The Quark Machines: How Europe Fought the Particle Physics War

Abstract

Gordon Fraser's agressive subtitle How Europe Fought the Particle Physics War suggests a battle for domination. In fact, his book provides a carefully researched and accurate account of the development of particle physics and its associated accelerators on both sides of the Atlantic, though with rather less attention to the role of the former Soviet Union. In terms of discoveries, there have indeed been winners and losers on both sides, but generally the story is one of active cooperation. Fraser, who has a PhD in particle theory, is eminently qualified to tell the tale having edited the CERN Courier for the past 18 years. He has sought unashamedly to make difficult concepts in particle and accelerator theory such as `renormalization' and `cooling' intelligible to the layman through the imaginative use of everday language. This complements his fascinating historical account of the individuals and the scientific, technological and political events that have dominated the story, resulting in a balanced, complete and readable book. Not surprisingly, the history of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, is a central theme, but the story begins appropriately in the 1930s, when Hitler's antics in Europe, described in the chapter Exodus, led to the emigration of a wave of German-speaking talent followed by a number of leading Italian pysicists. The US dominance of immediate post-war accelerator-based physics owed much to their presence as had the Manhattan project to build the first nuclear bomb, succinctly covered in The Storm Breaks. This had made national heroes of the big names in the field and opened the doors to funds for the first large particle physics accelerators at Brookhaven and Berkeley. In Europe, the discovery of the pion and V-particles using cosmic rays had greater significance than any of the accelerator-based research done there at that time. Meanwhile, the development of quantum field theory by Feynman and others, and the success of quantum electro- dynamics set the scene for what was later to become the Standard Model of the particles and their interactions. The events that led to the creation of CERN are described in All We Want is the World's Biggest Machine. The bold decision to build the CERN Proton Synchroton based on the new concept of strong focusing is contrasted with the relative failure to exploit it scientifically due to inadequate instrumentation, which left the major discoveries in the development of the Quark Model to the Americans. Apart from the first observation of weak neutral currents at CERN, using the Gargamelle bubble chamber, it was not until the 1983 discovery of the W and Z bosons at the proton-antiproton collider, the next truly bold CERN move proposed by Rubbia, that the pendulum really began to swing away from the US. Five chapters are devoted to the physics that has emerged up to the present day to produce the Standard Model and cover the contributions from accelerators around the world with perceptive commentary on their significance. The interplay between decision making and scientific achievement is clearly brought out. The Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN in its 27 km tunnel is a key factor in the `battle', and the `HERA model' used to build the German electron-proton collider HERA is an example of how international participation in the construction of an accelerator can be accommodated. The final three chapters, starting with Armageddon in Texas, deal with the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider in the US and the decision to go ahead with the Large Hadron Collider in the LEP tunnel at CERN, with substantial contributions from the US, Japan, Canada, Russia and others complementing those of the 19 CERN member states. Entitled, perhaps ominously, Last in the Line of Rings, the penultimate chapter ends with the statement that the LHC (due for completion in 2005) promises to become the first truly world particle physics machine. In his final chapter on the Financial Give and Take that was needed to realise the LHC project, Fraser really begs question as to what the next global step will be. This book, with its extensive glossary and list of popular reading material, will be much appreciated by those wanting a compact but informed overview of what it has taken to carry out particle physics from its origins up to the present day.