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from Gainesville, Florida Hello, I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. One of the most exciting and intensely competitive areas of basic research today is high energy physics, which studies the fundamental secrets of matter using enormous racetracks called accelerators, around which they drive subatomic particles called protons at blinding speeds.

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Physicists study the debris left from the collisions of such particles and from that debris attempt to define what are the basic building blocks of matter. The basic forces of the physical universe in which we live and of which we are parts. There is a great race on now in the field of high energy physics between researchers in this country and those in Europe to seize the leadership in this field.

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We will learn about that race and something about the world of subatomic particles and energy. When I return in a moment with my guest. Five Live presents Conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Dr Michael V.

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Gannon, professor of history and ethics and assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. My guest on this conversation is Dr Pierre Ramon, professor of physics and the College of liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Florida. Pierre, welcome to conversation.

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Thank you. Here, when I was in college studying physics, the basic understanding we had, or so I seem to remember of subatomic matter and energy was, uh, summed up in nucleus and Proton Electron neutron, and that was about it. But as I read modestly in the field today, I come across such terms as bosons and gluons and blue chinos and winos and quirks.

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And oh, I don't know what else What has happened are all of these new particles that have been discovered by people in your field. Well, some of them are. Some of the most of them are hypothetical. What happens is that with these microscopes very expensive microscopes, I might ask which we call accelerators.

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We keep discovering those little beasties, and as we delude ourselves that there are a few of them. Well, we keep discovering more, and then we have to give them funny names, and we do as you just pointed out. In fact, there's a new particle either real or speculative, called the Higgs.

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Oh, yes. Named after an individual, Yes, after an English physicist, Peter W. Higgs. And that one is much thought after because it is the first. If it exists, it would be the first particle of its type found at such an elementary, fundamental level, and lots of people have been looking for it.

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And, uh, in fact, it must. It must be there if this if our modern models are correct. The models that have predicted correctly the W and Z particles, which have just so the theoretical physicist, speculates or posits the existence of such particles. And in the experimental physicist looks for them with his accelerators and other, sometimes sometimes the other way around.

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Sometimes the experimentalist fines, and then the theories have to have to follow and say, Oh, jeez, it's there with better. And in the last decade, one example, at least of such particles have been found in an accelerator in behavior, for example, and particularly annoying. And then, while people cogs need interesting, it's there.

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But there is really no understanding. Oftentimes, there's no theoretical construction that gives sense or meaning to that particle. For some particles, that is true. So we have to keep on digging until we understand why it's there. Let's talk about what has happened in Europe over the last decade or so, culminating in the discovery reported on June 1 of this year by CERN c E R N, which I understand is a consortium of nuclear researchers.

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The discovery of the so called W and Z particles or bosons, is that correct? That's correct. This is very interesting. This is from the theories point of view. This is ideal. Um, these particles were postulated to exist, Um, at least my goodness 10 years ago by several people.

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And then there were refinements on on the on the theory and they were predicted, uh, to have a certain mass and essentially the the theories Tell the experimentalist look there and you'll find it. The experimental said, Well, I don't have a machine powerful enough or if you wish a microscope with good enough resolution to find it and they built one, so they built one and they found it.

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And so right now the bunch of theorists are glowing and a bunch of experimentalists are glowing also because they have contributed to our fundamental understanding. The director of Cern's laboratory outside Geneva, made the statement last June that this discovery of the W N C particles was the greatest discovery in physics since the invention of the transistor 25 years ago.

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Would you agree to that Well, and also that it put Europe six years in the lead over their American colleagues? Yes, I'm afraid the latter is true, but the American colleagues are bouncing back with, um, something called the superconducting uh, supercollider, which is being proposed. Right now, it's a so called goes under the name of Desert Ron Tech, Citron and maybe Florida Tron or Georgia Tron.

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I don't know because every part of the country wants to have it. Um, and, uh, the idea is to build a better microscope. Better mousetrap, if you wish. And what we would like to do is get the money right now allocated for it. It's a long project.

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We're talking now about all physics used by 1995. You know, it's a long thing, but with that, it is felt that if we put all our eggs in that basket, we can regain the lead and we will have the first glimpse of that regime of that distance of that scale, but wasn't the first step in regaining the lead, demonstrated in August of this year by the new Tevatron at the fairly laboratory at Batavia, Right?

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Well, this is helping in the way it is, especially in the development of the technology of superconducting magnets, which are necessary. What happens is that you want to guide little animals around the ring, and, of course, it costs you energy. It's like like anything else. If you want something to go the way you want it to go, you have to pay for it.

