Managing The World's Biggest, Most Expensive Research Project

Nobelist Sam Ting says his CERN experiment is like the United Nations—‘except we get something done.’ Here’s why GENEVA--"I don’t know what your rules are,” the particle physicist Sam Ting tells. the officials from the Soviet Union as they drink coffee in his Geneva office. “I don’t even care. What I am saying is this: When the announcement of a discovery is made, the people on the podium are the people who get the. credit. If you want your scientists to get the credit they deserve, you will have to change your policies about not letting them work outside the Soviet Union. Obviously, the choice is up to you—not to me. “He smiles. “1 am just a scientist, a single professor at MIT” For the first time in the meeting the Soviet delegation laughs. Whatever they think about their rules and Ting’s desire that they break them, the Soviets know that he is not just a scientist, a single prof essor at MIT the leader of the biggest and most costly scientific experiment ever attempted. Deep beneath the foothills of the mountains separating France and Switzerland, an enormous project is nearing completion a particle accelerator 27 kilometers—nearly 17 miles—around. Known as LEP (Large Electron-Positron Colli der), the accelerator will house four of the most costly scientific experiments ever performed. Three of the experiments are sponsored by—and receive most of their budget direction from—the home institution, CERN, the 13-nation European Laboratory for Particle Physics. These experiments exemplify the large undertakings, now commonplace in science, that have come to be called Big Science. The fourth experiment is something again. Known, unromantically, as L3, it is run by Samuel C.C. Ting of MIT who won a Nobel Prize in 1976 and has spent most of his time since preparing this new endeavor. L3 is a jump in scale over the other three Big Science experiments; with 450 physicists from 39 academic institutions and thousands of supporting technicians and engineers from governments and industries in Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan, it is the biggest, most international, and most expensive single piece of pure research ever performed. Depending on which figures are used for the value of the dollar, and which national accounting system is employed, L3’s annual budget is somewhere between $200 million and $400 million dollars—that’s the cost of an entire accelerator. Amazing as these figures are, they may not, in the long run, be nearly as remarkable as the way Ting has financed and managed L3. This experiment is not sponsored by an institution—it is an institution, nominally housed at CERN, but really at home only in the transnational arena of science. “L3 is just like the United Nations,” Ting says. “Except that we get something done.” The centerpiece of L3 is a particle detector the size of a five-story building. Jammed with sophisticated electronics, the detector wraps completely around the point where the particles collide, measuring everything that happens inside with what Ting and his collaborators hope will be unparalleled precision. The scientific goals of the experiment are many, but the great ambition is to learn something about a long-hypothesized particle called the Higgs boson—a particle that is integral to modern theories of particle interactions but that has never been seen. Its discovery may provide, at last, clues to one of the great unsolved physical questions: What is the nature of mass? For years, particle physicists have wondered in vain why, for instance, the proton’s mass is 1,840 times that of the electron, whereas the photon and neutrino seem to have no mass at all. In the 1960s, a variety of theorists tackled an aspect of this problem. The most promising solution involves the Higgs boson, whose interactions with other particles may give rise to mass. For technical reasons, the Higgs boson is thought to be rarely produced at ordinary energies, and may be exceedingly difficult to distinguish in the churning morass of interactions created by high-energy particles hitting each other. Ting and one of his long-term collaborators, Ulrich Becker of MIT came to the conclusion in 1979 that the question of the Higgs existence could only be resolved with a detector of unprecedented precision, which in turn required a detector of unprecedented size and intricacy—so big and complicated that the project could not be funded by any single institution, like CERN, or even by any single nation, like the U.S. Now, a decade of unremitting work later, the researchers are beginning the final stages of assembly on the L3 detector. Like an onion, the detector proper consists of layers every one designed to measure a specific type of particle. Each layer is difficult to construct, and each is enormously expensive—the magnetic “cage” that covers the detector proper is alone made from more iron than the Eiffel Tower. “At the beginning,” says Hans Hofer, a Swiss physicist who is one of