A Speculation About "small Science"

[SaxonViolence]

Most Science nowadays is "Big Science"—at least so I hear.

 

It makes sense, since most of the "Low-Hanging Fruits" have already been Plucked.

 

I was reading Michio Kaku's account of how he made a small Particle Collider as a teen...

 

It involved Stretching and then Coiling miles of copper wire for the electromagnets and he said it blew circuits not only for his own house, but for much of the block when he plugged it in.

 

Now it is my understanding that anything could happen anytime in particle collisions—but the odds of something really interesting happening AND being captured goes up exponentially with the energy.

 

Repeatability is also very important.

 

It would accomplish nothing to film a Higgs Bosun Cross-Dressing, Break-Dancing and doing Elvis Impersonations if it was a one-time-only event, never again to be recreated.

 

Nonetheless, they haven't shut down all the smaller atom-smashers in the world since the Super-Collider came on line.

 

I can only assume that there is still some good science that can still be done with smaller atom smashers.

 

So once again I had an inspiration for a book—this one mainstream and fairly realistic.

 

Imagine a small group of friends with the funding and ingenuity to put together a small atom smasher—small, but two to four orders of magnitude _{(or more)} more powerful and expensive than Kaku's boyhood effort.

 

They come with varying expectations (some of them mainly motivated by their paychecks)...

 

The money man mainly wants to play at being a Particle Physicist.

 

But just to make the story interesting—lets just suppose they make a modest discovery—something surprising enough to get them on a few magazine covers and spark a whole new interest in "Small Science" in many quarters.

 

A.} Can anyone give me some sort of General Type of Discovery that just might be made and verified in that Scenario?

 

B.} Recommend any good Primers on Atom Smashers?

 

C.} IF you were asked to design the Damned Thing—

 

What would be your first, second and third choices for types of Colliders for Small Science and why?

 

D.} Or is it just a Ridiculous Idea, even for a story?

 

 

Thanks.

 

 

 

Saxon Violence

Edited August 30, 2013 by SaxonViolence

[JMJones0424]

I freely admit bias here, as I view Michio Kaku as being to physics what Dr. Phil is to psychology. In other words, in my view, he frequently stretches the truth in order to fit his narrative with seemingly little regard to fact. For instance, I do not understand, given the modern electrical grid, how anything he made in his home could have knocked out power in his neighborhood. Do you have a reference to this anecdote?

 

Smaller colliders can be useful for confirming findings from larger colliders in energy levels that they are able to measure. However, since the cutting edge of particle physics is dealing in such great energy levels, I have a hard time believing that anything that could be constructed in one's backyard would be useful one way or the other in advancing particle physics.

 

On the other hand, I think there's a great deal of utility for someone to design and run a small, backyard collider in order to learn the physics involved. If this is the thrust of your story, then it may be far more believable. As an analogy, I don't expect to be able to construct a wind tunnel in my backyard that will enable me to improve upon the design of commercial jets, but I do expect to learn quite a bit about aeronautics were I to construct a wind tunnel and use it to attempt to design a commercial jet. I can't think of any discovery that could be made in particle physics by an independent, small-scale experimenter, but an independent, small-scale experimenter could conceivably learn quite a bit about particle physics.

[SaxonViolence]

I think that the story was in "Hyperspace"...

 

When and if "Hyperspace" Bubbles to the top of my Burbling Brew of Books, I'll try to find the anecdote.

 

Kaku comparable to Dr Phil?

 

How distressing...

 

Though I had noticed that his speculations were growing ever more "Popish"...

 

{As in "Pop-Culture" not as in "Romish Popism"...}

 

I look on Psychologists and Psychiatrists as no more than "Heap-Big Juju" Witch Doctors in an elaborate Pseudo-Scientific Belief System...

 

If the other Psychiatrists consider Dr Phil a Quack...

 

It's like how some High Status Anthropologists will gather around a Low-Status Colleague and call them a "Sociologist" until they cry...

 

Although Cultural Anthropology is Real Science...

 

 

Saxon Violence

 

 

BIG PS:

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/secretlife/scientists/michio-kaku/show/wire/

 

“So one day I went up to my mom and I said, ‘Mom, can I have permission to build a 2.3-million electron-volt atom smasher—a betatron—in the garage?’ And my mom stared at me, and she said, ‘Sure. Why not? And don’t forget to take out the garbage.’ So, I went out and took out the garbage. And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”

 

When Michio actually plugged in his atom smasher, it did, of course, blow out every fuse in his house and likely every fuse for miles around—yet another kid scientist who made the lights go out and the authorities shake their fists (while grudgingly admitting that the kid was pretty smart).

Edited August 30, 2013 by SaxonViolence

[JMJones0424]

OK, it is conceivable that the guilty party in this recounting is the PBS writer rather than Michio Kaku. Of course it's also conceivable that I'm mistaken. However, unless there was something significantly wrong with the wiring of both his house and his neighborhood, there's no reason his experiment should have blown out "every fuse in his house and likely every fuse for miles around." This is, after all, what fuses and circuit breakers are designed to prevent.

 

More on topic though, what Kaku claims to have built is a MeV collider. The Tevatron is six orders of magnitude larger and has been shut down partially because it isn't powerful enough to continue breakthroughs. It is far larger and more costly than any conceivable back-yard collider and yet is still apparently insufficient for breakthroughs in particle physics.

Edited August 30, 2013 by JMJones0424

[CraigD]

I can’t imagine the details, but in general, I’d say the kind of important science that could be done with a less powerful particle collider would involve confirming a theoretical prediction believed so certain to be wrong that testing it with one of the more powerful ones can’t be justified.

