Steven Goldfarb: “Global collaborations can help pushing technology beyond its limits”

What is a particle collider and how much does CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) care about art, design and architecture? Discover it in this interview with Steven Goldfarb, a physicist from the University of Melbourne working on the ATLAS experiment at this nuclear research organisation which was involved in the discovery of the Higgs Boson in July 2012.  Goldfarb is one of the speakers of the “Design Beyond Technology” programme.

You are taking part in the Design Beyond Technology programme organised by the ADI-FAD on March 21st. Can you give us a hint of what your talk will be about?

I am going to raise 7 major questions about our universe. I will only answer one. And that answer took about 50 years to get.

What is the use of a particle collider?

Particle colliders are essentially the world’s most powerful microscopes. Their goals are to try to understand the fundamental components and forces of nature and thus to help us to understand the universe we live in.

Who came up with them?

Mother nature came up with the first and most powerful collider, the Big Bang. Even today, the collisions that charged particles make with our outer atmosphere come at much higher energy than we can produce in a laboratory. Over the past century, we have collected the traces of these collisions, referred to as cosmic rays, and learned a great deal.

In the early 1930s, physicists John Cockroft, Ernest Walton, and Robert Van der Graaff engineered devices that could accelerate charged particles in the laboratory, in order for us to study interactions in a controlled environment. We now have learned to accelerate particles to higher energies, made it so opposing beams pass through each other, and surrounded the collision points with precision detectors. This allows us to extract much more information and to look for rare processes.

By causing particles at high energy to interact, we can produce (through E = mc^2) fundamental particles of high mass. We would not know about those particles, otherwise, as they decayed to less massive particles only fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Now, we can reproduce them and study their properties, giving us insight into the fundamental forces of nature.

What have been the achievements of CERN so far?

We have probed material to find molecules, molecules to find atoms, atoms to find electrons and nuclei, nuclei to find protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons to find quarks. Since the late 1960s, we have constructed a model of these basic building blocks of our universe. It includes the particles that make up matter: leptons and quarks, as well as the particles that propagate forces, called bosons. The model also includes the rules by which these particles interact. It has made incredible predictions, such as the masses of new particles before they were found and the existence of the Higgs boson. Yet, it only describes about 5% of our universe, so we still have a lot of work to do.

Can you please tell us briefly about your experiment, ATLAS? Why is it called this and what is it trying to prove?

ATLAS is a rather awkward acronym: A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS. The Toroid refers to the very large superconducting magnet that surrounds the detector, in order to bend the trajectories of charged particles coming from the collisions. I prefer to think of the name as our attempt to map the secrets of our universe.

It is one of four detectors surrounding collision points on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. ATLAS and its sister experiment, CMS, discovered the Higgs boson on 4 July 2012. This was a remarkable discovery, in that it helped to validate our understanding of how fundamental particles get mass. But, this was only the start of our adventure. We are now producing thousands of Higgs bosons, enabling us to study its properties and to search for other rare processes. In short, we are now in a time of pure exploration. We do not know what we will find next, and that is very exciting.

How can the discoveries of ATLAS impact architecture and design?

Beyond increasing our understanding of the universe (not a small thing), I think the methodologies of large scale global collaborations, such as Atlas, can provide insight on how to push technology to its limits and beyond. The Atlas detector is a cylinder roughly 46 meters long and 26 meters in diameter. Yet, many of its 100 million active components must measure positions to a precision of 10s of microns or timing to a precision of 1 nanosecond. The detector was built by a collaboration of 5500 people from 180 institutions located in 38 countries around the world. The international diversity of the collaboration members spans around 100 nations. In the case of big science, such as this, increased diversity is beneficial and, I would say, necessary for success. That goes for the scientific analysis, as well as for the construction and operation of the experiment.

Do physicians work with any artists, designers or architects at CERN?

Yes. All of them. There is an Artist Residency program at CERN called Art@CERN, in which world-class artists compete for the opportunity to be residents. On occasion, we also invite artists to create installations, such as one that is ongoing at our Data Centre to illustrate the large scale flow of data from our experiments to detectors and on to analysis and eventually knowledge. We have a mutual influence agreement, so to speak. Everyone gains.

CERN’s IdeaSquare invites students from Design schools and Design factories to collaborate with scientists, artists, engineers, etc. to work on finding solutions to human problems. These range from water pollution to fire fighting to old age issues to fast planes, etc. Architects can be involved in this, as well. While they certainly help in building our external structures, our “neo physics lab” style is perhaps not the best advertisement of good architecture.

I should also mention that we invite well-known artists, including musicians, to visit the laboratory, and we have developed outreach programs, such as the “Music of Physics” or “Origins” to combine Art with Science to reach new audiences and draw the interest of our youth. We have brought these programs to countries and festivals around the world, including the Montreux Jazz Festival, Womad, Moogfest, etc.

If physics where art, which art would they be?

The answer to this really depends on the nature of the person being asked. I personally like to think of it as music. We have outstanding individual musicians, each maestros with their particular instrument (hardware, software, analysis, communication, etc.). From them, we have built large orchestras that work together to try to answer the most profound questions known to humankind. The diversity of our individual origins contributes to beautiful harmonies, allowing us to create these masterpiece experiments. They provide a clear argument for building bridges and not walls.

Author: Sol Polo