“Trivelpiece had been granted 15 minutes to win the president’s support for the largest and most costly atom smasher ever conceived. A green light, the advocates said, would guarantee American dominance at the forefront of high-energy physics for decades to come. Without his backing for the project, the nation’s historic leadership in unraveling the nature of matter was sure to fade as other countries pushed on.
“The Superconducting Supercollider sounded like the kind of diabolical weapon a comic-book super-villain might build in his (or her) lair to hold the world to ransom. In practice, it was the world’s first particle accelerator to be designed specifically to look for the Higgs boson….
“The supercollider wasn’t the only machine that had a chance of discovering the Higgs boson. At Fermilab, [physicist Leon M. Lederman’s] Tevatron had been colliding protons and antiprotons since 1985, though at energy levels too low to prove the existence of the Higgs particle. At CERN, engineers were building a new machine, the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider, and were expecting to switch it on within two years. Both machines would need major upgrades before the scientists would have a realistic shot at discovering the Higgs boson, but at least they were up and running. In the particle accelerator business, that is no trivial achievement….
“Trivelpiece had set off early for the meeting, but along the way fell into conversation with William Martin, the deputy secretary of energy. Martin wasted no time reminding him that a lot of time and money had been spent arranging the meeting. He went on to add that all of Alvin’s friends and colleagues were relying on him to win the president over. ‘Now don’t be nervous,’ Martin said, as he turned to leave. Right up to that moment, Trivelpiece hadn’t been nervous at all.”
BOOKS The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Live Without It, by Philip Ball. Oxford University Press, 2010
Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, by David Wootton. Yale University Press, 2010
Creeping Failure: How We Broke the Internet and What We Can Do to Fix It, by Jeffrey Hunker. McClelland & Stewart, 2010
Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life, by Richard Cohen. Random House, 2010
Honeybee Democracy, by Thomas D. Seeley. Princeton University Press, 2010
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey. Doubleday, 2010
Moon: A Brief History, by Bernd Brunner. Yale University Press, 2010
Preparing for Climate Change, by Michael D. Mastrandrea and Stephen H. Schneider. MIT Press, 2010
White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, by Carl Elliott. Beacon Press, 2010
EXHIBITS Brain: The Inside Story, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City from November 20, 2010, through August 14, 2011
Cyprus: Crossroads of Civilizations, at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., through May 1, 2011
