Globe-jetting spreading the word of science
As the rain pelts down on Monday afternoon, it is not the mundane world of today that we discuss but for nearly two riveting hours, we go back in time, to the very beginnings of our universe.
Guiding us back to the Big Bang and the three crucial minutes thereafter which gradually made the universe look like what it does today is ‘Science Ambassador’ Dr. Rudiger Voss.
Dr. Voss: Explaining how nature strategised to create the universe. Pic by Mangala Weerasekera
While spreading the message of science, on his globe-trotting ventures, Dr. Voss also gives us a bird’s eye view of the goings on at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, straddling both France and Switzerland, which in the last 60 years (it celebrated its 60th anniversary on September 29) has been attempting to unveil the universe’s secrets.
Six-footer Dr. Voss, with his silvery hair peppered with grey, had been drawn to CERN (the Geneva-based Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) as a young graduate of Physics and Mathematics from Germany’s Ludwig Maximilians University Munich way back in 1976. There has been no breaking of bonds since then and he was in Sri Lanka for three tightly-packed days as CERN’s Head of International Relations not only to talk science but also to explore the possibilities of forging CERN-Sri Lanka links.
Invited by the Coordinating Secretariat for Science, Technology and Innovation (COSTI), Dr. Voss held extensive lectures and talks with academics, researchers, undergraduates both in Kandy and Colombo and officials of the University Grants Commission, the Atomic Energy Authority and the National Institute of Education as well as the Senior Minister for Scientific Affairs Prof. Tissa Vitarana, Education Minister Bandula Gunawardhana and Technology and Research Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka.
For this Particle Physicist, his love affair with matter had begun only in the final two years of high school. “I was in boarding school at Meinerzhagen, a small German town, when I fell into the hands of an extremely capable teacher. I was lucky to have changed schools just before that,” he tells the Sunday Times in an interview.
Once under the ‘command’ of the ‘King’ and ‘Queen’ — the general perception in physical science being that the royal duo are Mathematics and Physics — there was never any thought of moving away. His life has been inextricably linked to CERN, with his early research work being based on electroweak interference in deep inelastic muon-nuceon scattering.
Before his current mission of opening the eyes of all and sundry to the wonders of science, Dr. Voss has held many important positions at CERN including that of Senior Research Physicist; Physics Coordinator; and Chairman of the Science Information Policy Board; and also Chairman of 
the Particle Data Group Advisory Board at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, America. It has also become a family affair, for his wife, Eva Maria, is Head of the Legal Department at CERN.
It is with much passion that Dr. Voss speaks of his ‘workplace’ during a presentation open to the public organised jointly by COSTI and the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science at the SLIDA auditorium.
CERN’s mission is to push back the frontiers of knowledge, develop new technology in fields such as medicine for the benefit of human-kind, train the scientists and engineers of tomorrow and unite people from different countries and cultures.
Pointing out that science is a universal language of human-kind, he says that it may be well less spoken in some areas. This is the very reason CERN is sending him jetting around the globe to propagate this language of science. Although he flew back to CERN on Wednesday, he will be on his way to India next week, later Japan, followed by South Africa and finally Pakistan before being at home-base for Christmas.
Brought alive by close-ups on the screen, Dr. Voss talks of the world’s most advanced and powerful machine lying in CERN’s cavernous bowels below ground in the 200-hectare campus. It is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) consisting of a 27-km ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of particles along the way.
The contrast flows forth from Dr. Voss – the four-km ‘grey’ Geneva air-strip, the longest in Switzerland as against the “giant machine” that is the LHC.
CERN, the most advanced focal point for science, according to him came into being after World War II with many European countries collaborating on the theme ‘Science for Peace’. However, radical changes have come about since 2010, with different categories of membership being thrown open to non-European countries. “Highly symbolic is Israel becoming the most recent member-state.”
Run on a recurring budget of US$ 1.2 billion, CERN has 2,300 staffers, 1,600 other paid employees and nearly 11,000 users as of the last count. Stressing that the sun never really sets on science, Dr. Voss shows on a map the countries from which CERN’s visiting scientists are. Next he moves to passport holders of specific countries and whereas earlier Sri Lanka remained white, the second category shows five Sri Lankan passport holders conducting research there.
Hoping that his visit will change the status quo, with more Sri Lankan scientists accessing CERN’s state-of-the-art facilities, he says the five Sri Lankans currently there are working at universities outside their home country such as in the United States of America and India. “This is both good and bad,” says Dr. Voss, adding, “the good is that we have Sri Lankans at CERN but the bad is that it indicates a brain drain of advanced scientists from Sri Lanka.”
A particle physics or fundamental science lesson follows thereafter and also during the interview with the Sunday Times. Explaining that our imagination stops at the radius of earth, he says as a flight curves, we see our beautiful blue planet. Look at the sky, stars and galaxies – how big are these objects? The human eye and imagination can access only a small particle — dimension of hair, but cannot see smaller structures.
“We look into the sky with powerful telescopes such as the Hubble and try to figure out how our universe looked like 13.8 billion years ago. If I built a bigger telescope will I be able to see the origin of the universe with my bare eyes? Fortunately not, otherwise, I would be jobless,” he jokes.
It is back to the Big Bang, as he says we know quite precisely what happened microseconds after the Big Bang. The early universe was different to the universe now. There was primordial matter, extremely hot and compact – a “dense soup” of particles with no light escaping and no structure. It was much heavier, unstable, radioactive particles which were decaying. Then the universe experienced a cool down. The particles became lighter until finally at the end of such change, the lightest particles did not decay, thus becoming stable particles. This all happened in the first three minutes after the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago.
“With the cooling down, the universe captured and started to form atomic nuclei, such as protons and neutrons,” says Dr. Voss. “At the turning point, atoms were formed and the universe became transparent and started looking like what it is today.”
It is CERN that built the LHC, the powerful super-microscope which allowed elemental particles to smash together at high speed and release energy to simulate how Nature strategised in those three minutes to bring about the universe as we know it today, he reiterates, adding that 2010 saw a new era in fundamental science with the exploration of a new energy frontier and the launch of a worldwide LHC computing grid.
The LHC project is a global scientific adventure, combining the accelerator, a worldwide computing grid and experiments, which have brought about immense benefits, adds Dr. Voss.
| The importance of Higgs
When asked about the ‘God particle’, gently Dr. Voss says it is misleading to call it that as science and religion should be kept apart. Physics is a universal science. The Higgs boson is one of many fundamental particles, a corner-stone, which was missing in visible matter. Questioning why we need a Higgs, this Physicist answers that elementary particles are point-like, without any internal structure. The natural consequence would be that they are mass-less, but we know experimentally that this is not the case. Theorists R. Brout, F. Englert, P.W. Higgs, G.S. Guralnik, C.R. Hagen and T.W.B. Kibble together with others postulated in 1964 a solution which spontaneously breaks this symmetry initially between the gauge bosons. A field was proposed that fills all space (vacuum) that has the following effects: *Bosons can acquire mass This is why in 2013 when the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded jointly to Englert and Higgs, it was announced “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. |