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And these things are going very fast, and they're so powerful that usually the magnets which are supposed to guide them well would overheat. And so what happens? One uses superconducting magnets where the heating is very, very small. I hear that they're cool. These super conductive magnets are cooled by liquid helium almost to absolute zero a few degrees, and the central liquid fire for the helium just itself doubles the world's capacity to produce liquid helium just at that one laboratory.

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But that's a very good example of the scale of high energy, experimental technology and physics. In fact, a great deal of high energy experimentalists and theorists, if they don't find a job, are easily hired in industry. Um, not so much theorist, I should say, but certainly experimentalists.

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And the reason is because their knowledge of fast electronics, for example, is just sought after by all kinds of industries and to, uh, get the proton to proceed in just the right speed and orbit, or whatever are the technical terms that apply here. 500 computers have to work together, mesh together like a Swiss watch when they go very fast.

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Well, I'm a practical purpose, the speed of light almost at the speed of life. So it's kind of a technical feat, which means that the measuring devices must also react very fast. That is why you need very, very fast electronics. Are you suggesting that what happened at Batavia is not itself going to be productive of new discovery so much as it is a demonstration of a technology that later in the desert, Ron can lead to new discoveries, although you know theorists of their own prejudices and God knows what we're gonna find?

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But, um, I think it's going to help me, but it is necessary. It's a good example that for every, um, breakthrough in with any machine or anything like that, you have many previous attempts that are necessary and on which anyone rides this kind of piggyback effect.

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And so what happens is that this was a necessary step. And, uh, now we have to get going and built at that enormous machine. Uh, I should say that the Europeans, uh, I've already, uh, projected a huge machine, which and the dedication ceremonies, uh, took place last week in a Swiss French border with all the dignitaries and everything.

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And to give you an idea of the importance the various governments there put too high energy physics. Uh, the presidents of various countries were there. And Mr Well, Professor Rubio, who is the discovery of this W and Z, paraded with them etcetera. It's regarded as a great achievement.

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And Professor Carlo Rubio is on the faculty at Harvard University, Italian born but on the faculty in this country. I understand he offered his experimental design to the Fermi Labs at Batavia, and they turned it down and he took it to the European facility itself. Yeah, well, they have been, uh, you know, it's awfully difficult to know what's going to give what's going to be the right way to proceed after the fact.

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It's always easy. I told you so. But at first, and it's true in both experimental and theoretical physics and in fact, in life as well. At first you don't know, and it's only after you've solved the problem that it looks very easy. But at first you're really very, very puzzled.

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And, well, there are some wrong decisions, you know, after the fact, which are made at the same time. In the beginning of the seventies, there were some superb machines working in the United States, namely the collider of electrons and positrons in which great discoveries were made.

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But it is undeniable that American high energy experimental physics is lagging for the first time since the Second World War. But I think it's going to get back in the next decade, and this is what we have to plan for. And apparently, the superconducting magnets are a key to our resurgence.

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What happened at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, where superconducting magnets were being installed and apparently, uh, the physicists experienced or technicians experienced so many difficulties there that that laboratory had to be abandoned. That's right. That's right. The decision was made this summer just to abandon it.

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Well, I think that what happens is, you know, with any new technology such things happen. You think you can do something and basically you're a pioneer. I mean, you're going completely into the dark and you don't know, But this is not completely my expertise. I'm more theoretician.

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We just tell experimentalist what to do. We don't tell them how to do it. Well, returning to theory about and again showing how little I understand about these matters, I know that there are four forces in the standard model that people speak of today gravity, electromagnetism and the so called weak force and strong force.

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And has the work at CERN demonstrated that there's some kind of unified field here what Einstein was searching for so much in his lifetime. It's very interesting oneness that you glimpse underneath these, but there is a oneness that is being glimpsed. I mean, in fact, the story started with Mr Maxwell in the last century, where you have electricity and magnetism which are very different phenomena with the rubbing of the cat and the compass.

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I mean, and yet when you are when you approach velocities close to that of light, those two phenomena are alike, although they look very different to us. But this is setting the stage for what I'm going to say next. Because the idea is that two phenomena which look very different to us can at a very small scale, be the same.

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After all, you and I look different. But yet we're made up of the same cells. By the same token, two forces which look different to us might at some scale be the same. So what people have found is that the force, which is the so called strong force this was the great theoretical discovery of the last decade.

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The so called strong force, which holds the nucleus of atoms together, um is actually kind of not so strong if you look at it at very, very short distances and that nucleus, which looks like a fuzzy ball, if you look at it closely with a better microscope again, um is actually made up of tiny little animals called quarks, and they're held together by a force that resembles very much the electromagnetic force and resembles.

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And that in itself, electromagnetic force resembles very much the so called weak force. And so things that look alike. There is a tendency to unify them, and so far the discoveries that have been made in the laboratory is a pointing in that direction and that Mr Einstein tried to unify gravity, namely the fall apples falling with electromagnetic with thunder, so to speak, with electromagnetism.

