mad skills

At the Trinity test site, as soon as he saw the blast, Fermi started ripping up little pieces of paper. At the very moment the shockwave from the blast arrived, it blew Fermi's paper scraps away. Fermi then took out a slide rule and said, "Ah, 12,000 tons of TNT." From the papers and position, he could calculate the explosive power of this new weapon.

Physicist Gino Segre, relating a story he heard from his Nobel Prize winning uncle Emilio Segre, about working with Fermi on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, in an interview in today's New York Times.

particulate matters

We were hoping to have a particle collision this year, but oh well -- next year.

Paraphrasing my friend the sometimes-constable, mostly physicist, who's just back from Cern.

(You'll have to forgive me, but there's nothing quite like making small talk with a particle physicist. Now if I only understood a word of it...)

record of invention

So I leaned over to my Higgs Bosen buddy at a break during our committee meeting last night and asked him, what with all the news on the new Collider: “Have you been to Cern lately?” (don't I sound urbane? ;) Which of course resulted in some gossip (apparently Fermi Labs has embarrassed themselves badly with an exploding magnet), and delightful use of language (when particle physicists talk about ramping up a new particle accelerator, they say that they’re going to: “get some beam up” – slowly, so as not to compromise the equipment – and then, over time, they’ll “move up to top energy”) and then led into the most extraordinary napkin-sketch conversation.

He’s just filed a record of invention – predecessor to prototyping, forerunner to any possible patent – for a tremendously cool device that would provide energy efficiently and at practically no cost – if it works.

All this he sketched on a scrap of paper for my wondering eyes and made perfectly plain sense of for my fascinated-by-physics-but-not-entirely-savvy-to-it ears.

And of course I’d like to tell you all about it, but seeing how they still need to ramp up a prototype (at the Department of Energy’s expense) that would probably be breaching a trust and the what of it isn’t important anyway, is it?

What’s important is that people think these things up. Manufacture them out of nothing more than grey cells and coffee gone cold and the pure night air. (And oh, right, government funding.)

Wandering around Rodin’s bronze folk at Stanford the other night I got to wondering the thing I wonder a lot whenever I’m moved by a masterful artist’s art: Why do I need this? And why did you, my friend the artist, feel compelled to create it? To drop everything else and just do this? For me. For all of us.

The courage of that astonishes me. I have such a compulsion to be useful – even the way I make my livelihood grew out of that compulsion – much as I love it, it was more or less accidental. I saw an opportunity to do something, something that I did reasonably well, something that other people found to be of use, something they’d pay me to do so that I could eat.

And I like to eat. So I kept on doing it.

But to quit everything else and only create things because they’re beautiful?

M’s sketch last night – the invention – the whole thing was about harnessing energy. Spinning coils and magnetic fields and laser beams – all to harness this one thing and put it to beautiful use. Born of pure imagination, it may well find a useful end. But only because he dreamed the beautiful thing into being. Only because he allowed it to be.

Beauty is its own excuse for being. — Emerson

can you hear me now?

I have a friend who works just down the road at Fermi Lab, and he's doing his damnedest to observe the Higgs Bosen particle. Every once in a while I’ll run into him when he’s deeply fatigued and looking very, very excited. He’s generally kind enough to share all kinds of great gossip about unobservable particles which of course I’m not allowed to mention here but which make me feel like I know something terribly important even though I hardly understand a word of what he tells me.

Recently I bumped into him and he was excited about something else altogether – a community theatre production – an English Farce – in which he played an English Bobby. He is English, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch, but he still did a knock up job. My sweetie and I went that same day to see the show, and it was lovely fun and a bargain to boot, and it was everything I love about this little corner of my adopted Chicagoland because really, after all, how many Sunday afternoons do you have the chance to see a particle physicist dress up like an English Bobby and chase around Vicars and Communists? Hardly ever. At least I don't.

Regrettably, he told me about the farce while we were standing in line to sign a petition to protest a local school board member’s attempt to ban an AP Biology textbook in the local high school.

Which would be one of the reasons why I occasionally shudder about my neighborhood.

The good news is that all went well: those of us who believe that the Enlightenment actually had lasting and positive effects showed up in large numbers and lined up to have our say to the School Board (I was a coward but cheered on friends who bellied up to the mic) about why a text book that mentions RU 486 and shows female genitalia really isn’t going to encourage our children to have any more sex than they’re already having. At the end of the day good sense prevailed and the book was once again approved for use.

But it was frightening to be in that room, to hear the arguments laid down, and to realize that while the folks on the side of Science understood one another, they didn’t understand the folks who took the side of what was being promoted as “Morality” (“Religion has nothing to do with it” a few of them claimed), and the folks who spoke on behalf of "morality" didn’t understand a word of what the folks on the side of Science were saying.

And I'm not entirely sure that either side wanted to understand the other.

There was no debate, and there was certainly no dialog. There was a simple series of statements declaring why the speaker was in the right. There was no sense that we might have understood each other, even if we tried. We simply didn’t speak one another’s language.

That’s all. I don’t have any cogent conclusions about the situation. No telling insights.

It just left me concerned that folks don't know how to argue anymore -- and rarely do you run into that cousin to a good argument -- the Platonic dialog -- where folks suspend certainty and dig deep into something through questioning and examination.

I get myself into trouble pretty regularly because I'll start throwing questions out to pick and probe at a situation. The hope, of course, is that the folks I'm picking and probing with will share in the exercise, and we'll get to a new understanding of the thing by the time we're through with it. But too often I get baffled looks accompanied by strange intonations, and I usually cave and say something lame like: "I'm not saying we do it this way" or "I'm not saying I think that, I'm just wondering if..." Rarely does it go anywhere interesting.

But every once in a while it does, and the person picks it up and starts throwing out their own hypotheticals (Bush and his cronies who "won't speak in hypotheticals" be damned -- they're what you need to puzzle anything through). And more often than not, you get somewhere new -- and you get there together.

I'm not sure if it's the new place or the fact that you figured it out together that matters more -- but I suspect it's the together part that makes it so satisfying.