L3's co-spokesmen, “everybody said L3 would never work because each layer relied on an extraordinary amount of untested, state-of-the-art equipment. We were forced to start with only minimal support from CERN. We were all outsiders—which has turned out to be fortunate, because we now have much greater freedom from outside supervision.” Such freedom has its costs: Ting has spent much of the last 10 years a captive of airlines, hotels, and bureaucracies. Playing the roles of politician, lawyer, customs agent, administrator, Ting has had to fly from one funding nation to another, telling each government that the experiment is so vital, so technically advanced, so likely to make a major discovery that it simply cannot allow its physicists to be locked out, and that each country must figure out some way to contribute people and materials. Every step along the way, L3 has run into problems that are far beyond the purview of particle physics as it has thus far been practiced. The hassles with customs are difficult; supplies for L3 often have to cross a dozen borders before arriving in Switzerland. One shipment of high-precision equipment was dumped in the snows of the Pyrenees for several months in 1986 because Spanish border officials refused to believe that such a huge amount of high-precision material was destined for duty-free research rather than for industry. Even the technical problems—the physics problems—have had international ramifications. One layer of the L3 detector, for example, is made from some 8,000 crys tals, each more than nine inches long, of bismuth germanium oxide, which in its crystalline form has remarkable sensitivity to low-energy photons. The lowest bidder—by far—for the formidable task of making the BGO was the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, a branch of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences. But Ting ran into a wall when he tried to make a contract with the institute. Under Chinese law, workers once hired cannot be fired, meaning that the Institute of Ceramics would be stuck with supporting the extra workers long after the experiment ended. A Nobel laureate of Chinese heritage, Ting was able to go right to the top—a meeting with China’s leader Teng Hsiao-p’ing. “I explained the problem,” Ting said. “He listened attentively, he’s a smart man; he was interested in what we were doing. He said, ‘It will be arranged.”’ But that was only the first of Ting’s problems with the BGO crystals. Although Shanghai had the technology to grow the crystals, it lacked the equipment needed to mill them to the ultraprecise specifications of L3. The requisite high-tech device was made in France, where the government regarded it as part of the national patrimony. After weeks of negotiation, Ting finally finagled the French government into shipping its equipment to Shanghai And all this was merely a prelude to what many other scientists had said was impossible—making the crystals. But building each layer of the onion has involved the impossible. To carry it off Ting has had to become more manager than scientist. First of all, he knew he needed a multinational organization of researchers, engineers, computer operators, and bureaucrats—there are now thousands and they are bursting the seams of a four-story building at the CERN campus. And he has needed to sit through lengthy meetings—not about science but about such critical topics as how to allocate office space. Says Ting, somewhat ruefully: “I’m not even a scientist any more. I haven’t done any science for years.” And the human tensions that naturally arise in a project of such magnitude ultimately land in the lap of ex-scientist Samuel C.C. Ting. Often the young scientists who work 18 hours a day with a wrench resent the senior physicists who seem to breeze in once a week; the older researchers in turn feel burdened with paperwork and isolated from the real physics; and both worry that they might spend years on an aspect of the experiment that gets eliminated from the final project when money runs short. Although Ting shares their frustrations, he does little to soothe them; Ting is not a handholder. He tries to keep the scientists focused on their first love: physics. He gives them the same rationale he lives himself. “If you want to do physics nowadays, this is how you have to do it.” He also has to confront bruised feelings over the inevitable tussles for resources. With different subgroups from different nations working on different sections of the experiment, there is considerable competition for resources within L3. At the outset of the experiment, for instance, Ting adopted a design by University of Michigan physicist Michael Longo for the hadron calorimeter—the uranium containing layer that absorbs heavy particles and measures their energy. The Soviets, however, urged a modification that would enable them to mass-produce the calorimeter pieces with the technology available to Moscow. To some members of the collaboration, the modified design was