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What modern theories are doing right now is trying to unify electricity and the weak force, which has been almost unified now and the strong force, and then take those animals and then unify them with gravity. And then after that, we'll all be out of a job.

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I doubt that. But did not the experimental work enable the theorists to leapfrog ahead something that Einstein was unable to do because he lacked the experimental apparatus? That is, that is quite true, But theorists are usually leapfrog. Don't wait for experimentalists to leapfrog. Um, they got a theory that they thought it was beautiful.

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This is something very strange. In science, there is distinct that when you got it, you know It's right kind of kind of thing. It looks beautiful now why nature chooses it is another matter. Of course. Most of the time you can fool yourself. But what happens is that theories did not wait for for experimentalists.

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In that case, they started making all kinds of extrapolations into regions that where they cannot possibly look. But nevertheless, theories are theorists and the extrapolate. One bonus of this extrapolation that has happened is that is that maybe there are some fundamental forces in nature which violate the proton, a proton number.

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Namely, that means that the proton, the nucleus of the hydrogen, could someday disintegrate, and people have been looking in caves. There's a large number of of high energy experimentalists who are now in caves, looking at enormous chunks of matter and trying to monitor every proton inside and to see if one has disappeared or not.

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How do they do that? Well, they know that when the proton disappears, there will be a flash of light and so they look for flashes of light without hallucinating and what happens? The reason they're in cave is because we are bombarded continuously by all kinds of junk from all over the place.

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And if we are deep underground, most of the junk is just absorbed by the material on top. It's like an umbrella. And right now, in fact, one of the the disappointments, although I think it's too soon to tell, is that people had hoped that they would have been there, might have been able to see the proton actually disappear.

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Poof, just like that in a flash of light in a flash of light. And nobody has seen that. Not yet, not yet. But discoveries don't come too easily. Never do. Very rarely do you get it going the first time around. Are you as a high energy physicist given to cosmology, given to speculating on the basis of your theories and experimental findings what the origins of the universe might have been?

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Yes, yes, whether we like it or not, we are drawn to that, Um, as we. The reason is, the following is that the universe we understand now by large scale observation is made of chunks of matter that are going away from one another. So it's like if you run the movie backwards and the chunks of matter gets closer and closer together and then after a while they are very, very close together.

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But now what we're observing in a laboratory is the interaction of pieces of matter very close together. So it must have been the same as the old the old days, when I'm in the old days the very old kind of obligation or whatever you want to go well for us, what happens that we run the movie backwards until we hit something we don't understand.

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We've been able to run it backwards to something like 10 billion years. And then there's some primordial explosion called the Big Bank, the big big Bang boom where, of course, unable to know what happened before the Big Bang. In fact, we'll be happy to really understand what happened after the Big Bang but what we are right now.

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This is a big explosion, and now we are the relics of this and what were we are is we could compare ourselves to somebody finding the bones of a rare dinosaur and then trying to conclude from it that it had blue eyes. It's the same kind of and the expanding Galaxies are also relics of this and I suppose the first sign to astronomers and physicists that this actually that's right.

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This was the great discovery of Mr Hubble this century. Caltech and everything we look at, for example, as a byproduct of this theory, Um, there is a the fact that we are bathed with little particles called photons and people at Bell Labs in 1965 looking for something else found this radiation, and then it's like like radiation, like exactly what's happening with the television right now.

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And, well, they found it. So it's there. So therefore, this picture of the world in your very old days is probably quite accurate now, but we still don't have all the the puzzle were like detectives, and we need better microscopes and we have to keep on digging.

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One of the original cosmological puzzles was order versus Disorder, and when the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was first articulated and if I stated incorrectly told me. But I understand that you can, according to this principle, you cannot define both the position and velocity of an electron at the same time under the same circumstances.

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And many were led to speculate on the basis of that principle that at bottom. At the very primitive level of matter, there is no order. Everything is in random disorder. I wonder if that is actually held by physicists or if that's not the work of philosophers building upon, uh, physics and the I think the latter.

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I think the latter is quite quite true, although there are many, many mysteries as to matter in a very, very small, there are many things we simply do not understand. But these kinds of questions we we tend to relegate to the back of our minds or else to the later stages of a cocktail party, because they are usually not very fruitful in a sense that for normal people, namely normal physicists say they do not allow you to get a better idea of what's going on.

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Usually the way you will get an idea of what's going on is by working very hard and then later on you just after you you have time to see your work. You go and you say I can express it very simply in this way or that way.

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But Mr Heisenberg early papers look completely crazy, and they were quite correct. But But he had to think very hard in order to make sense of it. Just the principles still apply, namely? Absolutely. You, uh you alter the very active observation, alters the thing, observed no question about it.

