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Steve Elkins

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Switzerland and CERN's Large Hadron Collider

The LHC is the largest machine ever built and the World Wide Web was created to process its data. It's a 17 mile long microscope which is searching for extra dimensions, the "God particle," anti-matter, and forces akin to those that took place in the first trillionth of a millisecond after the Big Bang at incredibly small sizes on the order of a tenth of a thousandth of a trillionth of a millimeter. It generates a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s and temperature necessary for the LHC’s superconducting magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe - even colder than outer space. The magnets contain 1,200 tons of superconducting filaments much smaller than a human hair which, if unwrapped, would be long enough to encircle the orbit of Mars. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The LHC uses an amount of electricity required for a small city such as nearby Geneva. The LHC’s $9 billion price tag also makes it the most expensive machine ever built.

Photos taken by both Steve Elkins and his production crew.
An article published by CERN about the January 2012 visit: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/CERN-Interviews-Steve-Elkins/
An essay by Ben Eshbach about the experience: http://www.beneshbach.com/cern.html
Read More
  • Veytaux, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012.
35mm film.

    Veytaux, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012. 35mm film.

  • Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012.
35mm film.

    Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012. 35mm film.

  • Grindelwald, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012.
35mm film.

    Grindelwald, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012. 35mm film.

  • Montreux, Switzerland. Photo by Ben Eshbach. January 2012.

    Montreux, Switzerland. Photo by Ben Eshbach. January 2012.

  • Me filming swooping crane shots of the ALICE experiment, located in St Genis-Pouilly, France, where they are studying what happens to matter when it is heated to 100,000 times the temperature of the sun.

Photo by David Marks.

The following was written by my friend Ben Eshbach, who accompanied me on this trip:  "Kathryn Grim drove us out to the ALICE detector on our third day at CERN where we met our guide, physicist Peter Jacobs. Jacobs had a very clear way of explaining the physics of ALICE to a layman like myself, so I asked him if he could explain something to me about the history of the aether. Specifically, I wanted him to tell me, in layman's terms, what had "happened" to the aether between the 17th and 19th century when by that time it had accrued enough "substance" to be detectable -- if real. How had it gone from being the incorporeal "substance" of More, Bruno and Kepler, to being something with location, extension, penetrability - something that one could build a machine to detect? I suspected the answer involved aether slowly accruing properties necessary for theory - particularly light theory - and that those properties had raced ahead of empiricism until Michelson-Morley put the brakes on it. But I wanted to know what a real cutting-edge, articulate physicist could tell me.

Jacobs was completely frank. "I have no idea," he said. "We don't study that stuff and nobody talks about it." When Jacobs said "nobody talks about it" he didn't mean that it was hush hush. He just meant that it's not a topic for lectures and symposia. "And why should we?" Jacobs asked. "I mean, we're looking for the truth. What's the point of learning past error?"

I asked him, "Do you think it's because the history of science is a history of error that physicists aren't interested in it?"

"I didn't say we weren't interested in it. I said we don't talk about it. We don't read about it."

Jacobs continued. He told me that in college he read Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and pretty much thought it was an okay way to look at the history of science. He wasn't gung-ho about Kuhn. I got the impression that he was just a bemused observer. He knew who Kuhn was, and he recognized that my follow-up question was in Kuhn's territory. He made the good point that physics history wasn't what real physicists study.

Thomas Kuhn was famous for claiming that natural scientists are typically unknowledgeable about the history of their own craft and that this ignorance is institutionalized by the process by which scientists become trained in their field at university. More accurately, he observed that natural scientists are often knowledgeable of their own history but only as far back to the point where their own present model or "paradigm" became consensus. Learning history in accurate detail any further back serves no pedagogical purpose; learning historical errors is literally a waste of time for a scientist in pursuit of truth in the present. According to Kuhn, there are two types of histories of science; there is the kind of history that one finds in the opening chapters of survey course science textbooks - this is the kind of "history of chemistry" or "history of particle physics" that a freshman chemist or physicist learns. Then there is the kind of history written by historians in history departments. This is the kind of history that scientists typically do not learn. These two types of histories are very different in their structure and subtext, and are institutionally separated by university departments. Kuhn talks about the role of textbook history of science:

"Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great lessons of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet, the textbook derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the text’s paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative."

