Wednesday at Lindau

The big and the tiny and tying them both together were discussed today. Prof. Dr. Riccardo Giacconi (2002) told us that astrophysics is at the most exciting point in its 400 year old history. His ground breaking work on X-ray astronomy has allowed a generation of scientists to open new windows on our view of the cosmos observing new phenomena that has been invisible to us previously. He was part of the Hubble team and known as a tough man when dealing with the myriad of political interests that exist at NASA. Labelling Hubble as the ‘people’s telescope’, he spoke of the fundamental questions it has helped to answer; these include the confirmation of the so called ‘dark energy’. “Such advances would continue to be observed and explained built on the back of technological advances in telescopes which require political will and strong financial backing”, he claimed. He was at pains to emphasise that these are not abstract findings; the understanding of dark energy and dark matter are a fundamental one; perhaps the most fundamental in physics today.

Continuing along this fundamental line, Prof. Dr. George Fitzgerald Smoot (2006) allowed us to peer back into time illustrating how he and his team showed the blackbody form – a fingerprint from the big bang that is still evident at the edge of the universe. Plotting out the 13.6 billion years that the universe has existed, he took us through the various ‘spheres of time’ that constitute the various phases our universe have gone through. “In 2008, the launch of the ‘Max Planck’ satellite will hopefully shed more light on the radiation relic by looking at the linear polarisation of this phenomenon”, Prof Smoot told us. Recently, the expansion of the universe has been seen to accelerate once more. This has possible links to the existence of dark matter (the great unknown in physics that accounts for a massive percentage of the mass of the universe). This spooky concept has also been attributed to the formation of bright-light (from stars) filaments with clusters occurring at filament junctions.

  Expansion of the Universe 

Understanding the particles that form the building blocks of our universe was the topic of the next section of talks. Linking the theories of the tiny (governed by quantum dynamics) and of the galactic (relativity) scientists hope to develop a general theory of everything. Prof. Dr. Martinus J.G. Veltman  (winner in 1999), whose prize was given for devising a mathematical system of predicting the properties of the subatomic particles that make up the universe, gave us a concise history of particle physics. Interestingly, this began with Nicolas Callen’s (Irish) induction coil which produced 600,000Volts. He pointed out that the voltage was monitored by getting his students to stand in a conducting line in contact with the source – we all laughed and then he asked us to think what were all made do in our experimental lives J. Trinity scientist and Nobel Laureate Earnest Walton was credited with the first particle accelerator and the first experimental evidence for Einstein’s E=mc² equation. His talk continued through the evolution of the particle accelerators, right up to the Large Hadron Colloider about to be opened at CERN (http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Welcome.html).

Prof. Dr. David J. Gross explained the excitement surrounding the Large Hadron Colloider that is about to be switched on at CERN. The colloider will operate at massive energies allowing the creation of exciting, unseen, sub-atomic particles. The authors of the standard model described to us the missing pieces of the jigsaw required; (1) the search for the Higgs particle which they hope will prove the standard model and; (2) looking at super-symmetry.

All agreed that this was perhaps the most exciting time ever in particle physics with Nobel prize winning work there for the taking!