There at the entrance, Tom Kroc met me. He was a cheerful man in blue jeans and a work shirt, with amber-gold curly hair and beard. It was a very different look from the grim, dark-clad, and arrogant scientists I knew from the East Coast. Kroc was to be my guide through the complex. I followed him into the long hall of the Linear Accelerator, where, as with the streets of Chicago, a rich, detail-filled perspective stretched off into the distance. Inside a reinforced chamber, the beginning of the atomic journey, was an amazing, shiny structure of rounded corners and columns of cylinders and spheres, where simple hydrogen gas is deconstructed into protons and these protons are sent into the raceway of the Accelerator. We proceeded further along the LINAC as the Linear Accelerator is known, and stood in the long hall next to the proton path, while Kroc patiently explained the process to the totally non-physicist me.
I am a big fan of industrial environments and architecture; steel mills, oil refineries, and power plants thrill me. I was in my element, then, at Fermilab. I had expected a quiet, hidden place, as cautious and silent as a library – but Fermilab’s Linear Accelerator was as noisy as the Chicago El. Spaced along the track were tangles of equipment around big cylindrical engines called “klystrons” (a cool Greek word meaning something like “water injector” or more scatologically, an enema!) These Klystrons, Kroc explained, were like huge electrical transformers, which take electricity from an outside source and hype it up into high-energy microwaves and radio waves, which are then pumped into the proton chambers to impel the little guys on their way. More power! More speed!…The Klystrons made a great shuddering racket, sounding somewhat like heavy printing presses, accompanied by other sounds of electrical hums and the hiss of coolant.
My guide explained just what was being done at Fermilab, and what the scientists were looking for – nothing less than the ultimate nature of the universe. Fortunately, Tom had given this tour to so many people (though not to the public) that he was able to explain this arcane science even to me. The accelerator also had helpful displays for the guests, showing detailed pictures and diagrams of the equipment and the process. What was more, the particle accelerator was being used not only for pure science, but to heal people. Its beam could be directed precisely to burn out cancers, and the wall displays showed patients undergoing treatment along with pictures of before-and after success stories.
Here is where I must apologize to more scientific, abstract, philosophical-minded readers. I am hopelessly mired in Mythos. I cannot look at something, especially a complex system, and not start “mythologizing” it or telling stories about it. The first thing that came to my mind was alchemy – they were doing alchemy here at Fermilab! Kroc knew nothing about alchemy, so I tried to tell him a bit about how the dissolution, smashing, and re-forming of particles was a modern version of the alchemical “solve et coagula” (dissolve and re-form), and that the hydrogen nuclei were the “prima materia” (first material) from which all this flowering of particles arose, much as the old alchemists began with an undifferentiated mass of matter in their attempts to transform it into gold. The Accelerator was the athanor, the furnace in which the prima materia would be transformed. He seemed to get this right away, a quantum alchemist in search of the Philosopher’s Stone, that is, the Theory of Everything that would explain and unite all the forces of the universe.
I also thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy, here under the carefully restored Illinois prairie. This was not the Inferno - there was too much hope here. Perhaps my mountain-loving guide was the poet Vergil, Dante’s guide to Purgatorio, the place of circular purification. This was reinforced by our tour of the Circular Accelerator, or “Tevatron,” where particles sped round and round at ever-faster speeds before blasting each other to bits in collisions. Kroc told of antiprotons held captive in great circular containers, circling until they met their end in a subatomic blaze of energy. Tiny souls, all of them, swirling in Purgatory until they ascend to Quantum Paradise.
I followed Kroc to the top of the tall Fermilab building, where I could look out over the whole complex. With its “processional way” of electrical pylons leading into the great earthwork circle of the Tevatron, it immediately reminded me of the great prehistoric British temple complex of Avebury. In fact, Kroc informed me, a local artist had already thought of that and had created an artwork which portrayed Fermilab and Avebury superimposed on each other, menhirs over the Tevatron. The designer of the complex, phyicist Robert Wilson, had taken care to arrange the whole thing aesthetically, with deliberate echoes of ancient cultures. Perhaps there was more Mythos in the land of Physics than I thought.
There were artworks displayed in many places in the Fermilab headquarters, including some pieces of (non-active) equipment which were so visually interesting that they were displayed as sculptures. Physicists here, who came from dozens of different countries as well as the USA, were treated to a rich cultural life of concerts, art exhibits, theater, and films. Many of the physicists, explained Kroc, also played music or created art themselves.
I had to ask the question: why could physicists be artists and musicians, but artists and musicians not be physicists? I remembered the sarcastic words of a now-departed physicist at my alma mater Brandeis University, who said to the music department faculty: “We physicists come to your concerts, but you never come to our lectures!” Why such asymmetry? Perhaps physics is simply too hard and arduous a discipline – like Jesuits, physicists, already gifted with innate intelligence and mathematical talent, must study for years and years before they can understand and practice their craft, whereas anyone, of any talent or intelligence range, can pick up a guitar or a paintbrush and have fun, no matter how amateurish they might be.
As an artist, I feel the need to challenge that asymmetry, even though I am hindered by my deficient mathematical ability and the constantly distracting play of myth, story, color, and image circulating in my own private mental accelerator.