This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2008. We ran it here in 2016.
From a glass-enclosed visitor’s gallery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, I watched three technicians, encased in white suits, slowly affix bits of equipment to a large aluminum frame, the platform of an SUV-sized rover to Mars.
My most recent visit to JPL, last September, let me see the Mars 2020 rover being assembled in the same clean room where I saw Curiosity being put together, ten years earlier.Two sets of steering rockets were already attached; two large metal spheres painted black and gold were seated nearby. “Those are the fuel tanks, right?” I asked my friend Steve, an engineer on the project who guided my tour. “Like the ones that blew up the Mars Orbiter in the 1980s?” Every piece has a necessary function, and every piece has a history of what can happen if it goes wrong. Even with a recent string of triumphs, Mars probe failures still outnumber the successes.
Each piece is added in a carefully scripted order, with a quality-control specialist looking on: the torque wrench must not overtighten a nut, the accelerometer must not be installed upside down this time. It’s quite a show. Each bit of assembly calls on the engineers to move arms and hands and fingers with a control as fine as any dancer’s. We watch one technician carefully wrap a set of wires in thin golden tape; and just as carefully, unwrap them again.
“Oops,” I comment.
“Maybe he was supposed to do that,” suggests Steve.
In Switzerland, another such team is completing CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, to finally reveal the existence and nature of the theorized Higgs boson. What’s a Higgs boson? In the standard model for how ordinary matter is constructed from subatomic particles, the various ingredients of matter are labeled either “fermions” or “bosons” (named for Enrico Fermi and Satyendra Nath Bose). Roughly speaking, fermions help define the space that matter occupies (such that two things can’t occupy the same space at the same time) while bosons define how bits of matter interact with each other. Most of these particles are well known, and well measured: protons and electrons are fermions, photons are bosons.
I actually got a tour of the ring at CERN (while it was down) in 2011. Stealing antimatter for the Vatican, no doubt.The one exception are the bits responsible for matter having mass. The theorized mass-bearing boson, the Higgs particle, requires such high energies to produce that until now it has never been seen. That’s one reason the Large Hadron Collider was built. The press have labeled it the “Genesis machine” to search for the “God particle.”
That nickname for the Higgs boson comes from the tongue-in-cheek title of a book by Leon Lederman, retired director of Fermilab; irony-impaired journalists have taken him seriously. Apparently they feel the need for such overwrought metaphors to turn high energy physics in a compelling drama for the general public. This description only embarrasses most physicists, including University of Edinburgh professor Peter Higgs himself.
The deeper point is that, elegant as our standard model is, it needs to be tested. Experiment is the quality control of theory. It’ll be exciting if the Higgs boson is actually detected, because measuring its properties will help flesh out the standard model. It will be even more interesting if it is not detected. It would mean that our theories are in need of serious repair. That would be a truly dramatic result.
Like a West End play, every big production needs its critics: its quality control specialists. It’s part of the overhead for doing big science. You can’t find the Higgs boson on your own.
But fixing a performance from within, while it is running, is tricky. My engineer friend Steve’s role at JPL is to find real-time solutions when a spacecraft in flight gets into trouble. In 2001 he reprogrammed a science camera to replace a blinded navigation camera, so that the Deep Space One probe could find Comet Borrelly.
Where did he learn to make repairs on the fly? His degree is in theatre.
The Mars Curiosity Rover had its spectacularly successful and dramatic landing on Mars in 2010. And CERN announced the Higgs Boson in 2012.
