With  the  20th century  came the identification  not  only of new
 forces, but of scores more  particles.   Einstein proved that energy
 itself is composed of particles--the  quanta.   Wolfgang Pauli found
 an odd particle  called the neutrino, and the existence of  the even
 stranger  antimatter  was established by Paul Dirac.   The list kept
 growing,  and There  were mesons and muons,  and pions.  Said Fermi,

 ENRICO FERMI:   (actor's voice]  If I could  remember  the  names of
 all these particles, I would have been a botanist.

 TIMOTHY FERRIS:   Hopes  of  finding  an  ultimate building block of
 matter were raised anew when Murray Gell-Mann  proposed that protons
 and neutrons are made of  still  smaller  particles  that  he called
 quarks.

  The concept of force was simplified as well, when Sheldon  Glashow,
 Abdus Salam,  and  Steven Weinberg  showed that electromagnetism and
 the weak  force  are aspects of a single  electroweak force. Experi-
 ments by Simon van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia  confirmed the electro-
 weak theory.

   More ambitious grand  unified and superunified theories  followed,
 and by the mid-1980s,  hopes  ran  high that physics might be within
 reach  of an  ultimate  unified theory,  a  single  equation  able to
 explain the toilings of quarks and stars.
                                   *****

 LEON LEDERMAN:   [physicist]  The trouble  we're in now is that this
 standard  model,  the  standard picture,  is very elegant; it's very
 powerful;  it  explains  so  much,  but  it's  not  complete.   It's
 incomplete.   It has some flaws.  And one of  its greatest  flaws is
 one which is hard to  explain.   It's  an  aesthetic flaw.  It's too
 complicated.  It has too many arbitrary parameters.

   We don't really see the Creator twiddling 20 knobs to set 20 para-
 meters to create the universe as we know it.  That's too many.  Ever
 since the Greeks started us on this road to understanding the atoms,
 the fundamental building blocks of the universe, we've had this pre-
 judice that there's something simple underneath all of this.

   ...And six quarks, and six leptons,  and their antiparticles,  and
 their  coming in  different colors and in different charges,  is too
 complicated

   And  there's  a  deep  feeling  that the picture is not beautiful.
 And that  drive for beauty  and  simplicity and symmetry has been an
 unfailing guidepost to how to go in physics

 STEVEN WEINBERG: [Physicist] We haven't come to the bottom level yet.
 But  as  we  approach  it, we pick  up  intimations of an underlying
 beautiful  theory  whose beauty we can only dimly see at the present
 time.  We  don't know.  We  don't know  that it's  true.   We  don't
 know there  really  is a beautiful underlying theory.  We don't know
 that as a species we're smart enough to learn what it is. But we  do
 know that if we don't assume there is a beautiful underlying theory,
 and  assume  that  we're  smart enough to learn what it is, we never
 will.

 JOHN WHEELER: [physicist] To my mind, there must be at the bottom of
 it all an utterly--not equation, not an utterly simple equation, but
 an  utterly  simple idea.   And to  me, that  idea, when  we finally
 discover it,  will be  so compelling, so inevitable,  so  beautiful,
 that  we  will  all  say to each other,  "Oh, how could it have been
 otherwise?"

                                    *****

 TIMOTHY FERRIS: The unified theories suggest that nature would func-
 tion  more  simply  under conditions of extremely high energy.  Take
 electromagnetism and the weak force.  At normal  energy levels, they
 seem  very  different.   Electromagnetism  is  conveyed  by photons.
 Photons are lightweight and they can travel for vast distances.

   But the  weak force is a  different matter.   It's carried by weak
 bosons.  They're  heavy  and  can  travel  only very short distances
 before they exhaust themselves and  decay. That's why the weak force
 is limited  in range to the nucleus of the atom.   But the  theories
 say that the situation would  change if we  could turn  up the heat.
 Fueled by the  ambient  energy, a  new  particle  called the Z would
 appear and be capable of knitting together  electromagnetism and the
 weak force.

   [computer animation--an electroweak interaction]  In this computer
 simulation,  we'll watch as a Z particle  decays and  re-combines to
 form  a photon, carrier of   electromagnetism.  The photon, in turn,
 decays to  form a pair of  weak bosons, carriers of the weak  force,
 and the bosons transform themselves back into a Z. What had been two
 forces is now one electroweak force.  One way to test the theory was
 to look for Z particles.

   [on location, mountaintop on the border of Switzerland and France]
 Like salamanders,  the   mythological  creatures  that dwelt only in
 fire, the Z particles thrive only under conditions of intensely high
 energy. The  universe today  is too  cold for  Z  particles to exist
 for  long.   They  would  find it chilly  even in the interior  of a
 super giant star.  When the electroweak theory first predicted  that
 there ought  to be such a thing as a Z  particle,  no  laboratory on
 Earth could summon up enough heat to test that prediction. It wasn't
 until 1983  that  science  managed  to fire up a spark hot enough to
 summon up the Z particle, if it existed. It happened in a laboratory
 here on the  borderline between Switzerland and France.

  The site was CERN, an international laboratory administered jointly
 by 13 European nations. Like other giant particle accelerators, CERN
 consumes  as  much electricity as a small  city, but it manufactures
 nothing. The 6,000 people who work here are engaged in pure research.
   [video: the Cockcroft-Walton room at CERN] It all starts here. The
 particles that are accelerated are protons. They're easy to come by.
 There's  at  least  one  proton in the nucleus  of every atom in the
 universe.  And  they're economical.  This one bottle of hydrogen gas
 contains a full year's supply of protons for  the CERN  accelerator.
 The gas is emitted in  infinitesimal  little  puffs  through   these
 computer-controlled  valves,  and emerges into this  pipe, the lead-
 waters of  the  entire  accelerator.  Those  tiny puffs  of gas each
 contain as many  protons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
 This steadfast old generator cranks out nearly a million volts.  The
 power is used to set  up an  electromagnetic field  in this chamber.
 In the field, the negatively charged electrons orbiting the  nucleus
 of each hydrogen atom  are  stripped away, leaving the denuded, pos-
 itively charged proton. The electrons remain behind, and the protons
 speed off toward the main accelerator.

 continued...

--- FMail 1.22