PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

3. INANIMATE PRODUCTION LIKE ANIMATE REPRODUCTION
In gathering the data concerning the construction of cathedrals, I had
to distinguish Gothic cathedrals from large churches. I also had to estimate
a cornerstone date for old churches that were “upgraded” to
cathedrals later. Such uncertainties may be responsible for some scattering
in the data points above and below the fitted natural-growth curve.
In any case one can safely draw the overall conclusion that Europe’s
need for Gothic cathedrals was largely satisfied in a “natural” way by
A.D. 1400 (Appendix C, Figure 3.5).
In more recent times physicists have built laboratories of extravagant
dimensions called particle accelerators or atom smashers. Some time
ago in an inaugural speech, the director general of the European Center
for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, where some of the world’s
largest accelerators can be found, referred to particle accelerators as the
cathedrals of today. This image suggested among other things that an
end to this “species” should also be expected, so I decided to study their
evolution and probe into their future. Atom smashers proliferated after
World War II to produce a population whose growth has followed the
same pattern as supertankers and cathedrals did before. The historical
data I collected in this case consist of the number of particle accelerators
coming into operation worldwide. The S-curve fitted on them approaches
a ceiling in 1990 (Appendix C, Figure 3.6).
Each accelerator counts as one even if the size of the device varied
significantly over the years. The early setups were of modest dimensions.
The Cosmotron of Brookhaven National Laboratory, where
preliminary work for the discovery of the antiproton was carried out in
the 1950s, was housed inside one big hall. At CERN, the ring of the
electron accelerator LEP was completed in 1989. It measures eighteen
miles in circumference, lies deep underground, and passes under suburbs
of Geneva, several villages, and the nearby mountains. LEP’s underground
tunnel was the largest and the last to be constructed. A later
proposal for an accelerator in Texas, the Superconducting Super Collider
(SSC), involving an underground tunnel with a circumference of
almost fifty-four miles was rejected by the US government. The rejection
came as a confirmation that the “dinosaur’s” size became too large
for survival.
One may think that accelerators like the Cosmotron and LEP, being
so different in size, should not both count as one in defining the population.
On the other hand, building the Cosmotron with the know-how of
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