Jacobs has a good point though, right? Whether or not Kuhn is correct in his description of how science textbook histories are constantly rewritten so that the present state of inquiry always appears to be progressing toward the same goal that we have always been pursuing, it still stands to reason that a contemporary chemist has little to gain studying phlogisten theory or a contemporary physicist the luminiferous aether. Not everyone agrees, though. Ernst Mach, for instance, had a different opinion:

"They that know the entire course of the development of science, will, as a matter of course, judge more freely and more correctly of the significance of any present scientific movement than they, who, limited in their views to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present moment."

Who's right? Mach was certainly wrong about other things. I don't think that Jacobs' answer indicts him in any way. He's not a historian, he's a cutting edge researcher. Would a fuller knowledge of his discipline's history help him be a better researcher? Would a longshorman be a better wharfie if he studied the history of longshormen? No. Would a politician be a better leader if he studied the history of politics? Maybe. Would a Supreme Court Justice make a better arbiter if she studied the history of Constitutional law? Yes. Where do scientists fit in this spectrum?"

    Me filming swooping crane shots of the ALICE experiment, located in St Genis-Pouilly, France, where they are studying what happens to matter when it is heated to 100,000 times the temperature of the sun. Photo by David Marks. The following was written by my friend Ben Eshbach, who accompanied me on this trip: "Kathryn Grim drove us out to the ALICE detector on our third day at CERN where we met our guide, physicist Peter Jacobs. Jacobs had a very clear way of explaining the physics of ALICE to a layman like myself, so I asked him if he could explain something to me about the history of the aether. Specifically, I wanted him to tell me, in layman's terms, what had "happened" to the aether between the 17th and 19th century when by that time it had accrued enough "substance" to be detectable -- if real. How had it gone from being the incorporeal "substance" of More, Bruno and Kepler, to being something with location, extension, penetrability - something that one could build a machine to detect? I suspected the answer involved aether slowly accruing properties necessary for theory - particularly light theory - and that those properties had raced ahead of empiricism until Michelson-Morley put the brakes on it. But I wanted to know what a real cutting-edge, articulate physicist could tell me. Jacobs was completely frank. "I have no idea," he said. "We don't study that stuff and nobody talks about it." When Jacobs said "nobody talks about it" he didn't mean that it was hush hush. He just meant that it's not a topic for lectures and symposia. "And why should we?" Jacobs asked. "I mean, we're looking for the truth. What's the point of learning past error?" I asked him, "Do you think it's because the history of science is a history of error that physicists aren't interested in it?" "I didn't say we weren't interested in it. I said we don't talk about it. We don't read about it." Jacobs continued. He told me that in college he read Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and pretty much thought it was an okay way to look at the history of science. He wasn't gung-ho about Kuhn. I got the impression that he was just a bemused observer. He knew who Kuhn was, and he recognized that my follow-up question was in Kuhn's territory. He made the good point that physics history wasn't what real physicists study. Thomas Kuhn was famous for claiming that natural scientists are typically unknowledgeable about the history of their own craft and that this ignorance is institutionalized by the process by which scientists become trained in their field at university. More accurately, he observed that natural scientists are often knowledgeable of their own history but only as far back to the point where their own present model or "paradigm" became consensus. Learning history in accurate detail any further back serves no pedagogical purpose; learning historical errors is literally a waste of time for a scientist in pursuit of truth in the present. According to Kuhn, there are two types of histories of science; there is the kind of history that one finds in the opening chapters of survey course science textbooks - this is the kind of "history of chemistry" or "history of particle physics" that a freshman chemist or physicist learns. Then there is the kind of history written by historians in history departments. This is the kind of history that scientists typically do not learn. These two types of histories are very different in their structure and subtext, and are institutionally separated by university departments. Kuhn talks about the role of textbook history of science: "Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great lessons of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet, the textbook derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the text’s paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative." Jacobs has a good point though, right? Whether or not Kuhn is correct in his description of how science textbook histories are constantly rewritten so that the present state of inquiry always appears to be progressing toward the same goal that we have always been pursuing, it still stands to reason that a contemporary chemist has little to gain studying phlogisten theory or a contemporary physicist the luminiferous aether. Not everyone agrees, though. Ernst Mach, for instance, had a different opinion: "They that know the entire course of the development of science, will, as a matter of course, judge more freely and more correctly of the significance of any present scientific movement than they, who, limited in their views to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present moment." Who's right? Mach was certainly wrong about other things. I don't think that Jacobs' answer indicts him in any way. He's not a historian, he's a cutting edge researcher. Would a fuller knowledge of his discipline's history help him be a better researcher? Would a longshorman be a better wharfie if he studied the history of longshormen? No. Would a politician be a better leader if he studied the history of politics? Maybe. Would a Supreme Court Justice make a better arbiter if she studied the history of Constitutional law? Yes. Where do scientists fit in this spectrum?"

