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RETHINKING THE SPACE SUIT
THE HIGGS BOSON PARTICLE
INDOOR CLOUDS
New ideas emerge for space suit design and technology that will take humans further into the cosmos than ever before.
How the discovery of the most elusive particle known to physics will transform the field of physics.
An artists sets out to build a machine that can generate clouds indoors.
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ELEMENT 113
BAHAR TOWERS
BAXTER THE ROBOT
How a small collective of scientists have reimagined particle physics and developed an entirely new element.
A completely reimagined bulding design that is that reduces carbon emissions by more than 50% .
An artifical ly intelligent, child friendly robot that is both very affordable and incredibly useful.
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Editor in Chief Brendon Gouveia Writers Zahra Barzin Julia Sido Jesse Youngblood Connor McCarthy Production Zoya Gray Spencer Jones Contributors John Smith Tony Santos Louis Gouveia Tim Leong Matt Honan Joe Brown Design Intern Ryan Boye
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INSPIRED INTERVIEWS
APOLLO 14 SPACE SUIT X-RAY
Every issue we release an image that we believe is awe inspiring and beautiful. This issue's image is of Curiosity on Mars.
In this issue's Inspired Interviews we take a question posed by Richard Feynman and asked leading scientists to respond.
A deeper insight into the overwhelming complexity of space suit design.
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STANDARD MODEL INFOGRAPIC
THE TITANS OF TECHNOLOGY
S.T.E.A.M.
From its conception to it's discovery this inforaphic shows the time it took to discover all the particles in the standard model.
A short list of the top technology entrepenurs of the last decade and how they've changing the world.
John Maeda talks about the intersection between art and science and it's importance to the future of America.
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CURIOUSIT Y MARS ROVER
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richard feynman at caltech
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BY BRENDON GOUVEIA
INSPIRED INTERVIEWS RICHARD FEYNMAN
In his famous lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman presented this interesting speculation: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I BELIEVE IT IS the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetua motion, attracting each other when they area little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.” Fascinated by Feynman’s question, Momentous put a similar one to a number of leading thinkers: “Imagine—much as Feynman asked his audience, that in a mission to change everyone’s thinking about the world, you can take only one lesson from your field as a guide. In a single statement, what would it be?” Enric Sala – Marine Ecologist “The biosphere is the largest and most important asset of ourplanet—a vast living natural market that contains and makes our individual lives, human society, and the economy possible.” Steven Stogatz – Mathematician “You can make sense of anything that changes smoothly in space or time, no matter how wild and complicated it may appear appear, by reimagining it as an infinite series of infinitesimal changes, each proceeding at aconstant (and hence much simpler) rate, and then adding all those simple little changes back together to reconstitute the original whole.”
Paul Ehrlich – Biologist “The scale of the human socio-economic political complex system is so large that it seriously interferes with the biospheric complex system upon which it is wholly dependant, and cultural evolution has been too slow to deal effectively with the resulting crisis.” Robert Sapolsky – Neuro-Biologist “Frequently, the way to understand a complicated system is to understand its component parts, but that’s probably not the case for the most interesting complicated systems — like us.” George Sugihara – Theoretical Biologist “Many social and natural phenomena — societies, economies, ecosystems, climate systems—are complex evolving webs of interdependent parts whose collective behavior cannot be reduced to a sum of parts; small, gradual changes in any component can trigger catastrophic and potentially irreversible changes in the entire system that can propagate, in domino fashion, even across traditional disciplinary boundaries.” John Willibanks – Science Evangelist “Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.”
moral. Begin by holding hands and talking, face to face, recalling our shared evolutionary history, and the importance of human nature. Jill Tarter – Astronomer “In Cosmos Carl Sagan said, ‘We are made of star stuff.’ That simple statement does not encompass the physics of the earliest moments of the universe, but it encompasses its evolutionary history, from the formation of the first stars, which enriched the universe with additional elements, to the creation of planetary systems, and life and humanity on the planet Earth. Because it emphasizes our intimate and direct connection with the cosmos, it admits the possibility that others are, or have been, or may be, likewise connected.” Carl Folke – Social Ecologist: “Humans have a tendency to fall prey to the illusion that their economy is at the very center of the universe, forgetting that the biosphere is what ultimately sustains all systems, both man-made and natural. In this sense, ‘environmental issues’ are not about saving the planet — it will always survive and evolve with new combinations of atom—but about the prosperous development of our own species.” James Fowler – Political Scientist “The same mathematics of networks that governs the interactions of molecules in a cell, neurons in a brain, and species in an ecosystem can be used to understand the complex interconnections between people, the emergence of group identity, and the paths along which information, norms, and behavior spread from person to person to person.” Dominic Johnson – World Politics “The dazzling diversity of species and biological adaptations over 3.5 billion years of life on Earth owes its existence to “adaptation by natural selection,” which requires just three simple conditions to operate: variation, differential selection (the best performing traits survive and reproduce more effectively than others), and replication of successful traits by subsequent generations, via a double helix of molecules that code for proteins as biological building blocks.”
Marc Hauser – Evolutionary Biologist “We started human life as hunter-gatherers, where contact with others, kin and non-kin, was the center of human life, social and
INSPIRED INTERVIEWS 9
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RETHINKING SPACE SUITS BY ERIC SOFGE
It's been over 40 years since the last manned space mission outside of low earth orbit. More recent developments in space suit design and technology will allow humans to venture further into space, traveling further into the cosmos than ever before.
