ENS NEWS N° 42: Intro
That Eureka moment!
Legend has it that when Archimedes concluded that the volume of water that he displaced when getting into his bath was equal to the volume of his body, he ran outside naked shouting Eureka – the Greek for ‘Ive found it!’ Since then the history of science has been regularly punctuated with eureka moments; moments that have often cemented the reputation and celebrity of the person who first experienced it. Some eureka moments have become the stuff of legend, like when the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head, or when Einstein first hit upon his theory of relativity, or when Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse first established the existence of alternating current in addition to Thomas Edison’s direct current. Of course, a eureka moment is not always a random, one-off occurrence; nor is it necessarily the result of serendipity. Sometimes that momentous moment of enlightenment is achieved after years of struggling to find the truth or to identify a solution to a seemingly insoluble conundrum; years when that solution was often very close and yet tantalisingly just out of reach. But when that moment of enlightenment occurred it was no less a eureka moment than if it had just spontaneously happened.
Recently the Belgian physicist Professor François Englert, and his British counterpart Professor Peter Higgs, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for predicting the existence of the elusive particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets. The insight they provided has been hailed as crucial for the understanding of the cosmos. Without the Englert-Higgs mechanism all particles would travel at the speed of light and an explanation of atoms and how they work would not exist. The eminent professors, together with the other scientists who worked alongside them, predicted some fifty years ago the existence of what we call today the ‘Englert-Higgs boson’. But it wasn’t until 2012 that the ‘new building block of nature’ was finally detected at the state of the art facilities of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Switzerland. When the multinational, multidisciplinary teams at CERN finally demonstrated, with the help of the large hadron collider, the existence of the Englert-Higgs boson, and were able to ‘touch’ one of modern science’s Holy Grails, they shouted out eureka. The euphoria of this moment was fully justified, even though it took fifty years - and around €20 billion of expenditure - for evidence to transform theory into reality. Happily, both professors are alive and well today and able to enjoy the worldwide recognition that goes with being Nobel laureates. Better late than never, I suppose!
The global nuclear community owes a great deal to these two great physicists and to their colleagues at CERN. We are, to some extent, custodians of their legacy. Some of the more senior ENS members among us may well have worked with or met Peter Higgs and François Englert. Others may have found inspiration from their work and followed closely how CERN brought it to fruition. One thing is for sure, without pioneering scientists like Higgs, Englert, Einstein or Fermi our understanding of the planet would not be as advanced as it is today. Perhaps it’s time that the general public was better able to understand the significance of their pioneering work and its relevance to their everyday lives; to put the contribution of nuclear science into its proper context?
Mark O’Donovan
Editor-in-Chief, ENS NEWS
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