  • Untitled photo
  • Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

    Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

  • CERN. Meyrin, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

    CERN. Meyrin, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

  • Becky in her spaceship. Photo by David Marks.

    Becky in her spaceship. Photo by David Marks.

  • Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

    Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

  • Me filming crane shots inside the LHCb experiment, located in Ferney-Voltaire, France, which is creating and studying anti-matter to help us to understand why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter. It's a fascinating coincidence that Voltaire lived here in the 18th century and wrote about "possible worlds" without knowing the world's largest machine would be built directly under the soil he walked on to study related ideas.

Photo by David Marks.

    Me filming crane shots inside the LHCb experiment, located in Ferney-Voltaire, France, which is creating and studying anti-matter to help us to understand why we live in a Universe that appears to be composed almost entirely of matter, but no antimatter. It's a fascinating coincidence that Voltaire lived here in the 18th century and wrote about "possible worlds" without knowing the world's largest machine would be built directly under the soil he walked on to study related ideas. Photo by David Marks.

  • Untitled photo
  • Untitled photo
  • While at CERN, we befriended physicist Aiden Randle-Conde, who wrote the following piece about the relation between this dancing Shiva statue at CERN's headquarters and the particle physics research being done there: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/11/10/in-the-shadow-of-shiva/

CERN headquarters. Meyrin, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

    While at CERN, we befriended physicist Aiden Randle-Conde, who wrote the following piece about the relation between this dancing Shiva statue at CERN's headquarters and the particle physics research being done there: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/11/10/in-the-shadow-of-shiva/ CERN headquarters. Meyrin, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks.

  • Montreux, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins.

    Montreux, Switzerland. Photo by Steve Elkins.

  • Untitled photo
  • Montreux, Switzerland

    Montreux, Switzerland

  • Geneva

    Geneva

  • Untitled photo
  • Untitled photo
  • Untitled photo
  • Me in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks. January 2012.

    Me in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo by David Marks. January 2012.

  • Ben. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012. 35mm film.

All the friends who joined me at CERN went for different reasons. Ben wrote a fascinating essay about why he went. Here it is: "In the United States, a scientific education - even a layman's scientific education - is an education in science, not about science. Accordingly, most of us end up thinking about science only in terms of the truth claims arrived at by its means. Knowledge of science is approached by treating it as an instrument of inquiry, rather than as an object of inquiry. Not surprisingly, few people I've met know as much about science as they do about black holes and archaeopteryx. When I'm at a cocktail party and I hear someone remark how much they like science, it usually turns out that they're not into science at all; they're into quasars and bosons and genes and neurons. They're into the objects that science makes available to them. Science, for them, is just the means by which these exciting bits of the world are made visible. For me, science itself is one of my favorite bits of the world.

My personal interest in science is its historical, sociological and philosophical dimensions. I like to approach it as one of the things that can be looked at, studied, dissected, and in some cases even quantified. I enjoy Feyerabend more than I enjoy Feynman. I enjoy a good laboratory ethnography more than I enjoy a report of what researchers found in the laboratory. I enjoy reading the history of the COPUS effort more than I do understanding science in exactly the way COPUS wants me to. And I enjoy coming to understand the process whereby 16th and 17th century astronomers warmed to an unconfirmed Copernicanism more than I do reading De revolutionibus or the Almagest. I am by no means an expert in the sociology, history or philosophy of science -- I am as dillettantish about these aspects of science as any of of my lay friends are about quarks and dinosaur fossils and DNA.