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future space suit concept by nasa
By the time the alarms go off, he’s back on his feet, hoping the rover wasn’t filming, but knowing that it was—that his face-first sprawl on the surface of Phobos has been recorded for posterity. The visor’s fiber-optic display flashes ominously: suit breach. His body, or some small sliver of it, has been exposed to the raw, airless vacuum of a Martian moon... AN ASTRONAUT CAN DIE in many ways, but decompression is one of the more gruesome. A punctured space suit means a race to sanctuary, before the envelope of pure oxygen surrounding the body bleeds away and hypoxia causes the person to black out. Rapid pressure loss isn’t explosive, but it’s ugly: Water in the body begins to vaporize and tries to escape, the lungs collapse, and circulation shuts down. No one’s dying today, though, at least not on Phobos. The suit he’s wearing isn’t a pressurized balloon. It’s the reverse really— a squeeze suit, with a lattice of
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smart-memory alloys that binds it to the body, replacing an oxygen cushion with direct, mechanical counter-pressure. The result is formfitting and nimble; it requires less energy to move and increases an astronaut’s range on foot. And in the event of a rupture, the suit remains viable: It can be patched on the spot with a space explorer’s equivalent of an Ace bandage, its own shape-memory alloys pulling tight to seal the breach. By the time the patch is in place, the alarms have stopped. Epidermal biosensors and path-planning algorithms have shortened the astronaut’s trek across
the surface, from six miles out to just over four. He’ll call mission control to argue against this shortcut when his heart rate settles. A nasty bruise isn’t going to kill him. And he didn’t travel 100 million miles from home to turn back now. For human beings to push farther into the solar system—to an asteroid, to a Martian moon, or even to Mars itself—they will need a new space suit: one that will allow them to travel through deep space, move easily across alien surfaces, and survive a wide range of potentially lethal hazards. “If a small hole appeared in a gas-pressurized suit, it’s a major emergency. Mission over; get back to your safe haven ASAP,” says Dava Newman, an aerospace biomedical engineer and director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. Even today’s most sophisticated suits are limited to low-Earth orbit—and one was never designed to leave the spacecraft. NASA began using the Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES) after the 1986 Challenger disaster to protect shuttle astronauts during launch and reentry. But it was barely fit for duty. Since the shuttle’s controls weren’t built for suited operation, pilots routinely flew without their bulky gloves, leaving them vulnerable to a rapid pressure leak. The suit’s life-support system was
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adhoc, with hoses taped down throughout the cabin. Now that the shuttle program has ended, astronauts wear the Russian equivalent of the ACES, introduced in 1973. NASA’s other suit, the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), is less of a garment than a multi million-dollar spaceship packed with liquid-cooled plumbing. Worn during space walks, it first touched the void in 1983; the majority of its fabrics were cutting-edge during the Cold War. Though the suit’s manufacturer, ILC Dover, has been experimenting with self-healing polymers, and though NASA has promoted the development of advanced materials such as aerogels for ultra-thin thermal insulation, those technologies haven’t yet migrated into the EMU. The next era of spaceflight shouldn’t have to make do with hand-me-downs, not with the wealth of materials and designs incubating in labs around the world. With the impending private takeover of orbital and suborbital launches, and the first echoes of a mandate to land humans on Mars, there will be many more people going to space, some of them traveling vast distances. They deserve suits that live up to there expectations.
edward white in the first space walk
THE LAUNCH SUIT
In its initial contract with a suit maker, SpaceX stipulated that the pressure garment must look “BAD ASS.”
The first new suits will be streamlined successors to ACES, only they won’t be designed for steely-eyed missile men, but for a new cohort of pilots and passengers who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be whisked into space. Called intra vehicular activity or launch-entry suits, these are the drop-down oxygen masks of the space industry, devices whose true function ality—which includes pressurization and some measure of life support—kicks in during emergencies. As designers deal for the first time with clients other than NASA, they are being forced to take on new challenges. In an initial contract with suit-maker Orbital Outfitters, SpaceX stipulated that the pressure garment must look “badass.” “You don’t get that sort of verbiage in government contracts,” says Chris Gilman, chief designer at Orbital Outfitters. “I love it.” There are obstacles, however, to badass space suit design. A launch-entry suit is ungainly, an oversize one-piece embedded with rigid interfaces for the helmet and gloves, and enough room to inflate, basketball-like, when pressurized—especially in the seat, so an astronaut isn’t forced to stand up. Gilman plans to counter this
“baggy butt” with tactical stitching. Ted Southern, co-founder of Final Frontier Design, which secured initial funding for its 3G Suit through the Kickstarter crowd funding platform, hopes to use patterning as fashion designers always have to improve fit. “I honestly think that’s the key,” he says.“The more anthropomorphic it is, the cooler it looks.” This is the new business of space suit design: to satisfy the needs of commercial customers, whether that means cramming survivability into a svelter package, or coming up with novel, cost-saving innovations in structure and materials selection. The 3G suit—the first of which is slated for delivery as early as January to the Spanish aerospace start-up zero2infinity— eliminates some metal components. Final Frontier is considering replacing others with high-performance plastic. For the IS3 suit that Orbital Outfitters is providing to XCOR Aerospace for use in its suborbital two-seater, the L`ynx, the company is exploring disposable elements. Components such as the bladder layer that seals the suit could be swapped out before each launch.
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space walk on the international space station .
