International Atom-Smashing

Oct. 4 marks the best holiday you will never celebrate: the National Day of Shame. Congress proposed the holiday to commemorate the 1957 launch of Sputnik and the U.S.’s loss in the Space Race against the USSR. In a move very much indicative of our country’s attitude toward international relations, we disregarded the suggestion to spend a day reflecting on our failures and instead declared the launch of Earth’s first artificial satellite as no more than the warm-up lap to the real Space Race: sending a human being into orbit. Of course, we lost that one, too.

Oct. 4, 1957 did more than momentarily destroy our national pride. Sputnik launched the Space Age, which culminated with the 1969 moon landing that finally healed America’s wounded ego. Fifty years after Sputnik first streaked across the night sky, we can fully appreciate both achievements as great leaps for mankind. Sputnik sparked the world’s imagination and inspired each step we have taken out into our solar system since.

A small metal ball was able to do this because, first and foremost, it represented a military threat. The U.S. famously panicked over Russian technological capacity, obsessing over the missile gap and pouring money into science education. As Cornelia Dean recently wrote in the New York Times, Sputnik convinced America that “the cold war was being fought with slide rules, not rifles.”

But something else had already shone a spotlight on the deep connection between science and the military: the atomic bomb. In what can be seen as both the brightest and darkest day in the history of physics, Einstein’s E=mc2 was brought to dramatic and devastating fruition. Never before (or perhaps again) was the science of the world’s smallest scale so obviously relevant to our lives.

Many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century essentially got their start working for the military. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Robert Wilson, Chien-Shiung Wu, and virtually all other heavy-weight physicists of the time (including Einstein himself) threw themselves behind the Manhattan Project. The government recruited every physicist it could get its hands on, including women like Wu—a first in the traditionally male-dominated field. Resources poured in and results poured out. Today we may question the morality of putting those results to military use, but we cannot question their validity or importance. High energy physics came into its own with the support of the military, and their intimate relationship continued well beyond 1945.

Sputnik and the Space Race brought science to the fore of the national consciousness again, intertwining physics and defense even more tightly. Every discovery, small and large, that we made before the Russians represented a victory—not necessarily because of the practical applications of those discoveries, but simply because we made them first. A major Cold War battle was the one the U.S. fought to dominate the pursuit of knowledge.

But to the scientists involved, the pursuit of knowledge always bordered on the quixotic. When Robert Wilson was questioned by Congress in 1969 about the rationale behind investing millions of dollars to build the Tevatron, Fermilab’s particle accelerator, he provided one of the most eloquent and accurate justifications of scientific research I’ve ever heard: “It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.” But when, 20 years later, the time came for the government to authorize funds for an even more powerful accelerator, the brilliantly named Superconducting Super Collider, it pulled the plug shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, and U.S. support for basic scientific research has dwindled ever since.

We are currently on the brink of a new phase in high energy physics: the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, is scheduled to open next year in Switzerland. Plans are also in the works for the International Linear Collider, a sort of sister-accelerator to the LHC. We will be able to explore the deepest mysteries of our universe with these machines, but that is perhaps not the most beautiful or exciting thing about them. The ILC’s name says it all: these accelerators are so expensive and difficult to build that literally almost every country in the world has to contribute money and manpower. The papers published as a result of work at the LHC will have hundreds of authors from all over the world. A single country no longer dominates physics and today’s experiments may be the most international efforts humankind has ever made.

This is the golden age of high energy physics, and not only because of the great discoveries our new colliders are poised to make. It is because nearly the whole world has been collaborating and cooperating to make them. The atomic threat did not end war, nor will the discovery of the Higgs boson. But if or when that discovery is made, it will belong to the world in a way that Sputnik or even the moon landing did not. For the first time, the pursuit of knowledge is truly global. And that is something worth defending.

Elizabeth Wade is a Barnard senior majoring in comparative literature.
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