LONDON: Scientific research is dramatically more global in its practice and impact than it was just a decade ago. Whether the United States is able to capitalise effectively on new discoveries stemming from international collaborations will determine future economic growth and job creation in America.
High-energy physics, or particle physics as it is often called, is the epitome of the growing globalisation of science and its recent history holds lessons for the innovation possibilities of tomorrow.
Not long ago, the United States was home to three world-class accelerators, mega machines that are the mainstays of particle physics. Now all three – Brookhaven’s AGS, Stanford’s Linear Collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron – are mere memories. What remains is the heritage of the pioneering technologies they developed that are vital to accelerator facilities throughout the world.
Today, many American particle physicists are members of international teams working at such facilities, principally the Large Hadron Collider, a mammoth circular device stretching 17 miles in length and buried as far as 574 feet below ground near Geneva, Switzerland. Dan Brown fictionalised the machine half a dozen years ago in “Angels and Demons,” a best-selling tale he spun around the creation of a single gram of anti-matter.
The LHC, as physicists around the world call it, never did what Brown imagined it could, but it did produce the Higgs boson with the help of 1,500 US scientists. In physics circles, the Higgs discovery represented a dazzling conclusion to decades of work by thousands of scientists from more than 30 countries. But along the way, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, which hosts the LHC, spawned something even more revolutionary, at least in a public sense.
Spread across the globe, CERN’s scientific cast desperately needed a communication tool that could transmit images and massive sets of data. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, working in Geneva, delivered the tool: the World Wide Web. And in less than 20 years, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, http, transformed commerce, entertainment, finance and the way we connect with each other.
Clever people in any nation could have seized on Berners-Lee’s creation and made their fortunes. But the dot-com revolution happened here.
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