Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2005 APS April Meeting
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2005; Tampa, FL
Session X13: The Rise of Megascience |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Adrienne Kolb, Fermilab Room: Marriott Tampa Waterside Room 12 |
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 10:45AM - 11:21AM |
X13.00001: Megascience on the Prairie: The Powers and Paradoxes of Pushing Frontiers at Fermilab (The Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber Lecture) Invited Speaker: In the decades following the Second World War, high-energy physics witnessed two remarkable transformations. The first, examined by many historians, led to ``big science.'' As researchers who participated in wartime projects continued working with costly apparatus in well-funded teams, almost all parameters of the high-energy field (time spans, size, collaboration numbers, cost, etc.) grew exponentially into the 1960s. The second transformation -- the focus of this talk -— unfolded during the 1970s and 80s, yielding ``megascience,'' a new form of big science of still larger scale. At Fermilab this second evolution proceeded shortly after the laboratory was founded in 1967. Ironically it began with a vision of small science. The first director, Robert R. Wilson, celebrated the lone researcher who conducted modest experiments and valued the small and frugal even while building a costly accelerator and doing physics at the highest energy. As progress in particle physics required much larger experiments, the dynamics of megascience took form under Fermilab's subsequent director Leon Lederman. In time, the intensifying competition for limited resources transformed the largest experiments into long-lasting institutions for conducting effectively unending experiments. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 11:21AM - 11:57AM |
X13.00002: Submicroscopic Nature Needs Megascience Invited Speaker: The history of ``submicroscopic nature,'' that is, the history of particle physics, begins in the early 1950's and builds on the construction of a post WWII series of particle accelerators developed to study nuclear physics had been applied to the collisions, in the earth's atmosphere, of cosmic rays. These were high energy particles generated in cosmological events and colliding with oxygen and nitrogen in our atmosphere to create new particles. These studies discovered muons, pions, kaons and lambdas---the beginnings of a vast ``zoo.'' Clearly, studies of the inhabitants of the zoo required energetic collisions, the higher the energy of the accelerator, the more extensive was the range of masses that could be produced and studied. Our paper will review the developments over the past 50 years. As accelerators grew, so did the particle detectors and the sizes of the experimental groups. This will bring us to Fermilab in 2005. Finally, we will describe the $\sim $900 physicist groups that are cheerfully collaborating, building particle detectors designed to peer deeply into the structure of matter, based upon the ``Large Hadron Collider'' (LHC), an accelerator of unprecedented size, cost, and complexity. The story then takes us from the 100 MeV (10$^{8}$ eV) ``atom smashers'' of 1950, to the $\sim $10 TeV (10$^{13}$ eV) behemoth now under construction in Europe. Thus, we move from dozens of machines often on University campuses around the world, to one single megascience device shared by physicists around the world. The motivation for this evolution is physics, as we shall attempt to explain. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 19, 2005 11:57AM - 12:33PM |
X13.00003: Some Observations on DOE's Role in ``Megascience'' Invited Speaker: As director of the Office of Energy Research (now Science) from 1981 to 1987, I had the opportunity to witness and influence the initiation of several projects that have given scientists in several fields new tools that now allow studies that have not been previously possible. I will offer some observations on what worked and didn't work in the process of gaining approval and funding for some of them, and some speculation on where we might go from here. [Preview Abstract] |
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