Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Billions invested, a cast of thousands waits for colossal collisions…

No, not Nascar but fans of CERN’s particle-smasher, expecting suicide crashes of proton-on-proton by 2008. (Nice article in the NYT by Dennis Overbye, plus lots of pictures.) Frank and I head to Switzerland May 30 for some tours that I hope will create less controversy than Robert Scoble’s!

I bugged Frank at dinner for a plain explanation of what these new experiments–higher energies than all previous ones–are going to show. Translating his words into my own simplified words–we’re smashing a giant metaphorical goose-egg to find out which of three kinds of stuff might lurk inside.

• Possibility #1: Evidence for supersymmetry(golden goose egg!) A bunch of new particles whose behavior strongly suggests we’ve discovered a matching set to the ones seen before–squarks, gluinos, and similar strange etc.
• Possibility #2: New totally weird stuff (metaphorically–I dunno–mermaids swimming in eggyolk?). Stuff nobody predicted, so we have to go back to zero and re-tool our theories to fit the new mess–maybe with a suspicion that CERN’s detectors weren’t working properly.
• Possibility #3: Just what we’ve seen before (awww, egg yolk and egg white). The same exact particles we already know about, doing the stuff that we already understand.

Bonus links!!!

• I stuck the particle-smashing image from the NYT next to the rose window of the Cathedral of Chartres (a high-minded collaboration on a massive scale that predates CERN by just a bit less than 1000 years) because Frank says that particle colliders are the Gothic cathedrals of our era.
• The very first image on the World Wide Web was those amazing singers Les Horribles Cernettes! (Thanks to Lubos Motl for this info.)
• Cernettes singing “You Only Love Your Collider” in RealMedia video.

Ah 1999–the summer my husband Frank Wilczek almost blew up the universe, as recently dredged up by the latest New Yorker.

Fans of the universe will be glad to know that you were in no danger, because I was on the job on your behalf.

1999 Betsy: But the universe is not going to blow up, right?
1999 Frank: Of course not.
Betsy: You really thought about it and it’s not.
Frank: Yes, I did. And no, it’s not.
Betsy: Good, because if it blew up I’d be so mad at you…

The New Yorker starts their version of this story when Scientific American decided to publish…

…a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine.

Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish. Wilczek labelled his own suggestion “not plausible,” but the damage had been done. “BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH” ran the headline in the London Times. Brookhaven was forced to appoint a committee to look into this and other disaster scenarios. (The committee concluded that “we are safe from a strangelet initiated catastrophe.”)

“I know Frank Wilczek,” Engelen told me. “He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve.” Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”

One missing piece of this widely-quoted version–The letter Frank wrote for SA was never published. Frank wrote them a carefully detailed reply to a non-physicist’s black-hole concerns. What SA published, with Frank’s name at the end of it, had been edited down to much more a dramatic nub by somebody somewhere inside SA.

If I’d just had a blog then, we could have talked back to this story in real time.

Jim Clash of The Adventurers" with Frank and Betsy

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…and even more so when hanging out with Jim Clash for his Forbes TV show The Adventurers.

Another adventurer (the one who took this photo) was Kevin O’Brien, whose adventures involve exploring caves and the waters therein. Watch out for Gollum, Kevin!

Before the show, I got to geek out with cool TV studio toys, and afterward we went out to lunch at the Gotham. Now, if only Jim had told us about his own terrible South Pole adventure before I ordered that plate of petit fours…

Can’t read the headlines?

• All-singing, All-dancing Nobel guy
• Einstein: “Know when to hold ’em.”
• Extra dimensions? CERN says no.
• Want wit, wisdom? Eat salmon, soy!
• Turkey is no longer a superfood.
• Blueberries hold the secret of eternal life!

You too, or your sweetie, can be similarly featured thanks to this crazy promo page sponsored by Xerox.

Spacetime and springtime on the kitchen counter

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Frank got home late last night from Texas–McMurry University gave him a really neat present, a wooden box with a compass and watch inside it. Or, as Frank explained it to me “Space and time.”

Where should I photograph this cool little toy? As it happened, on the counter next to our sink one of many small grocery-store spring plants was in fresh bloom. Then I decided the stoneware casserole with a dragon on top of it would make another good addition to the photo.

Ahh, multitasking. Can you see from this photo why Linda Stone thinks it’s not such a good idea?

