Quote:
Originally Posted by sarah
(Post 20596)
I (I should say we) try to find little Higgs boson in this mess. This one is a simulation... but in real life, if I may say, to find this naughty little tricky thing is not a cup of tea !
http://www.scidacreview.org/0601/html/acc25.jpg
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Hi sarah,
I NEVER expected to happen upon someone like you on this site... or anywhere else for the rest of my life, given how exotic your work is!
Encountering you exhumes ancient childhood memories and dreams. A half-century ago, I was a small boy attending the
New York World's Fair with my parents. In the fair's
Hall of Science pavilion, I picked up three booklets in the
Understanding The Atom series, intended for the education of the general public, and published by a US federal agency then called the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). I found them fascinating and would write away for many more of these wonderful free booklets in the next few years to come! I would even dream about becoming an elementary particle physicist when I grew up - until the huge cutbacks in US federal R&D that came at the end of the 1960's persuaded me that I would never be smart enough to make such an outlandish dream come true.
I last thought about these booklets DECADES ago - even if it's not impossible they are packed away in an old box still in my possession. Today I looked for them online - and guess what? The US Department of Energy has just this year published copies of them online
here!
My favorite booklet, whose nearly-torn-away cover testified to my repeated handling of it, was
Microstructure of Matter, which described the elementary particles which your guys study at CERN, although it reflected our more limited understanding of those times - before the
Standard Model reached maturity. Later, as a university undergraduate, I would never study particle physics, and as simple as this booklet was, it nonetheless provided me with the knowledge I needed to correctly answer two questions regarding this discipline which appeared in the Physics Graduate Record Exam (GRE) I took circa 1975!
But back in my childhood days, I would dream about actually doing experimental particle physics and so became interested in the construction of particle accelerators. For this, the aforementioned series provided the volume titled
Accelerators. My parents were struggling immigrants with primary school educations, and there was nothing like the World Wide Web to which to turn, so the exotic specialty information provided by such a booklet in those days was a miraculous treasure to a boy like me! Because I had the good fortune to live in a major US city, I eventually could borrow Livingston and Blewett's
Particle Accelerators (McGraw-Hill, 1962), too. But as I didn't even study single-variable calculus until my last year of secondary school, the book's routine use of Maxwell's equations made it rather inaccessible to me.
Yet I dreamt about building first, a Van de Graaf machine, and later, a cyclotron. Alas, my family was far too poor (and troubled!) for me to make brave ambitions like that really come true before I left home for university and went on to study other areas of science and technology. (Yet, oddly enough, as a condensed matter physicist, I would land up effectively leveraging cyclotron resonance via inelastic light scattering!)
However, since one needs all sorts of power supplies to build such machines, and an oscillator to excite the dees of the cyclotron, I was drawn into electronics, in which I actually made substantial progress. In those days, television sets not only used a vacuum tube for a display, but also exploited vacuum tubes as active circuit elements. I would salvage discarded TV sets from the trash, and desolder and test the components therein, to stock my supply larder! My father had given me a soldering iron when I turned eight, and I am proud to say I only injured myself with molten solder on my hand once - such a lesson is always memorable!
Curiously, the AEC series also included a volume titled
Computers, which introduced me to machine computation, then an exotic branch of electronics. That field proved of more practical value to me, and I landed up creating a paper design which functionally cloned a small contemporary computer, which I would enter into a national "science" contest to during my last year of secondary school.
In closing, for the benefit of others reading here, I'd like to mention that old-fashioned particle track imaging devices, which produced images such as the one you posted above, are described in the
Microstructure of Matter booklet, and the storage ring device which today keeps you so busy was already an active area of work a half-century ago, and is described on pages 47 and 48 of the
Accelerators booklet!
