Word: cern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...researchers will be awfully disappointed if all they succeed in doing is to fill out the known family tree of particles. Too much predictability can make science dull. Says Samuel Ting, an M.I.T. physicist and one of the head researchers at CERN: "I will only consider our experiment a success if we discover something really surprising -- new types of quarks, for example -- that would explode the standard theory...
Anyone able to take particle physics beyond the Standard Model will automatically win prizes, prestige and added power in the profession. The quest has attracted some of the most driven personalities in science. The leaders, including Ting, CERN director Carlo Rubbia and Stanford's Burton Richter, are known for their relentless ambition, feisty competitiveness and monumental egos. All have already won Nobel Prizes, but that seems only to have increased their desire for greater achievements. In the rush to get results, they push their staffs mercilessly and are furious -- at least in private -- whenever they come in second...
...this rivalry that speeds the accumulation of knowledge. Observes Jack Steinberger, another Nobel laureate at CERN: "Competition in science is not always a pretty thing, but it's always stimulating and productive." The search for the nature of matter requires brash risk takers because it is a venture into the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. Explains Roy Schwitters, director of the new SSC project: "The physics we do is like a voyage of discovery. You can imagine you're Columbus. We're setting sail to who knows where -- a new world, we hope...
There are no doubt plenty of frontiers left for CERN to push back. Though LEP does not appear to be powerful enough to find the top quark, the "clean" electron-positron collisions could reveal many other exotic phenomena. One long shot is the much-sought Higgs boson, named for British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to recognize its importance. According to some theories, the Higgs boson is what gives all particles their mass. The idea is that everything in the universe is awash in a seaof Higgs bosons, and particles acquire their mass by swimming through this...
...what the CERN researchers really expect, and hope, to find is something totally unpredicted. "In science nobody really knows what is going to come next," says Rubbia. "We always pretend that we know the answers, but nature keeps advising us that...