Heat (47 page)

The collider at Brookhaven is 2.4 miles in circumference and can, according to some sources, generate gold ion collisions with a power of 40 tera electron volts. The collider near Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has a circumference of 17 miles and can, according to some sources, generate lead ion collisions with a power of 574 tera electron volts.

Like Tyndall in his biography of Faraday, Enrico Fermi, in an address called “The Future of Nuclear Physics” (Rochester, N.Y., January 10, 1953), also commented on the value of basic research, such as the research that would be done a half century later at Brookhaven: “History of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule.”

Copyright © 2013 by Bill Streever
Cover design by Keith Hayes; photograph by John Lund/Corbis
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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ISBN 978-0-316-21528-2