ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

physics. They would talk particularly about solid state physics. And this has to do with the atomic physics and
the structure that you might fi nd that would be applied to electronics, for example. Traditionally, we call it
condensed matter physics, but solid state physics is the sort of subject matter that’s associated with basically
the electronics industry. So we were thinking at some level about the application of our science to industrial
development, to building things and so forth. And I still have sort of a thought process about building things…
But there came a time when I started to really ask some very fundamental questions about, particularly about
nuclear structure. I didn’t quite understand it, and I began to read and to think more about it and decided that
this might be a reasonable thing for me to start to study. The instruments associated with nuclear structure and
the subject itself. So instead of graduating or leaving in three years to study engineering, I decided to stay an
additional year and fi nish my undergraduate thesis work as well as a bachelors, A.B. degree, Bachelor of Arts
degree in physics.
Clip 4 - Transition to Particle Physics: My fi rst research paper that I published had to do with the study of
looking for heavy elements in an environment of bulk light elements. This came out of a study that was motivated
by the concern that people had about mercury in tuna fi sh. So we were looking for trace amounts of heavy
elements in biological materials. So I had already done radioactive materials in soil samples, so this was not
signifi cantly different to some extent. I got to use a cyclotron to do the work, and that was very signifi cantly different,
rather than just counting the activated materials that were coming off soil. So, during this particular year,
I began to study the heavy elements, or trace elements, in various types of biological materials…I had a lot of
fun doing that, and it’s very interesting, cause I learned a great deal about the new techniques of making thin
targets, about using alpha particles scattering from cyclotrons and also about building and performing an experiment
as well as the analysis of it. After that work, I also received an Alfred P. Sloan travel fellowship basically.
It was suggested by what’s now the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. But I received funds to be able to
do work outside of Michigan State University and my mentor, Dr. Henry Blauser, suggested that I take these
funds to the Central European Laboratory for Particle Physics Research in Geneva, Switzerland. And so this
would be the fi rst time that I’d actually gone to Europe and while at CERN, I made the transition, perhaps to the
disappointment of my mentor, from nuclear and accelerator physics into particle physics.
Clip 5 - Difference Between Physics Types: At some level the difference between nuclear physics and particle
physics is designed to be associated with the energy. So in fact, if I’m dealing with particles that are in the range
of millions of electron volts, and I look at the structure of the nucleus of the atom, which means the protons
and neutrons that make up the structure of the atom, I’m doing nuclear physics. If in fact I want to do particle
physics, I have to go to much, much higher energies because you have to have a high-energy beam to be able
to probe not just into the nucleus of the atom, but into the particles that make up the particles of the nucleus of
the atom. And those particles are known as quarks, or partons. So what we do essentially as an “atom smasher,”
so to speak, is that we break apart the structures that hold the nuclear forces that hold the nuclear components
together within an atom, and that is essentially nuclear interactions. And then, we also take some of the individual
particles with high-energy particle beams, and we break up the components that are inside of the protons
and neutrons that are the massive parts of the atomic structure, and we look at the particles that come out. This
is true conversion between the energy that’s in particle beams and the mass that’s equivalent to that energy. The
E equals MC squared really means something when you’re actually dealing with the production of elementary
particles, because the higher the energy that you’re going to have, the more energy conversion that you can
produce, and in fact the more precision you can have in terms of studying the particles inside of the nuclear
structure.
Clip 6 - Getting more Minority Scientists: If you want to make a scientist that’s even close to being, say, a
high-energy particle physicist, you have to start in the eighth grade. You have to get someone, not necessarily
whether that person is a member of an underrepresented group, but you have to look at the members of underrepresented
groups and say, who’s interested in understanding gravitational lensing, black holes, why the sun
shines, how nuclear structure works, how particles work, CP violation. Anyone who’s interested in doing those
sort of things is the person that you want to support because once you get that particular interest, that you get
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Physics