One of the lovely things about snow is the way it reminds us of all our past snowfalls.

• Above, from a just-today scanned box of old slides, my little sis in a long-ago NH winter.
• In 2003, my little dog was thrilled by two feet of snow.
• In 2004, with Frank a just-named Nobel laureate, a Swedish TV crew photographed us walking through November snowfall.
• In 2005, maple-syrup candy in snow created (a miracle!) the shape of Kokopelli.
• February 2006 piled blizzardy snow up over my boot-tops.

Thanks to my blog (and Flickr) all these snow memories are still here to enjoy. I wonder if, fifty years from now, their zeroes-and-ones will be as accessible to future someones as the dusty old box of slides I just scanned into jpegs…

Captain White Socks (1984 – 1996) entered our lives as a small, mostly-tiger kitten that Amity heard about from her camp-bus driver. Such was Cappy’s charm that it smote us all at once, even as we gasped at the giant fleas crawling out of his ears and over his tiny tummy.

Quick veterinarian action intervened.

Years passed, during which Cappy grew large and bold, treating our family with a courtly affection but expecting to be the alpha (neutered) male in his interactions with any outsiders. He was lordly (not to say a bit aggressive) and he may well have been chasing a car when he met his end. I had imagined that he (like our other cat Sylvester) always stayed in our back yard but kept away from the street.

It wasn’t so. There was a slight drizzle falling from the sky when I was summoned by the doorbell, and a very contrite driver, to look at Cappy’s now limp but still beautiful corpse, spangled with fog drops.

To my dismay taxidermists turned me down flat when I asked about getting Cappy “preserved” so that he could lie curled up on some mantel or windowsill. My children were baffled. We had been to Chincoteague and seen the body of Misty “mounted” (they don’t call it “stuffed”) for eternal memory. We had stayed in New Zealand with people whose parlors displayed even (now somewhat motheaten) dogs they had loved in their childhood.

But even though we were by then in Princeton, NJ, so that I was able to pester taxidermists all the way from NYC to Philadelphia, nobody wanted to “mount” our old Cappy so that we could keep him. “We don’t do pets,” more than one surly old-timer told me. Meanwhile, in our freezer, Cappy lay curled up in a giant plastic bag surrounded by frozen peas and fudge-ripple ice cream.

Frank, of course, had a truly unique suggestion: “Don’t say it’s a pet. Tell them I shot it.” Somehow, I hadn’t the chutzpah to try his method.

In the end, finally, I bought some beautiful cloth that was black and golden, like Cappy, to wrap him up in. We buried him in the back yard. Einstein’s back yard, which was our back yard way back then.

But if there’s a resurrection, Einstein can’t have him because we want Cappy back!

“Valdivia is a little city with some big rivers flowing to the Pacific Ocean, not very far away. The riverfront market every day has lots of very fresh fish as well as farm vegetables, and raspberries for about 35 cents a basket. If you buy fish from one of the kind fisher-ladies, she guts them on her wood table and tosses the skin back over her shoulder to happy sea lions who wait in the river below.

We have a nice two-bedroom apartment, to get hot water you need to light the special hotwater heater, but it is really quite modern with a tv, lots of US shows with Spanish subtitles which (I like to think) will improve my Spanish if I watch them.”

That’s from some email I sent in 2001, during a previous visit to Valdivia, in southern Chile. In about an hour, we’re headed there again (three changes of airplane, about 24 hours door to door).

All absolutely worth it to be part of the party celebrating the inauguration of Chile’s wonderful Centro de Estudio Ciéntificos.

Then we head a bit further south, because we’ve been invited to ride around below Tierra del Fuego on a converted Chilean navy ship–a few days there, then another 24-hour trip home, then 24 hours to do all the laundry, and a 24-hour-ish flight to Japan.

If my younger self, who longed to travel the world, could see me now she’d be very satisfied.

Happy birthday in St. Thomas…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

What I’ve been up to….

The oxygen atom, thinking about the scientist Eve

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

My new career, glamor photographer–this is fun! But then, my first 637 careers were fun also…

Career number 638 is “scientist wrangler.” I have to organize 5 volunteers with laser beams who will–but I don’t want to spoil the ending.

“Scientist wrangler.” That sounds a bit like my career number 432. And 527 and maybe 611 also…