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But then it enables you that to have at every scale at which you observe you can have a new phenomenon occurring. In fact, in the discipline that we use the tool that we use, which is quantum field theory. We know that by looking very, very closely at something, we can just kind of make the vacuum bubble and we can take out of it a particle and its anti particle pair.

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And so we alter just by looking at things we alter the structure of what we think is the vacuum, namely, vacuum used to be nothing. Now there's a lot in the vacuum as we as we look at it. And so it's like a detective work. We keep digging in the sand, and sometimes some theorist is very smart and just makes an extrapolation.

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Most of the time we just muddle through. Is it not another mystery that there can be two principles at work such as matter and anti matter? I must say, I don't understand either one very well. But I would understand anti matter less than the other. Uh, but they are both part of the well.

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What happens is that we know that if you take this particle called the photon, which I talked about before, um, it can be the byproduct of the meeting of matter and antimatter or the other way around. If you take a photo down under some circumstances, you can produce matter and antimatter.

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Now, antimatter is a very weird thing because we are made up of matter. Well, let's call it matter. And yet this other thing called antimatter was little by little reluctantly discovered in the laboratory. Now we have We are made of matter, but not antimatter. How come?

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Well, in a big bank, the original Big Bang theory? It's a very hard thing to understand because there is just radiation, just kind of light kind of things. And so there should be as much matter as antimatter. And yet here we are matter. Well, that means on the way to us something must have happened.

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And what has happened, we think, is that there have been some interactions which can distinguish matter from antimatter and you can select. And this, in fact, is a byproduct of our understanding of this electroweak interaction, which Mr and then with a strong interaction. In other words, it's a byproduct of our probing the nucleus of finding the double your finding dizzy.

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All of these things enable us to speculate about something that happened enormous amount of time to go. And sometimes I must tell you when you're on a starry night and you look up and you see all the stars. It's a very humbling thing to think that the human mind can comprehend some of these things.

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It's very amazing. That's what Aristotle said when he described Man as a microcosm, a little world and that he could contain. She can contain the world within the mind. That's right. The real adventure of life is in the mind. Yes, Without it, we would. Well, there's a famous story about Einstein dating from some 40 years back, I suppose, about a young physicist who was despairing.

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He was greatly depressed about life and told Einstein that he was thinking of killing himself, and Einstein reputedly said to him, How can you possibly think of doing away with yourself when you have in front of you some marvelous challenges and mysteries to unravel. For example, he said, the question is light a particle or a wave, you should devote your life to finding out the answer to that question.

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Well, I don't know if he went on to do that, but let me catch up now, 40 years later and ask, Has anybody made a determination? Is like a particle or a wave. Well, what has happened is that the question has lost some of its importance.

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Nobody cares, because we have now formalism, which enable us, if we wish, we can consider it as one or the other. And it was only in a historical context that it was a very important question because people who were thinking of particles and people were thinking of waves.

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They look very different to us. But then again, at another, at another level, they don't look very different. And so we don't ask the question anymore. Uh, we ask the questions of graduate students, but not not of ourselves. You know, we began by talking about the Europeans and their great advances over the last 10 years, and I suppose some are wondering, as I am.

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Where are the Japanese in all of this, they seem to be making microprocessors. No, they they are. The Japanese have a very fine tradition in in theoretical physics. In fact, we have. There are many, many very great Japanese theoretical physicists in experimental physics. They have not.

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Although they are. They are building a little accelerator right now. They have not really invested a large amount of money. However, many Japanese physicist experimental physicists are going to to Europe now and to work there because when you have a typical high energy experiment, you have hundreds and hundreds of people on it, all with various expertise.

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It's a bit like Carlo Rubia is like a captain of industry because we need somebody with very good at this and somebody very good at that. And the Japanese have started making little groups of people are very good at certain things, and they eventually it's a matter of time.

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I know that they're making a strong move to develop. Superfast computers are likely in the view of some to take world leadership in that area before the decade is out And what about the Soviets? Well, the Soviets seem to have put most of their resources in other areas.

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Uh, namely they really have. They have built computers. I mean, they have built essentially, um, accelerators. They have not been competitive, as I mentioned earlier. In order to be competitive in this, you need to have a lot of very good fast electronics which the Soviet do not have, at least in a non military sector.

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And so it is very difficult for them to work very well. Although, as theoretical physicists, they have again a very fine tradition and have some very good physicists there. Pierre, thank you very much for this very happy to marvelous adventure of the mind. And I would certainly call it that I thank you for being with me on conversation.

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Dr. Pierre Ramon, professor of physics, specializing in high energy physics and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Florida. Uh huh. Mm hmm. But