unnecessarily cumbersome—”It’s like trying to kill a mosquito with an elephant gun,” a non-Michigan L3 member told The Scientist. Tensions mounted—and then exploded—at a 1985 Moscow meeting when Yuri Galaktianov, leader of the Russian side of the collaboration and head of the hadron calorimeter group, overrode Longo’s protests and adopted the modification. Michigan protested to Ting, the ultimate authority in a clash, between two large subgroups. Ting upheld Galaktianov. Then Longo stormed out. Ting fired him. Gone was one of the most brilliant experimenters the U.S. could offer U; on the other hand, Ting had held together the collaboration, which could not have readily survived the departure of the Soviets or the strains of keeping both groups happy. Now embittered, Longo is finding that his ability to raise funds for his own work has been hurt. Longo is not the only one who has had problems with Ting. Unlike most senior experimenters, Ting is not working on a half-dozen projects simultaneously; L3 is everything to him. He works seven days a week on his experiment, and, he says, hasn’t been to a physics conference in five years. Such single-mindedness has led to two different kinds of criticism: one that Ting is megalomaniacal, the other that be’s downright ruthless. A decade ago, when his team was one of three with evidence for a new subatomic particle called the “gluon,” Ting twisted arms both in scientific journals and in the popular press to make sure his data were published first. This attention-grabbing behavior angered just about everybody in particle physics except, of course, the other members of his collaboration. Some team members will say his arm-twisting was just another indication that he is a fierce team-player. But the term “fierce” is also used by those among his enemies who accuse him of ruthlessness. The principal complaint seems to be that he browbeats coworkers over their errors. (He also bestows praise, but the tongue lashings linger longer in memory.) “He’s broken some people’s careers,” says one former collaborator. ‘There are people driving taxis because of him.” But here again, his supporters argue that he’s only exhibiting the toughness necessary to carry off a huge, complicated project on an international scale. They point out that Ting does not play favorites, caring only about the physics, and he is as likely to damn the work of the most senior professor as the youngest graduate student. Four times a year, Ting’s toughness is on display when the L3 collaboration holds a general meeting in Geneva. Not all members attend—airfare is too expensive, and there’s too much work to be done—but as many as a third of the members listen to progress reports in a big CERN auditorium. On the stage at the meeting last May, Ting listened impassively; occasionally he silently paced up and down the aisles. The presentations were laced with engineering jargon that was often incomprehensible to those working on other parts of the experiment, Ting’s comments, however, couldn’t be misconstrued: “I don’t understand,” he informed one member of a subgroup working on the electronics. And his tone brooked no argument—”If you can’t make me understand it, it won’t go in the detector.” An explanation followed. Ting waved his hand dismissively. “If it’s too complicated, it won’t work,” he said, “Make it simpler, or it can’t go in.” And after that: “This must be thoroughly tested before it goes in, because once it’s in the detector, it’s almost impossible to get it out.” Despite the occasional trauma, such meetings provide a salve to one of the most frequent fears young researchers have about Big Science: that they will be buried in the collaboration, and not have any chance to gain recoguition. The ranks of U today include as many physicists as were working in the 1920s, and come from as many institutions. Hence the accomplishments of the bright newcomers are quickly displayed to an international community at these meetings, and word of their feats soon spreads around the globe. Border questions, quality control, trade agreements, computer security—the concerns of L3 portend important changes in the way science will be done in the future. Such changes, Ting and his collaborators emphasize, were not consciously sought. They were an inevitable outgrowth of physics itself. “Nobody said, ‘Hey, let’s get 450 people together and make a gigantic experiment like this,’ “ says Ulrich Becker, Ting’s MIT colleague and one of L3's original designers. “We said, ‘How do we find the Higgs boson?’ And to answer that they had to build a device this big. The scale is unavoidable. It is just following the physics. And the physics will continue to get bigger, and physicists will be less and less ‘just scientists.’ “He must be thinking of Samuel C.C. Ting. Robert P Crease and Charles C. Mann are co-authors of The Second Creation, a history of particle physics.

Managing The World's Biggest, Most Expensive Research Project

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