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For the SSC: A Scientific Adventure for the Nineties
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13474 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
1,728 Words |
| Author
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Chris Quigg
Chris Quigg is deputy director for operations of the SSC
Central Design Group in Berkeley, Calif., and visiting
professor of physics at the University of California. |
A century ago, in 1871, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev arranged the chemical elements in the periodic table according to their atomic weights and recognized his classification as an empirical law of nature that scientists could rely on to predict new facts. The periodic system quickly became the operational basis for modern chemistry, but an understanding of why the periodic system worked required decades of experimentation, leading to the creation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Together these two products of basic research, the periodic system of the elements and quantum mechanics, account for much of our commerce and standard of living in the late twentieth century.
Over the past twenty years, elementary particle physicists have constructed a modern equivalent of the periodic table: a classification of the basic constituents of all matter and of the interactions among them. To learn what lies behind this modern "periodic table," new and more incisive experiments will be required in the 1990s. The most technically capable and cost-effective instrument for carrying out these investigations is the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which last January the Reagan administration recommended for construction. The knowledge acquired through understanding the new periodic table could have as profound an impact on life and thought a century hence as the development of modern chemistry and the quantum theory have had on our own generation. Even so abstract a notion as the theory of relativity, which long ago indelibly altered our worldview, now finds practical application in the Global Positioning System, a space- and ground-based navigational network that can pinpoint a user's location to within a few hundred feet.
The Scientific Need
High-energy physics is the ultimate expression of human curiosity about what the world is made of and how the world works. By exploring and codifying basic laws of nature, high-energy physics gives us a deeper understanding of our universe and our place in it, and offers the possibility of putting that knowledge to humane and productive use.
Thanks to a host of experimental findings made possible by particle accelerators in the United States and elsewhere in the world, the last two decades have brought a radically new and simple picture of nature on the most basic level. The resulting great synthesis is known as the "standard model" of elementary particle physics. We have learned that all matter in its diverse forms is assembled from a few basic building blocks called quarks and leptons.
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