 

Even this is a stretch, since even a small collider isn’t cheap to run (I doubt you’d want to build one, when there are lots of them already built, but less used because of their having been superseded by newer ones), and the various engineers and experimental physicists needed to run them would be hard to convince to endanger their reputations working on something too weird. For a SF story to be plausible, you’d have to include a lot of character background story involving how a team of folk with the training to run the experiment came to such dire straits as to be willing to. Though back stories of love, betrayal, drugs and violence are romantic, more plausible are ones of young PhDs finishing low-paying post-doc jobs, finding no job in their field, looking at the bleak possibilities of entry-level IT jobs, provisional highschool teaching, fast food, etc, and being willing to take anything in their field.

 

If you change your focus from confirming a pure science physics theory to practical engineering, I can imagine one IMHO excellent “cheap new machine” possibility: a much more efficient antimatter factory.

 

An antimatter factory is a system that created and stores neutrally charged antimatter, usually in the form of antihydrogen, an atom of which consists of a positron and an antiproton. The physics of such machines is uncontroversial: take a source of positrons and a source of antiprotons, slow (cool) the particles enough that they can combine to form antihydrogen , then keep them from contacting ordinary matter (in which case they annihilate, producing energy). While the science is simple, and the engineering has been successful on small scales for nearly 20 years, engineering efficient particle coolers and traps remains an immature technology. For this reason, per unit mass, antihydrogen is fantastically costly, on the order of US$100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion dollars) per gram. Experimental physicists expect improvements in next-generation machines to reduce this cost to on the order of $10,000,000,000 (ten billion) per gram, but it remains so high that antihydrogen is to date useful only for experimental observations, such as those done by the largest antimatter factory operators, the ATRAP group at CERN.

 

Antimatter (with equal masses of ordinary matter) has the highest energy density physically possible, [imath]\frac{E}{M} = c^2[/imath], about 1000 times greater than that of nuclear fission, 100 times that of nuclear fusion, and 500,000,000 times that of chemical fuels. If it could be efficiently manufactured in large quantities, it would be mind-bogglingly useful, technologically and likely socially transformative. It’s no accident that, when folk who knew a little physics began fleshing out the fictional physics of the Star Trek universe in various “tech manual”, antimatter was what fueled its spacecraft.

 

Conventional science is able to manufacture the tiny quantities needed for various experiments that require it, so have little interest in engineering greatly improved antimatter factories.

 

The basic technology of an antimatter factory, however, scales down well. Positrons are emitted by nearly all materials. Even small scientific particle colliders produce antiprotons, as do natural phenomena such as cosmic rays. The challenge is slowing and holding these antiparticles - removing, not adding, energy.

 

A small, commercially-motivated engineering enterprise might succeed in developing engineering technology for producing and storing quantities of antimatter useful as fuels. The scaling up of this into a practical means of energy storage would almost certainly be very expensive, and have to be flow in solar orbit, but a successful small scale engineering proof of concept by Small Engineering could show that such a scaled-up scheme would work, triggering a technological revolution.

 

A wonderful primer on this technology can be had in Robert Forward’s 2002 Indistiguishable from Magic

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/secretlife/scientists/michio-kaku/show/wire/

...

When Michio actually plugged in his atom smasher, it did, of course, blow out every fuse in his house and likely every fuse for miles around—yet another kid scientist who made the lights go out and the authorities shake their fists (while grudgingly admitting that the kid was pretty smart).

OK, it is conceivable that the guilty party in this recounting is the PBS writer rather than Michio Kaku. Of course it's also conceivable that I'm mistaken. However, unless there was something significantly wrong with the wiring of both his house and his neighborhood, there's no reason his experiment should have blown out "every fuse in his house and likely every fuse for miles around." This is, after all, what fuses and circuit breakers are designed to prevent.

The fault lies with the Wire’s Tom Miller for adding the “likely every fuse for miles around”.

 

What Kaku actually wrote in his 1994 book Hyperspace was:

When finally constructed, the 300-pound, 5-kilowatt betatron consumed every ouce of energy my house produced. When I turned it on, I would usually blow every fuse, and the house would suddenly become dark.

A typical residential house has no fuse larger than 30 Amps, so I expect teen-age Michio was hoping for a few seconds at about 150% max current, cutting it off before the fuse could burn through. His power demands were comparable to trying to run 3 to 4 present-day hair-driers at the same time, and had a similar effect on his 1964 home’s electric system.

 

No fools, Micho and his dad had the good sense not to bypass the house’s fuses, or while they might have had more success with his betatron, they might have burned down their house. (Screwing pennies into their sockets is an easy trick for this, done by many folk who find themselves in the dark with no spare fuses, and a major reason why fuses were replace with breakers in new and renovated building)

 

He never actually produced an electron beam with his betatron, but showed that it generated a strong enough field that, it could have, with more work.

 

Michio Kaku’s purpose for this seems clear to me. He wasn’t trying to do new science – similar but working betatrons had been made since the 1940s, and he’d read about them – but do well in his high school science fair. His parents were little-educated first-generation Japanese-American immigrants of modest means, (they met in a WWII internment camp) and Michio craved a science scholarship. His plan worked: he attracted Edward Tellers attention at a National Science Fair, got an engineering scholarship to Harvard, and graduated first in his class, going on to a PhD at Berkley and the high-visibility career he’s famous for now.

 

While Kaku’s not the greatest physicist of his generation, he was first in his undergrad Physics class at a good college, and is IHMO an excellent writer and promoter of science for the general public who inspires many young folk to study science better. I wouldn’t call him a “great scientist”, but certainly “good for science”, which earns him my enthusiastic :thumbs_up. I also have read, and highly recommend, Hyperspace, and hope to read his newer books.