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THE Z-1 SPACE SUIT
EXPLORATION SUIT To go beyond low-Earth orbit, astronauts will need more than a new launch-entry suit. They’ll need an all-purpose suit for exploration. NASA recently unveiled its Z-1 suit, the first in a series of testbed designs. The Z-1 contains bearings in the joints that make it far more mobile than the current extravehicular activity (EVA) model, the EMU. It also has a rear entry port that can turn the suit into its own air lock, allowing it to be docked to the side of a habitat to avoid tracking in abrasive lunar regolith or corrosive Martian soil. Next, the agency will begin work on the Z-2, and the best features of both of these suits will be Folded into the Z-3. If all goes according to plan, the Z-3 will make its inaugural space walk from the Inter-national Space Station by 2017. But whatever features the Z-3 takes into orbit, it’s not likely to include today’s most pioneering materials, or resolve the biggest drawback of EVA suits: They are person-shaped blimps, filled with enough oxygen to maintain a survivable pressure. When moving, astronauts burn 75 percent of their energy struggling against their own garments, muscling their giant Balloon
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animal limbs into flexion and extension, and only 25 percent on the actual business of exploration. MIT’s Newman wants to flip that ratio. Since 1999, she has been developing the BioSuit, a space suit that replaces gas-filled pressurization with a different system: mechanical counter pressure (MCP). Instead of pumping in a protective buffer of air, MCP exerts a uniform, full-body squeeze, reproducing suf fi cient atmospheric pressure through mechanical force. The resulting suit would move more easily, using only 25 percent of an astronaut’s energy. It would also be far more durable, since mechanical counter pressure could be restored easily in the event of a breach. Astronauts need a suit that can face the pocked surface of a hurtling asteroid and a dust storm on the Red Planet. To make MCP a reality, Newman needs a new material—one that binds tightly, conforming to the intricate curves of human physiology, while also yielding to motion. “In the last couple of years, we were looking at 14 candidate technologies,” she says. “Now, we’ve got it down to three.” One option is dielectric elastomers, which
To go beyond low-Earth orbit, astronauts will need more than a new launch-entry suit. expand or contract through electrical current, acting as low-power actuators. Another is shape-memory alloys, a catchall term for flexible metals that can resume their original shape and properties. Newman’s team is focusing on braiding multiple alloys, including the nickel titanium blend, Nitinol, which deforms and reforms based on shifts in temperature. “I think we’ve proven the technical feasibility,” Newman says. She estimates that, with even a few million dollars per year, she could scale the technology up to produce a real suit in three to five years.
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THE DREAM SUIT The hurdles standing in the way of a manned deep-space mission are daunting: propulsion capable of economically making a round-trip to Mars, a spacecraft that can shield its crew from lethal galactic cosmic rays during the yearlong flight. It won’t be next year, or probably even next decade, but when the day for far-ranging space exploration comes, astronauts will need a suit that can face a range of environments, from the pocked surface of a hurtling asteroid to a dust storm on the Red Planet. To build it, designers will need an arsenal of new materials, each imparting a new capability. Conductive nano wires and electro-active polymers laced throughout the suit could harvest energy from the astronaut’s movements, turning the pressurized helmet’s visor into a translucent fiber-optic headsup display. Local maps and preset routes superimposed on the visor could toggle on and off with voice commands. Other data might come from epidermal biosensors, filtered through algorithms that recommend a slower pace to optimize energy and air supply. Even engineers skeptical of realizing full-body MCP anytime soon envision lim-
SPACE TRAVEL DISTANCES
earth l.e.o
Low Earth Orbit: 1,200 miles or 3 hours Moon: 238,900 miles or 6 days Mars: 57.6 million miles or 150 days
asteroid belt
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ited applications, such as gas-free gloves. Depending on the destination, designers could swap in other components. A suit headed to an asteroid might have boot soles that leverage the same dry adhesion effect of gecko skin, allowing them to attach to surfaces in nearly any condition, including near-zero gravity on a quickly rotating celestial body. Stabilizers under development at Draper Laboratory could be mounted on a suit’s arms and legs: Miniaturized gyroscopes that have tiny spinning discs, they would provide resistance to create the impression of Earth gravity and potentially reduce disorientation in zero-G. Mars presents its own challenges, including temperatures that swing from 70°F to –225°F. “On Mars, there are seasons,” says Amy Ross, a space suit engineer at NASA involved in the Z-1. “You might actually need your light spring jacket and heavy winter coat.” While Ross imagines supplying removable, full-body coveralls of various weights, Newman is pushing for an actual coat—an aerogel-layered garment that would be just a few millimeters thick, with enough gas-impregnated insulation to withstand the worst Martian temperature drops. A lotus-leaf-inspired coating developed by ILC Dover—it mimics the plant’s slippery, self-cleaning properties—could limit the amount of dust tracked into vehicles and facilities. Final Frontier is pursuing nanostructured or powdered compounds for lightweight, flexible shielding from radiation—one of the greatest challenges for future suits. Extravehicular suits currently have no radiation protection, forcing NASA to simply limit the number of space walks during an astronaut’s career. As Gilman from Orbital Outfitters points out, “Space suits are filled with invisible subtleties.” Every ounce of mass, and every potential interaction between materials, adds complexity to a system that’s already mind-bogglingly intricate. Still, this is what the future of the space suit could be—not an incremental upgrade to Apollo-era gear, but the best that multiple research fronts have to offer. Astronauts’ ability to truly explore the solar system will be defined by the materials engineers have at their disposal. Some of those materials may never work in space. But those that do might mean the difference between a few shuffling, symbolic steps and a walking tour worth the 100-million-mile flight. M
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Medical Injection Flap
Tether Bar helps keep the Astronaut Grounded in low gravity
Fastner ring to attach gloves
Tether Bars to support arm movement
Electrical Connecters/ Flange
Shoulder ring to help reinforce the life support backpack.
Helmet Lock Ring
The following image is an X-ray of Alan Shepard's space suit on the Apollo 14 moon mission. Its overwhelming complexity makes it a true marvel of human engunity.
