Impressions and
Associations of a Bogazici University Lecture
dedicated
to Emine Gürpınar who magically welcomed me at CERN
Prof. Rolf Heuer, the former director
of CERN (2009-2015), who is also known as the man who introduced the world to
Higgs Boson, gave a lecture on 03 February 2016 at Bogazici University. I had marked
the date on my calendar a while ago. The full title of the lecture was "The
Role of Science for the Sustainable Development of Society – in particular the
Role of Large Scientific Infrastructures". Don't bother googling that title,
you won't be able to find it since he changed the name last minute from "Science and Sustainability – The Role of Unique International Facilities".
It was during his position that the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -huge particle accelerator- located at CERN in
Geneva was in full function. Both in Turkish and in English, in every
talk, it is also referred to as "atom smasher" and the Higgs boson as the "god
particle". Both terms are provocative and curious ways of twisting vocabulary.
There are personal and sociological reasons as to why I am drawn into the topic
and the way Prof. Rolf Heuer presented it to a university audience, made up of
graduate and undergraduate students, retired physics professors, faculty, and
some administrators.
The talk was deliberately designed to be
jargon-free and was decorated with several small jokes spread into the
German-accented calm and self-confident manner that Prof. Heuer delivered his
speech. I will begin with two points that Heuer proudly underlined:
1. CERN is free from political issues
so that scientists from all around the world can work in a smooth and efficient
manner. Shedding this national layer of one’s self is extremely important,
Heuer said, considering the huge egos of the academics. It indeed sounds
impossible and I cannot help wondering how much is covered in this statement.
He sometimes wished that if only politicians could work in this manner! Later,
however, during the Q&A session, when two questions regarding politics were
asked his face became more serious and he underlined that the success of CERN
is absolutely due to its exclusion of politicians. He said politicians are
welcome to visit, and one has to show a face in political gatherings such as
Davos, but keeping the politics off from the mecca of science is crucial.
2. The letter E of CERN, which
used to stand for Europe now stands for Everywhere and the statistics
were shown to underline the multi-nationality of the people working for the
institute. Diversity, Heuer has observed, influences the ways of thinking and
exploring among other things. Having collaboration and competition
simultaneously sounds like the ideal combination for success for him, although
one of the questions posed by a female social scientist was whether it was
possible to eliminate the competition element and keep the collaboration only.
Prof. Heuer replied that he doesn't believe in the progress without
competition. I remain skeptical on this statement.
The third point he made combines itself
to no.2 since it is about sharing wider. Prof. Heuer made great effort toward
the educational and outreach activities of CERN. "We need to train more
scientists and make science more attractive to the students at a young age" he
said, and provided some examples. Turkey's membership to CERN was signed in May
2015, and he named Bogazici faculty in the team.
My Personal
Fascination:
CERN as an Intangible
Way to Enlighten Humankind
A Criticism by a
Former Turkish Physicist
All of us need to be reminded regularly
(set a reminder on your cell phone!) of the dark energy and "dark matter" which
account for the other 96% of the universe. How little we know yet how big our
egos are or the importance we attribute to our lives in our small worlds. How
much we exaggerate our problems and how badly we destroy the planet, the bio-systems and how we consume products made in Asia with the sweat of under-age
laborers… The list is huge and so is the dark matter.
What Heuer referred
to as "disruptive innovation" (the type of
discovery whose consequences cannot be predicted and go off balance) is also fascinating for me. Engaging in it is pure adrenaline! Scholars who are dedicated to the questions such as "what
happened right after the Big Bang?" or "how is it possible that the matter and
anti-matter does not destroy each other?" are extremely attractive for me (men
or women). I am not necessarily referring to a sexual attraction, it is more
than that, it is the combination of brainpower, creativity and discipline,
exactly this combo, which I find incredibly captivating. I hope to make more
friends coming from that realm, not only study their lives but become part of
it.
The dancing Shiva
symbolizes the life force in the Hindu Trinity. He is the Creator, Sustainer,
and the Destroyer. Creation is sparked by the vibration of drum in his right
hand, sustenance by the open palm of the front right arm, the fire in the left
arm dissolves the universe.
There I was,
standing by the statue, and asking myself why Shiva and why here at CERN? Now here is a curious 'coincidence': In
Islam, Allah is also Al-Khaliq (Creator), Ar-Razzaq (Sustainer), and Al-Mumit
(Causing/Bringing Death) but for 'some reason', I could not imagine having Asma al-Husna (names of God) engraved in a
decorative manner in the garden of CERN. A gift from Pakistan maybe?
I think Prof. Heuer marketed CERN successfully for the Bogazici audience.
Maybe he was genuine, maybe he wanted to or required to act that way. Just for the record, the new director is Fabiola
Gianotti, the first woman director in CERN's history. There is even a book
about being a female physicist Mary K. Gaillard, A Singularly Unfeminine
Profession: One Woman's Journey in Physics, who also worked at CERN and wrote that she had to harness 'survival
mechanism' while in the circle.
And speaking of women in particle physics, one of my favorite authors in
contemporary Turkish literature Aslı Erdogan, an outspoken rebel, criticized
the conditions of CERN where she received her MA degree on Higgs Boson (1993)
after completing a summer course. In an interview on CNN-Turk, in response to
the speculations on the Higgs Boson and whether it can be the space after the
search of God, she said:
"I don't look for God in a physics lab, I look in the acts of humanity instead. I think the last place to find God is
a physics lab. I didn't feel I belonged to CERN and the life we led there. Even
the 'lazy' ones like myself averaged a 15-hour work per day, and you
don't have the luxury of making any mistakes because it is a team work, there
is a chain-reaction structure. It was at CERN that I decided to quit physics,
the competition was relentless."
In fact, Aslı Erdogan's first novel, Kabuk
Adam (Shell Man), has a group of international physicists in the background
who are gathered on a Caribbean island. It
is a story of an irrepressible desire between a Caribbean assassin and a white
woman. It introduced a new theme where a woman's desire was in the forefront,
which is very unusual especially for Turkish literature. The Caribbean man,
toughened from being tortured and an assassin, becomes the woman’s object of
desire. It is worth reading even for checking out the tension in the
protagonist’s life versus the lives of the physicists. It is very tempting
to compare what Prof. Heuer said about the link between competition and
progress (a linear approach to life and science) and how Aslı Erdogan commented
about her stories. She said: "There is no linear narrative, they are all cyclical yet each
recurring theme or sentence comes back in a transformed form".
No wonder she felt alienated
at CERN and questioned the narrative that was constructed under definitions of
success, career or team-work. I wondered if I was the only one in the audience who was thinking of Aslı
Erdogan (also Bogazici alumni) while simultaneously admiring Prof. Heuer who
concluded his talk with some lines from Guardian
(4 March 2015):
"The point is that
Europe is working together in a thrilling intellectual exploration that can
have no conceivable commercial or political payoff but could, in some still
intangible way, enlighten all humankind. In these otherwise murderous and
mean-spirited times, that is something to salute".
Oops, did I just hear the word Europe there? I thought it was replaced with the word "everywhere" !
I can only hope
that it is less than 96% of my small universe (my heart and brain) which
consists of the dark matter. I should confess though that I have always welcomed
dark humor of all cultures and times into my gray cells, or the gray matter as
they say…
| I cannot narrate light because I don't know it |
