes to do many major physics experiments. Such vast collaborative enterprises have become essential for the progress of theoretical physics, which relies on experimental verification of its predictions to retain its credibility; without such machines, contemporary physics theory is in danger of becoming a mathematical game. It is a mark of the scienceâs enormous success that indeed it now takes so much equipment and so many people to find something that is not already explained. The very abstraction ofcurrent theory stands as a testimony to just how much physicists do understand, for it is only because they have explained so much that they find themselves now, on the fringes of the unknown, in truly bewildering territory.
Yet however exciting it may be to participate in such grandscale adventures, a yearning remains in some physicistsâ hearts for a smaller-scale, more personal kind of science. Dr Ken Libbrecht, a physicist I know at Caltech who heads one of the gravity-wave teams, retreats in his spare time from the stage of Big Science to a tiny laboratory where he builds machines to study how snowflakes form. It is something he can do on his own, he explains. On holiday from what he calls his âday jobâ with the LIGO team, snowflakes provide a frontier of research that he can explore by himself. In this field he is the unequivocal world leader, and, surprisingly, very little is known about the physics of ice crystallisation. Libbrecht once joked to me that with the papers he works on about gravity waves the list of authors may take up more pages than the article itself; simply keeping track of everyoneâs names is a significant challenge for a group leader. With snowflakes the headline is his alone and, whatâs more, he is following in the footsteps of scientific giants: Michael Faraday and Johannes Kepler, two of the most important physicists in history, both did research on snowflakes.
Ken Libbrecht isnât the only Caltech physicist who gets a kick from what we might call handmade science.
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