APOLLO 14 SPACE SUIT X-RAY
Tether Bar connecter
Pressure Valve
Communications Flap
Steel support plate for the life support vest
Special Air tight zipper
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Boot ring connector and zipper
Protective layers in an accordian fold to help improve movement
A4-H UNIVERSAL HELMET
CUSTOM SPACE BOOTS
Custom fit boots
Cable Joints to improve mobility and help support the weight of the life support
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WHY THE HIGGS BOSON CHANGES EVERYTHING BY K ATIE ENGELHART SAVARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of experimental particle physics at the University of Toronto, awoke just outside Geneva, where CERN’s sprawling complex is nestled amidst lush vineyards, with the imposing peaks of Mont Blanc as backdrop. Buried 100 m underground is the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, built at a cost of $10 billion to help physicists unravel the mysteries of the universe. By the time Savard arose (somewhat sluggishly, as he’d been working on “Higgs analysis” until 2 a.m.), the facility’s main auditorium was already full. The summer students at CERN had camped out all night. Aysha Abdel-Aziz, a University of Toronto undergraduate working on Higgs search data analysis, was monitoring Facebook at 12.30 a.m., which flashed news of a swelling crowd. “At 1:30, I thought, man, I’ve got to get over there,” she recalls. “I got there at 2 a.m., and I’m glad I did. Because by 4 it was too late.” Students hunkered down outside the auditorium to wait with sleeping bags and food and cameras.
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aerial view of the lhc
AROUND 4:30 A.M. says Abdel-Aziz, a cluster of grey-haired physicists showed up. Discouraged by the lineup, which by then had snaked down the stairs and wound around the hall, they left. Savard, meanwhile, made his way to the lobby of his laboratory, where the morning’s events were being live streamed. The four screening rooms were full, but he managed to hustle a chair. Displaced by their youthful proteges, the world’s most seasoned particle physicists were relegated to back rooms, packed like sardines into satellite auditoriums around the complex. Some grasped bottles of champagne. Soon they would, most uncharacteristically, be shouting. Scientists at CERN will tell you that they both knew and didn’t know the results of the Higgs experiment while they sat waiting for the announcement. That’s accurate. The Higgs boson particle, also known as the “God particle,” or the "god-damned particle,” because it’s been so hard to find, was dreamed up 50 years ago to explain why everything around us has mass—essentially, why we exist. The Higgs boson has since been the focus of the biggest hunt in the history of
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modern science, with CERN as the epicentre. There, the Higgs-hunting venture is conducted by two separate teams, CMS and ATLAS (short for Compact Muon Solenoid and A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), each with more than 3,000 members; they’re forbidden from talking shop with each other to ensure neither results is influenced by the other. Top physicists would have known their own group’s findings. But both CMS and ATLAS needed to come up with the same numbers for anything to be conclusive. . Finding the Higgs boson, scientists say, will open the door to the study of other unknowns, like dark matter. Some have even imagined that, if the Higgs could ever be manipulated, it could lead to all sorts of science fiction scenarios, like travel at the speed of light, and more. As Savard and others scrambled for a vantage point, in Vancouver—where it wasn’t yet midnight— about 40 people gathered in the auditorium at TRIUMF, a Canadian physics lab on the University of British Columbia campus, which collaborated with CERN on the Higgs hunt. Armed with pillows, coffee and Rice Krispies squares, they looked up eagerly
at the live feed from Geneva. “We knew what ATLAS was showing,” says Rob McPherson, a University of Victoria physics professor and spokesperson for the Canadian ATLAS team. (Canadian scientists work exclusively on ATLAS, not CMS.) “We were keenly interested to see what CMS was going to show. We were on the edge of our seats.” . That scene was playing out in facilities from Aspen to Chicago to New York, where bleary-eyed scientists roused themselves in the middle of the night to watch what they sensed would be historic news. Columbia University physics professor Michael Tuts, the U.S. ATLAS operations program manager, sent out a campus-wide email to see if anybody might want to watch the results delivered live — at 3 a.m. New York time, on the Fourth of July.“I anticipated the reaction of, ‘Are you totally insane?’ ” He says, but 75 people came, from all different faculties, “not just the high-energy physicists.” In Geneva, each team announced its results to an overflowing auditorium: first CMS, then ATLAS. The presentations were methodical, delivered with the stern sobriety of an academic seminar. That is, until the very end, when a PowerPoint slide announced a standard deviation of 5 sigma—proof that they are more than 99.9999 per cent sure of their results—and the crowd burst into thunderous applause. “That’s highly unusual for
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The discovery of the Higgs boson particle has been compared to the moon landing—the biggest scientific achievement of a generation.
