John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

“Not a ring?” Alice felt disappointed. Accelerating particles in a circle seemed right somehow.

“For the past sixty years the highest-energy accelerators, from the Berkeley Bevalac and the Brookhaven Cosmotron of the 1950s to the CERN LHC and the SSC of today, have always been synchrotron rings, large circular rings of magnets in which the particles travel in a closed path while the magnetic field is gradually increased as energy is added and they’re accelerated. The SSC, with its fifty-three miles of ring and eighty-six hundred dipole magnets, is probably the end of that line of development. It’s the last of the giants.” He looked solemn for a moment, then grinned.

“Or perhaps not. I’m not much of a prophet. At any rate, the SSC is presently the world’s biggest accelerator, and that statement will remain true for at least the next ten years.”

Alice looked at the diagram and pointed to an area near the bottom. “Isn’t that a lake?” she asked. “Can you dig a tunnel under a lake without water leaks?”

“That’s Lake Bardwell,” said George. “It’s down near Ennis. The tunnel goes right under it. Before the tunnel was dug, them DOE geologists swore the Austin Chalk was gonna be watertight, but they were wrong. The tunnel leaked lake water and ground water here and there. It cost the DOE a pretty piece of time and money to fix the leaks, but it’s okay now.”

Alice made more notes.

George turned from the diagram. “But you’re here to see the LEM detector. Let’s go have a look at it.” He led her down the corridor to another door and down a ramp. Adjacent to the office building was a big open building, like an airplane hangar.

“This is called the LEM detector building,” said George. It was a long rectangular metal structure with a huge corrugated door at one end. A semi was parked at the big door, and a forklift was creating a huge stack of large cardboard boxes marked sun microsystems, computer equipment, fragile!

As they entered, Alice realized that it felt more like a cathedral than a hangar. It was big, noticeably cooler inside, and the sounds reaching her ears were accompanied by vast hollow echoes. It seemed to be mostly empty space. George led her forward across the concrete floor of the loading area to a railing.

“Look down,” he said.

Alice looked down and was immediately hit by vertigo. They stood on the edge of a vast pit. It plummeted, level after level. Each level was brightly illuminated by floodlights mounted at the edges of the vast open area. At the bottom of the pit was an enormous pile of equipment. Looking carefully, Alice could just make out tiny moving figures, people and remotes so reduced by the distance that they looked like… like ants.

“There it is,” said George. “The LEM detector.”

“I don’t understand,” Alice stammered. “I thought a detector was a crystal that makes light flashes or something. What I see is a giant irregular mound of equipment.”

“The mound is the detector,” said George. “It’s very big.”

“What’s that white column over to the side, with all the wires going to it? It looks like a stack of white bricks.”

“That’s the electronics stack,” said George. “Each of those ‘bricks’ is a house trailer. That’s where we keep most of the electronics for the LEM detector. It’s stacked up that way to simplify the ducting for the air-conditioning and power wiring.”

“But I count six layers of ‘bricks.’ That means it’s at least six stories high,” Alice objected.

“That’s right,” said George. “This is a damn big experiment. It’s at the bottom of a shaft two hundred feet deep, it’s as tall as an eight-story office building, weighs fifty thousand tons, cost five hundred million dollars to build, and keeps a thousand scientists busy fulltime.

“The particles that come out of that collision have large energies. They’re hard to stop. They don’t bend much in magnetic fields. They’ll travel large distances through anything, depleted uranium or steel or concrete, creating showers of lower-energy particles as they go. We need thick walls of heavy metal to slow them down and contain them. The detector is so big because it needs to be.”

“And why is the hole so deep?” asked Alice.

“Because the SSC is two hundred feet below ground level here, and the detector has to be at the same level as the accelerator. Also, the depth makes for better shielding.”

“Why is there no shielding up here?” Alice asked, watching as the beam crane lowered a large piece of steel into the pit.

“The radiation goes away when the SSC is turned off, so there’s no problem working on the detector now. And when the SSC is making collisions, only remotes are allowed in the pit and we clear the area over it, except for quick looks.”

“Then the machine must be off now,” said Alice. “I see people down there.”

“Indeed,” said George. “The next beam cycle starts tomorrow night. We’re making preparations for it now. Let’s go down and see what’s going on.” He turned and led the way to the elevator.

As they descended, Alice leaned back against the wall and scribbled detailed notes. Then she glanced down, carefully examined the floor of the elevator car, looking for crevices where an ant queen might be able to hide.

ALICE SAT ON THE LEM COUNTING HOUSE SOFA, SIPPING from a can of Diet Coke and reading over her notes. She had followed George around the enormous LEM detector for almost two hours. It had been interesting, but now she felt tired.

The room was a typical temporary office module: vinyl tile floor, diffused-fluorescent ceiling lights, and textured plastic workspace partitions. But it was filled to overflowing with computer displays and electronic equipment which, she now understood, consolidated a minute distillation of the vast information processed in the multistory pile of electronics trailers that comprised the electronics stacks down below.

She sucked at the straw and turned as George, across the room, put away his cellphone and walked toward her.

“Roy’s done with Jake, but he apparently has another emergency,” he said. “Belinda suggested that you come to her office tomorrow morning, so that the two of you can work out your interview schedule and probably get in to see Roy. Is that okay?”

Alice nodded. “Sure,” she said, “no problem. I’ll be in Waxahachie for a while. I’ve rented a house there for two months. I’ll spend a couple of weeks here at the SSC doing interviews, then write the Search article and perhaps work on a book project, too.” And I’ll finish the damned thing before I leave, she thought.

“Very good,” said George. He seemed pleased.

“I’ve been reading over the notes I made while you were telling me about the reason for building the SSC,” Alice said.” Can I check them with you to make sure I have it straight?”

“Sure,” said George.

Alice flipped pages in her notebook. “Okay, you people in high-energy physics are not satisfied with this QCD theory you presently use, what you called the ‘Quantum Chromodynamics Standard Model,’ even though it works well, because it relies on too many arbitrary numbers. Did you say that it has twenty-three adjustable parameters?”

“Yes,” said George, “the quark masses, the lepton masses, some mixing parameters, the interaction strengths, and some other things.”

“And you need data from collisions at high energies, which should lead you to a new theory that will explain where the masses and strengths come from. You think that the SSC will provide that data because…” She frowned at her notes. “I’m not sure I caught this part. Something about GeV temperature and boiling water and a change of ‘phase,’ whatever that is.”