That researchers can learn anything about the natural world by constructing the most unnatural environments imaginable strikes no one as counterintuitive in the 21st century. The particle detectors at CERN are humanity's crowning achievement in this once-contested activity. There is nothing more unnatural than a particle collider and nothing more designed than a high-energy physics experiment. But by designing, constructing and operating these hybrids of fact and art we are able to partition, isolate and sterilize portions of the natural world in order to find out how these portions presumably behave when they are unpartitioned, unsterilized and in their natural, undesigned environments. The philosophical leap of the imagination that gave traction to artifact-laden experimental philosophy in the 17th century is profound, but its profundity seems sadly hidden from our contemporary intuitions. For most of us, constructing elaborate devices for conducting experiments seems like a no-brainer.

This brings me directly to the part of CERN that I am most excited about. According to everyone we talked with at CERN, its present purpose is to "find" the Higgs particle. The word "find" was universally used. No one told us that the purpose of the CERN experiments was to find out whether or not there is a Higgs particle - although in the end, that's exactly what they're doing at CERN. The experiments are being conducted with an optimistic confidence. No one we spoke with at CERN is optimistically confident that the Higgs particle will not be found. As one CERN physicist says in a video which plays in the CERN Microcosm exhibit, "If it turns out that there is no Higgs particle, that will mean that we knew absolutely nothing." (I'm using my memory to paraphrase here, but the "absolutely nothing" part is verbatim.)

No one at CERN is excited about finding out that they knew absolutely nothing. No one told us, "I'm very excited to find out that everything I am trained to understand is wrong and that no one will fund any further research for which I am qualified!" But such is the risk of conducting crucial experiments like the one at CERN. With this in mind, the question that excites someone like me is this: How will researchers know when they have finally not discovered the Higgs particle?" Or to put it more accurately, how will researchers know that they have failed to discover a Higgs particle because their isn't one? -- as opposed to having failed to discover it because the experiments were just not accurate enough or because funding ran out just a little too soon or because the agreed-upon conceptual experimental cutoff point had been too optimistic.

This isn't an unfair question to ask. How null result experiments end is a fascinating part of controversy studies. They do not end in accordance with some scientific algorithm. They end in fights. Proving a negative is messy business. This is the point where the creative human element in science bares itself with no pretensions to be method-driven. This is when Karl Popper's name is resurrected in armchair philosophy circles and popular science articles. This is when career savvy researchers quickly issue press releases announcing the death of the Higgs - thereby influencing public opinion (and by extension, funding) before the scientific community has been able to reach a consensus on the matter. This is when a few strategically placed keynote addresses by high profile physicists can intimidate young researchers who do not want their careers stuck on the back-end of a dying paradigm. When both sides have had their time in the ring, when funding councils decide to finally cut off funding for the Higgs search, and after all the dust has settled and the wounds dressed, new science textbooks will report the historical episode as "The CERN experiments showed..." and very likely hundreds of seasoned physicists will age and die thinking, "Bullshit!"

Of course this scenario assumes a null result in the experiment. There is the possibility (the good possibility, according to the CERN researchers we interviewed and spoke with) that the Higgs particle will be sighted. Proving a positive is less messy than proving a negative. But I personally find the positive result to be less exciting. I see it as being similar to the Michelson-Morley experiments. Had their interferometers returned a positive result then we'd know the speed at which the earth moved through the aether. Yay. But with the null result something even more fascinating and wonderful happened. Or as CERN physicist Peter Jacobs told me, "The Michelson-Morley experiments changed everything!" In fact, the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiments gave us CERN."