a physics conference,” Tuts says. But of course this was a highly unusual discovery—the God particle, physics’ Holy Grail, had been found. . An ecstatic grin spread across the face of CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer as he turned to face the crowd. Although scientists still label these results preliminary, “as a layman, I would say I think we now have it,” he said. “Would you agree?” More cheers. In Geneva, Vancouver and around the world, scientists popped open bottles of champagne. Peter Higgs, the 83-year-old theoretical physicist who proposed the particle in 1964, was seen in the CERN auditorium wiping away a tear. The discovery of the Higgs boson particle has been compared to the moon landing—the biggest scientific achievement of a generation. For decades, scientists have gone on faith that it exists: the Standard Model of particle physics, a beautifully simple mathematical description of everything we know about the universe’s most basic building blocks, depends upon it. Even so, many wondered if the Higgs was just a figment of the imagination, manufactured by ivory tower theoreticians in the 1960s. After decades,a team of several thousand scientists from around the world has essentially confirmed its presence. The Standard Model is complete. The Higgs particle tells us something very basic and fundamental about why we’re here. It is evidence of the Higgs field, an invisible force field that stretches across the universe encasing us like a Jell-O mould, and giving mass to elementary particles within it: the stuff that makes up stars, planets, trees, buildings, animals and all of us. Without mass, electrons, protons and neutrons wouldn’t stick together to make atoms; atoms wouldn’t make molecules; none of us would exist. At the moment of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, every particle was massless and zipped around at the speed of light. The universe began to cool and expand, and the Higgs field condensed; particles started to slow down and come together, and everything as we know it began to take shape. Without the Higgs,
“the particles we’re made of would not hold together,” says Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont. “They would all be flying around at the speed of light, and there’d be no stopping it. The world,” he says, “would go up in a puff of smoke.” Peter Higgs, the boson’s notoriously reluctant namesake, is often compared to his famous particle: he’s hard to spot. Shortly before the big news dropped, he was flown to Geneva, along with three other influential physicists of the same era. He tried to keep a low profile, and was spotted eating alone in CERN’s colossal cafeteria. Days after the announcement, he was back there: this time, strug-
gling to fork up his lunch amidst a flock of buzzing admirers. In the meantime, CERN summer students had combed the laboratory halls carrying printed copies of Higgs’s original 1964 paper on the missing boson, in the hopes of nabbing an autograph. “Mild- mannered and very gentle,” is how his former colleague Alan Walker describes him. Higgs is said to cringe when the term “Higgs boson” is uttered in his presence. At times he will, rather warily, refer to “the boson which bears my name.” . Higgs’s bashfulness had been on prominent display the morning of July 4, when he entered CERN’s brimming auditorium and beelined for a seat a few rows back from the front, and somewhat off to the side. Presumably, he found the standing ovation that followed to be a bit much, but modesty seems only to fuel his new-found cult status. After the seminar, he declined questions from the press— though he granted, “It’s really an incredible thing that [the discovery has] happened in my lifetime.” His distaste for celebrity will be further tested if, as now recommended
peter higgs discussing the boson
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by fellow theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking—who once bet $100 against the particle ever being found—Peter Higgs becomes the recipient of the Nobel Prize. . Celebrity was a long time coming. In 1964, Higgs—then a lecturer of mathematical physics at the University of Edinburgh— published two papers outlining his theory about the never-before-seen particle. “The Higgs model” dealt with a problem that physicists had been grappling with: why do some particles have mass? And where does that mass come from? Higgs posited that particles obtain mass by interacting with a mysterious force field that permeates the universe. The Higgs boson is a sign of that mysterious field. . It was a far-out idea, although five other physicists published similar theories around the same time. The story goes that Higgs’s eureka moment took place during a quiet stroll through the Cairngorms, a mountain range in the Scottish Highlands. At that time, his area of research was considered “rather unfashionable,” he later said. Science writer Ian Sample says Higgs was “called a fuddy duddy [for] working on something that was seen as uncool.” In fact, the second of Higgs two papers was rejected by Physics Letters, Europe’s foremost particle physics journal, which, as it happened, was edited at CERN. Editors judged it to be “of no obvious relevance to physics.” He published it elsewhere. . It took a decade for opinions to change. In the 1970s, scientists began to see Higgs’s proposed boson—soon, the “Higgs boson” as the missing ingredient in the Standard Model, a theory developed around that time to explain how fundamental particles and forces behave. The Standard Model is made up of 17 particles: 12 are fermions (subdivided into quarks and leptons),which make up matter. Four are gauge bosons, which transmit forces so fermions can interact. And the Higgs boson was added to explain why particles have mass. The Standard Model isn’t perfect—it accounts for just three of the four fundamental forces, for example, because it doesn’t include gravity—but it’s by far the best explanation we’ve got of how our universe is stitched together. “Why do we have life? Why do we have planets? How did the universe form? All this is explained in the Standard Model,” says physicist John F. Gunion, author of The Higgs Hunter’s Guide. “Part of that picture is the Higgs mechanism for giving particles mass. It was the final linchpin in confirming the Standard Model,” but nobody knew if it was real. Without it, they worried, the Standard
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Model would fall apart. The Higgs boson was elusive prey. For one thing, the Standard Model gave no guidance about what its mass might be, so scientists had to look across a range of possibilities. Beyond that, catching one can’t be done: after a Higgs comes into existence, it decays almost immediately into other types of particles, and theorists predicted there’d be several different “decay channels” this particle might take. To find a Higgs boson, its seekers had to create one—by smashing protons together to “shake up” the Higgs field, as Tuts says. For a long time, there wasn’t a particle accelerator powerful enough to do this. Then the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was built. Established in 1954, CERN was primarily an attempt to kick-start a renaissance in European
Why do we have life? Why do we have planets? How did the universe form? All this is explained in the standard model. physics. It was also aimed at uniting scientists who had, just a few years earlier, been engaged in a race to build bombs capable of incinerating each other. CERN is now 20 members strong (18 are EU member states), with a number of “observers” (including the U.S and Russia) and “nonmember states” (including Canada). At any given time, 10,000 scientists and engineers, representing over 100 nationalities, walk CERN’s halls. It was here, in 1989, that Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal to create the World Wide Web, as a convenient means of sharing information between scientists. (His boss dubbed the proposal “vague, but exciting.”) The first ever web server ran on a CERN computer, and so was the world’s first website was Info.cern.ch. Located near the Franco-Swiss border (take tram 14 from Geneva’s city centre), CERN’s complex of spartan, low-rise buildings appears to be at the edge of nowhere, with nothing but a couple of gas stations in sight. Inside the gates of the facility, streets are named after dead physicists: Route Albert Einstein, Square Galileo Galilei. The grounds are quiet, though there is the steady bustle of scientists, traveling in small clusters to and from the cafeteria.
