Bila sam u CERN-u Zenevi u okviru konferencije LIFT 08
http://www.liftconference.com/
da Vam ne bi laicki prepricavala (sto mozda i nije lose za laike kao sto sam ja sama, ali o tom potom) evo Vam jedan zanimljiv tekst. Saradnju na tom projektu , u to vreme Jugoslavije,(danas stoji ime i Srbije) potpisao je Pavle Savic. Ovaj tekst je bio predvidjen za srpski casopis "Evropa" koji se nece pojaviti na kioscima ove nedelje jer je vlasnik resio da ga zatvori.
The Last Atomic Dinosaur
Bruce Sterling
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157603888289832/ The Second World War ended with the detonation of two atomicbombs in Asia, built in America. Keenly aware that atomic bombs
might end the world, conscience-stricken European scientists sought
to make physics into a force for European integration. In the 1950s
they created a giant laboratory where the secrets of the atom would
be mapped and the nationality of the investigators would not matter.
That place was CERN in Geneva. Today it is the largest
scientific instrument on Earth, and the most advanced and powerful
atom-smasher in the world. This mighty dinosaur is also the last of
her breed. CERN had an American sister, the Superconducting Super
Collider, but unlike CERN, whose progress is slow and whose budget is
modest, the Superconducting Super Collider chewed through 12 billion
American dollars and collapsed in complete failure without achieving
any scientific results whatsoever.
Most American collider physicists then quietly relocated to
CERN, where they work today. CERN did manage to transcend
nationalism -- its sponsors include both China and Taiwan, Russian
and the USA, as well as Serbia.
In May 2008, if all goes well, CERN will launch a sustained
assault on the last great unknown atomic particle -- the Higgs
Boson. The Higgs Boson is a keystone of the Standard Theory of
quantum physics, but no scientist has ever seen one. The world's
atom-smashing machinery was simply too weak to create a Higgs Boson
and confirm the theory. But CERN's new machinery, the "Large Hadron
Collider", is almost completely installed. It should have the force
to manage this feat.
I was in one of the last groups to tour the CERN facility
before it is turned on and closed to the public.
Our group ventured through elaborate radiation safety
doors and down an industrial elevator, deep into a huge subterranean
cavern that is crammed by a vast arcane device. This is the Atlas
particle detector. This detector is a rendezvous for flying
subatomic particles, which crash together and radiate cosmic energies
into a brain-confounded maze of pipes, cables, conduits, bolts,
brackets, perforated barriers, ringing metal staircases and cramped,
tiny crawlspaces, all in vivid shades of bright industrial blue,
green, orange and chrome. Safety signs, duct-tape and frazzled
plastic cable-ties abound; the human beings creeping through this
colossus, their heads in yellow hard-hats, look like lost hamsters.
Everything about CERN is colossal; the torrent of
electricity it uses, the size of the tunnels and ultra-powerful
magnets, the cosmic chill of the liquid helium, and, especially, the
data generated by the super-sensitive instruments. That is why, as
the decades passed at CERN in their sober, European fashion,
computers counted for more and more, while the atom-smashing meant less.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN. The
World Wide Web, "www," was invented for the convenience of European
physicists. CERN still has the first computer ever to run part of
the World Wide Web. It's in a glass case, a museum piece now.
CERN is still using the web for its own purposes -- it has
become the host of an initiative called "Citizen Cyberscience," where
anyone on Earth can download science data off the Web and help the
atomic scientists to analyze it, anywhere in the world. So CERN is
still strugglng to unite investigators across national boundaries,
hoping, in their stout way, that the advancement of human knowledge
will prove to be a force for our enlightenment rather than a swift
path to our own annihilation.
CERN is a cathedral of physics. Its the only place on Earth
that can place the final keystone into the Standard Theory -- a
bittersweet conclusion to centuries of scientific effort to discover
the nature of matter.
And that cathedral is in Europe. The Americans overspent and
lost patience, the Chinese and Indians are too busy to be bothered.
Decades after Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini Atoll, Three
Mile Island and Chernobyl, atomic physics has become European
heritage culture.