    Ben. Photo by Steve Elkins. January 2012. 35mm film. All the friends who joined me at CERN went for different reasons. Ben wrote a fascinating essay about why he went. Here it is: "In the United States, a scientific education - even a layman's scientific education - is an education in science, not about science. Accordingly, most of us end up thinking about science only in terms of the truth claims arrived at by its means. Knowledge of science is approached by treating it as an instrument of inquiry, rather than as an object of inquiry. Not surprisingly, few people I've met know as much about science as they do about black holes and archaeopteryx. When I'm at a cocktail party and I hear someone remark how much they like science, it usually turns out that they're not into science at all; they're into quasars and bosons and genes and neurons. They're into the objects that science makes available to them. Science, for them, is just the means by which these exciting bits of the world are made visible. For me, science itself is one of my favorite bits of the world. My personal interest in science is its historical, sociological and philosophical dimensions. I like to approach it as one of the things that can be looked at, studied, dissected, and in some cases even quantified. I enjoy Feyerabend more than I enjoy Feynman. I enjoy a good laboratory ethnography more than I enjoy a report of what researchers found in the laboratory. I enjoy reading the history of the COPUS effort more than I do understanding science in exactly the way COPUS wants me to. And I enjoy coming to understand the process whereby 16th and 17th century astronomers warmed to an unconfirmed Copernicanism more than I do reading De revolutionibus or the Almagest. I am by no means an expert in the sociology, history or philosophy of science -- I am as dillettantish about these aspects of science as any of of my lay friends are about quarks and dinosaur fossils and DNA. That researchers can learn anything about the natural world by constructing the most unnatural environments imaginable strikes no one as counterintuitive in the 21st century. The particle detectors at CERN are humanity's crowning achievement in this once-contested activity. There is nothing more unnatural than a particle collider and nothing more designed than a high-energy physics experiment. But by designing, constructing and operating these hybrids of fact and art we are able to partition, isolate and sterilize portions of the natural world in order to find out how these portions presumably behave when they are unpartitioned, unsterilized and in their natural, undesigned environments. The philosophical leap of the imagination that gave traction to artifact-laden experimental philosophy in the 17th century is profound, but its profundity seems sadly hidden from our contemporary intuitions. For most of us, constructing elaborate devices for conducting experiments seems like a no-brainer. This brings me directly to the part of CERN that I am most excited about. According to everyone we talked with at CERN, its present purpose is to "find" the Higgs particle. The word "find" was universally used. No one told us that the purpose of the CERN experiments was to find out whether or not there is a Higgs particle - although in the end, that's exactly what they're doing at CERN. The experiments are being conducted with an optimistic confidence. No one we spoke with at CERN is optimistically confident that the Higgs particle will not be found. As one CERN physicist says in a video which plays in the CERN Microcosm exhibit, "If it turns out that there is no Higgs particle, that will mean that we knew absolutely nothing." (I'm using my memory to paraphrase here, but the "absolutely nothing" part is verbatim.) No one at CERN is excited about finding out that they knew absolutely nothing. No one told us, "I'm very excited to find out that everything I am trained to understand is wrong and that no one will fund any further research for which I am qualified!" But such is the risk of conducting crucial experiments like the one at CERN. With this in mind, the question that excites someone like me is this: How will researchers know when they have finally not discovered the Higgs particle?" Or to put it more accurately, how will researchers know that they have failed to discover a Higgs particle because their isn't one? -- as opposed to having failed to discover it because the experiments were just not accurate enough or because funding ran out just a little too soon or because the agreed-upon conceptual experimental cutoff point had been too optimistic. This isn't an unfair question to ask. How null result experiments end is a fascinating part of controversy studies. They do not end in accordance with some scientific algorithm. They end in fights. Proving a negative is messy business. This is the point where the creative human element in science bares itself with no pretensions to be method-driven. This is when Karl Popper's name is resurrected in armchair philosophy circles and popular science articles. This is when career savvy researchers quickly issue press releases announcing the death of the Higgs - thereby influencing public opinion (and by extension, funding) before the scientific community has been able to reach a consensus on the matter. This is when a few strategically placed keynote addresses by high profile physicists can intimidate young researchers who do not want their careers stuck on the back-end of a dying paradigm. When both sides have had their time in the ring, when funding councils decide to finally cut off funding for the Higgs search, and after all the dust has settled and the wounds dressed, new science textbooks will report the historical episode as "The CERN experiments showed..." and very likely hundreds of seasoned physicists will age and die thinking, "Bullshit!" Of course this scenario assumes a null result in the experiment. There is the possibility (the good possibility, according to the CERN researchers we interviewed and spoke with) that the Higgs particle will be sighted. Proving a positive is less messy than proving a negative. But I personally find the positive result to be less exciting. I see it as being similar to the Michelson-Morley experiments. Had their interferometers returned a positive result then we'd know the speed at which the earth moved through the aether. Yay. But with the null result something even more fascinating and wonderful happened. Or as CERN physicist Peter Jacobs told me, "The Michelson-Morley experiments changed everything!" In fact, the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiments gave us CERN."

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