A few wear suits, but the standard uniform of the particle physicist appears to be some variation of short-sleeved button-down shirt and sneakers. The buildings themselves are surprisingly decrepit. The halls of Building 40, which houses ATLAS and CMS, are like dark, concrete tunnels. The flooring is pitted and uneven. Only posters taped to the walls—advertising a yoga society, a yacht club, and the Cinéclub’s upcoming screening of High Fidelity—add a splash of colour. There are halls where experimentalists work, and there are wings for theorists. A few days after the discovery of the Higgs particle was announced, the physicists who “found” it could be spotted sitting in patio chairs outside their main research site, eating heaping plates of cafeteria-prepared moules frites under a scorching sun. Inside, twenty something graduate students navigated between overpriced food stations. (The meal of the day cost around $15.) The cafeteria offers physicists a respite from their dark offices, and an airy place to talk. “This is a really special part of work,” she insists of the ever-blurred, and often non-existent, lines separating work life from personal life. Many physicists at CERN say they don’t feel as if they live in Geneva at all. CERN they describe as a “complex,” a “city,” an all-encompassing “planet.” Many CERN physicists are married to other CERN physicists. This is true of Canepa, whose husband also works in the field of antimatter. “We tend to mate” with each other, she explains, “because we never leave the lab.” That’s a good thing, because work days at CERN are long—and longer still when teams are working with researchers based in other time zones. CERN does not like to favor one time zone over another. “Friends ask, ‘Can we visit Geneva?’ ” Says David. “I say, ‘Yes, but I will be on call. I need to be near the detector in case my phone rings.’ ” She has made the 15-minute trip to central Geneva only three times since February. CERN has a way of digging its claws into people. Savard came there in 1990, while a co-op undergraduate student at Université de Sherbrooke. His plan was to be a ski instructor, but after a winter at CERN, he changed paths, captivated by the hunt for the Higgs boson at a time when scientists were designing the early detectors that would launch the decades -long quest. “It was unbelievable. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” Nicknamed the “Big Bang Machine,” CERN’s current particle accelerator—which became active in 2008—
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SECTION 1 sloan sky survey of the observable universe
THE STANDARD MODEL OF PHYSICS From its conception to the discovery of its particles. 1830 Electron
1840 Richard Laming
1850
1860
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J. J. Thomson
LEPTONS
Muoun
Electron Neutrino
Muon Neutrino
Tau Neutrino Albert Einstein
Photon
BOSONS
Gluon
W Boson
Z Boson
Higgs Boson
Down
QUARKS`
Strange
Up
Charm
Bottom
Top
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Leptons combine with other particles to form new ones. Bosons are typically particles that carry force. Quarks combine and form composite particles and are a fundamental constituent of matter.
1920
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First Theorized
1960
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Discovery
1990
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2010 2012
Carl D. Anderson
Clyde Cowan
Wolfgang Pauli
Melvin Shwartz
Donut Collaboration
Melvin Shwartz
Leon Lederman
Arthur Compton
Murray Gell-Man
Mark J. Jade
Steven Weinberg
UA1 & UA2 Collaboration
Albert Einstein
Arthur Compton
Peter Higgs
ATLAS Team
Murray Gell-Man
SlAC
Murray Gell-Man
SlAC
Murray Gell-Man
SlAC
Murray Gell-Man SlAC
Makoto Kobayashi Leon M. Lederman
Makoto Kobayashi
CDF
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rendering of a particle collision inside the lhc
To find a Higgs boson, its seekers had to create one — by smashing protons together
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is the largest machine in the world. Beyond searching for the Higgs boson, which has been its most prominent mission, the LHC was conceived to answer some of the most pressing questions in particle physics. What are dark matter and dark energy? Are there hidden, alternate dimensions all around us that we just can’t access or see? What sorts of matter existed right after the Big Bang, when a hot soup of “quark-gluon plasma” filled the universe? And where did all the antimatter go? At the start of the universe, scientists believe that matter and antimatter—its twin, but with an opposite electric charge—existed in equal amounts. But today, for some reason, we’re surrounded by matter, and for that we should be grateful: when matter and antimatter meet, they destroy each other. Built underground and spanning the border of France and Switzerland, the LHC is a 27-km-long tunnel around which two beams of particles fly in opposite directions, approaching the speed of light. When these particles crash together, they produce massive amounts of energy and new mass, which are recorded in detectors at ATLAS and CMS. Scientists then sift through data, looking for patterns that might indicate a Higgs boson popped into, and then out of, existence. “It’s like if you break a plate, and you only see the pieces,” says Manuella
Vincter, an ATLAS scientist and a physics professor at Carleton University, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Experimental Particle Physics. “You can put it back together and say, ‘That’s what the plate looked like.’ ” (According to Vincter, both CMS and ATLAS mainly observed the Higgslike particle decaying into two photons.) .. The sheer scale of the LHC is remarkable. Physicist Victor Weisskopf, a former CERN director-general, famously saw the massive particle accelerators that were built in the 1950s and ’60s as “the gothic cathedrals of the 20th century,” says theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, author of A Universe From Nothing. Canada has been deeply involved in the LHC project, investing $70 million in the accelerator, detector, and computing parts of the project; another $30 million in funding has gone to Canadian researchers, including 150 scientists on the ATLAS team. (Physicists on ATLAS come from 38 different countries.) TRIUMF is Canada’s main link. It hosts a computing centre that processes raw data from particle collisions. Even before the LHC smashed its first protons together, onlookers worried that its scientists were playing God—that recreating the Big Bang in a man-made machine could have catastrophic consequences, the
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kind we couldn’t even imagine. Some thought the LHC would rip open a black hole, gobbling up our planet whole. In the novel Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown (who also penned The Da Vinci Code), a Harvard University symbologist named Robert Langdon tries to foil a secret society intent on bombing the Vatican with a canister of antimatter, stolen from CERN. Things started to get really strange in 2009, when two physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, published papers suggesting CERN’s project was doomed to fail—that the creation of the Higgs would be sabotaged by forces from the future, because the particle itself might violate the natural order. CERN has done its best to counter these worries. An entire webpage is devoted to Angels & Demons, revealing that “portable antimatter traps,” as used in Brown’s fiction, wouldn’t actually work in reality. Its page tries to put to rest any fear of destructive black holes: “Astronomical black holes are much heavier than anything that could be produced at the LHC.” Still, the particle accelerator itself has attracted its share of crackpots, like a man arrested on the Swiss side in 2010, who claimed he’d traveled from the future to stop CERN from destroying the world. . It probably didn’t help that in its early days, perhaps fueling Nielsen and Ninomiya’s theories, the LHC was accident prone. One of several shutdowns, in 2009, was
blamed on a bird flying overhead. It had apparently dropped a piece of baguette into an electric substation, shorting out the power to the LHC’s cryogenic cooling system—a major problem, because the accelerator is kept at a temperature colder than deep space. The cost of the LHC—it’s one of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built—has inspired another kind of protest. Forbes estimated that “the total 1cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about [US]$13.25 billion” and dubbed this “a bargain,” but not everyone sees it that way. Abdel-Aziz told Maclean’s that one of her teams is working on upgrades to the inner detectors of the LHC that would replace silicon with diamonds. “We know that diamonds are stronger than silicon,” she explains. The image of scientists in Switzerland piecing together equipment made of diamond, at a time when the European continent is foundering financially, might yet prove controversial. . Back in December, when scientists announced they may have glimpsed the boson, excitement began to build; for Vincter, there were some tense months as she sensed they might be closing in. “We saw our range of Higgs space shrinking and as we took more data we’re hyperventilating, and then: boop. A little peak appears. And we’re like: YAY!” Vincter, fists clenched, does her best victory jig. For a while it was
tough, says the scientist who’s spent 14 years at CERN, “to tell people: calm down, relax, do what you’ve always been doing.” In June, she watched her ATLAS team conclusively detect a Higgs-like particle— with a mass in the predicted range of 125-127 gigaelectronvolts, or GeV. (Indeed, the mass of the newly discovered boson has been pinned at about 125 GeV.) Vincter’s hopes of a decisive find were buoyed when, a couple of weeks before the July 4 announcement, “delicious rumours” swirled that CMS physicists had been spotted toasting each other with champagne. Twenty-four hours after the big discovery was announced, CERN’s main lobby was swarming with tourists. Pilgrimages to the ’50s-era research site had begun and CERN appeared to be at the edge of a defining cultural moment. At reception, the calm Frenchman manning the information desk confirmed a spike in visitors. Weekend tours of CERN, he said, are now booked solid until early September. But it’s not just the quantity of tourists that has changed. He added: “There are tourists here now who otherwise would not be here. In French, we would call them, ‘Monsieur et Madame tout le monde.’ ” In other words, the place is brimming with people, many of whom wouldn’t know a Higgs boson from a plain old quark. With the LHC currently switched on, most areas are closed to tour groups. One building still open to visitors is ATLAS
PARTICLE PHYSICIST HIGGS BOSON RESEARCH EFFORT Like the big bang theory the the higgs boson particle was originally thought of as a crackpot theory. Only a small handful of scienitist worked on the project. As research continued, more and more evidence supported the possibiity. When the Large Hadron Collider was built there was as dramatic increase in particle physicists working on finding the Boson Particle. The chart illustrates the rate of the boston particlesresearch from it's concept to it's discovery.
100%
Discovered
50%
LHC Built
Theorized 0% 1960
1970
1980
1990
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2020
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anti - matter filaments
Are there hidden, alternate dimensions all around us that we just can’t access or see? What sorts of matter existed right after the Big Bang, when a hot soup of quark-gluon plasma filled the universe? And where did all the antimatter go? headquarters. Here, visitors can press their noses to the glass panel separating them from the “control room,” where Ph.D. students are permanently bent over laptops and multi-screened computers: monitoring the LHC’s detectors and performing regular checks. It’s important, David jokes, not to check Facebook when you are seated near the tourist entry. Large screens mounted on the back wall of the room flash reams of codeand line graphs. Higgs mania aside, some people are already asking—what can we do with a Higgs boson particle? What good is it? This isn’t unreasonable; when electromagnetism was discovered more than 100 years ago, for example, no one could have envisioned the role it would play in our global cellphone system today.Some imaginative thinkers have a few ideas about the Higgs: temporarily “shutting off” a person’s Higgs field could enable them to travel at the
34 WHY THE HIGGS BOSON CHANGES EVERYTHING
speed of light (if they could figure out how to switch it back on again one they reached their destination), or teleport from one location to another. Maybe a Star Trek phaser-style weapon could be designed, to zap enemies into a bunch of swirling light particles. Of course, as Krauss noted in an interview with Discovery News, “turning off” a person’s Higgs field would involve heating them up to “something like a billion, billion, billion degrees.” And if we could do that, we’d probably be smart enough to find easier ways to dispatch our enemies, or get from point A to point B. What’s far more exciting is what the Higgs boson will teach us, now that we can study it—showing a way forward beyond the Standard Model. Physicists are eager to build on that old theory, even push it aside, and the Higgs could show us how, shedding light on the next big questions in physics. .The same day the Higgs finding was re-
vealed, another remarkable discovery was announced, to much less fanfare: a team of researchers managed to detect a filament of dark matter bridging two clusters of galaxies, the first time such a thing has been done. Dark matter is a mysterious substance about which almost nothing is known; its gravitational pull seems to hold galaxies together, like a massive skeleton. But we can’t see dark matter; we only know it’s there from calculations of the speed at which galaxies move. The matter we know and understand accounts for just four per cent of the known universe; the rest is dark matter and dark energy. Now that the missing piece of the Standard Model is in place—the Higgs boson particle—scientists will be able to build new theories, new
engineers working on the lhc
models, that might help explain the other, as-yet-invisible 96 per cent, about which we know almost nothing. . Two kilometres underground, in mine near Sudbury, Ont., a team of scientists is looking for a hypothetical particle they believe could make up dark matter. “It’s not because we think there’s more dark matter in Sudbury,” says Nigel Smith, director of SNOLAB. Rather, rocky Sudbury is a perfect place for scientists to work underground, shielding their instruments from the cosmic radiation that bombards Earth’s surface. “For us, the Higgs discovery is really exciting,” Smith says. “We’re working on physics beyond the Standard Model. The fact that it’s been validated with this missing piece gives us confidence that the
next models aren’t built on a bad foundation.”One of those hypothetical models is supersymmetry—or “SUSY,” as it is fondly nicknamed at LHC headquarters—the idea that every known particle has a “superpartner,” which we haven’t yet found, and that dark matter is one of those superpartners. According to the supersymmetric theory, “you’d expect to see other Higgs bosons,” says Gordon Kane, director emeritus of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics. (It was Kane who won that $100 bet against Hawking.) And so we might only be seeing half of the picture. The next big thing to come out of CERN might very well be another Higgs boson, or several. “If Mother Nature is boring, Mother Nature gave us the Higgs boson and
nothing else,” Vincter says. “But if Mother Nature is kind, then she’ll provide us with more things to look for. And one of these things is another Higgs boson.”Observing particles to see how they behave might even take us down a path toward alternate, unexplored dimensions. There are four dimensions we all know of, including time; but there may be others, even seven or eight of them, theorists say, which none of us can access in our daily lives. “There’s one idea, that at the Big Bang, all dimensions were the size of tiny particles,” says Richard Teuscher, a physicist at the University of Toronto and an ATLAS team member who’s based in Geneva. “And then some of them expanded, and the others never did.” Kane compares it to a long, thin
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the large hadron collider
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physicists waiting for the boson presenation
If Mother Nature is boring, Mother Nature gave us the Higgs boson and nothing else,” Vincter says. “But if Mother Nature is kind, then she’ll provide us with more things to look for. And one of these things is another Higgs boson.
straw. “You can move along the straw; that’s a big dimension. And you can move around the straw. But you’re bigger in size than the straw, so you can’t move to the dimension inside it.” But particles can. Take the graviton, a hypothetical particle that conveys gravitational force—scientists believe it could be constantly “leaking away” into other invisible dimensions, Teuscher says, because gravity is so weak. “Gravity seems so strong because it adds up over the huge scale of the Earth,” he says. “But do an experiment: take a magnet and lift a paperclip. That magnetic force is stronger than gravity.” Gravity might have most of its
38 WHY THE HIGGS BOSON CHANGES EVERYTHING
interactions in dimensions that are “curled up in tiny space you can’t see,” he says. And the Large Hadron Collider may find them. . The LHC is only running at roughly half its energy capability, Teuscher notes. Next year it will begin a shutdown period, getting ready to rev up again by 2014. By then, the Big Bang Machine will have finally reached its full power. There is hope it will reveal dark matter for the first time. “It could happen any time,” says Vincter, smiling mischievously, “and I can tell you that a lot of people are working on it.” But one of the first orders of business will be to study this new Higgs particle, “to make
sure it really is the Standard Model Higgs, and not something that’s fooling us,” Teuscher says. “Maybe there’s already some new physics there.”Even after chasing the Higgs boson for decades, many scientists are hoping that’s the case—that what CERN has found isn’t exactly the Standard Model Higgs boson, but something more exotic. “What’s been observed appears to have the properties of the Higgs particle,” Krauss says. “That’s all we can say for now.” Soon, we’ll be able to say much more—and move on to the other unknowns. . To say CERN physicists wince when the phrase “God particle” is dropped would be an exaggeration, but they tend to have an opinion about it. Those opinions range from. “I’m a little bit annoyed when people use it” (Vincter), to, “Are you going to use ‘God particle’ in your article!? I hate it” (Abdul-Aziz). These physicists are looking for answers to questions humankind has asked itself for millennia—who we are, where we came from, why we’re here— but when it comes to some of the biggest existential riddles, they don’t much want to talk about it. Religion aside, physicists
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the atlas team celebrating at cern
COOL FACTS ABOUT THE LHC 1. It cost £2.6bn to build. 2. It houses 9300 magnets. 3. It fires protons and lead ions around a 17mile circular tunnel. 4. The protons travel at 99.999991% of the speed of light. 5. 600m collisions every second. 6. The collisions generate tempera- tures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun. 7. The inside of the accelerator is an ultra-high vacuum as empty as interplanetary space. 8. A total of 10,000 scientists and engineers from more than 60 countries work on LHC. 9. The LHC utilizes the most pow- erful supercomputer system in the world to analyse its data 10. It's the largest and most complex machine ever built.
can’t help but effuse about the Higgs boson particle, which they spent decades chasing, using the grandest of terms. “It’s beautiful,” Krauss says. “The fact that empty space is endowed with these properties—that what appears to be empty space endows particles with a mass. Apparently, nothingness is responsible for our existence.” The fact that Peter Higgs and five others dreamed this up back in the 1960s is almost as remarkable. “Normally, experiment leads theory,” Krauss continues. In this case, theory ran ahead by half a century. Scientists at CERN allowed themselves a few moments to savour the discovery, but not much more. Behind enough concrete to drown out the outside murmur, they worked furiously toward publication. According to their long-ago-settled procedure, both the CMS and ATLAS teams agreed to publish their findings simultaneously: as side-by-side articles in the same academic journal. Each scientist (and there are thousands) will be listed as an author: alphabetically, so as not to politicize the process. The first surname to appear on ATLAS’s paper will be “Aad.”
Vincter cautions, “even if we make it public, it’s not final until it makes its way into a journal.” Savard is one of a small handful of editors on the ATLAS paper. More than two decades after beginning his quest for the Higgs boson particle, he’s not letting himself get carried away. On the morning of July 4, after the results of the greatest hunt in the history of modern physics were announced, Savard took a moment to pass on quiet felicitations to colleagues— before heading back to work. M
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