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Superconductivity leaves the lab

Superconducting magnets are a common tool in many physics and chemistry laboratories, and are used in a host of research applications, including solid-state physics, nuclear-magnetic-resonance chemistry and particle physics. Outside the research lab, the only truly widespread use of superconducting magnets is in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in medicine.

However, applications of superconducting magnets are becoming more diverse. And nowadays, physicists and engineers might equally find themselves in remote mining sites in the Amazonian rainforest or in state- of-the-art hospitals. While such environments represent the extremes, they illustrate the movement of superconducting magnets out of the laboratory and into the wider world (see “Industry warms to superconductors” by Jeffery Tallon Physics World March 2000 pp27-31).

Mineral processing

Magnetic separation in the minerals industry is the largest application of superconducting magnets in industrial processing. Since the early 1990s Oxford Instruments has worked with the Carpco division of Outokumpu Technology Inc., developing magnets for laboratory and full industrial-scale use. Over 30 systems are now in operation across the world, in locations ranging from Cornwall in the UK to Australia, India and Brazil.

A wide variety of materials can be purified using a magnetic-separation system with a high magnetic-field gradient. The technique relies on the fact that the magnetic-separation force is a product of the material susceptibility, the base magnetic field and the field gradient. The main application is in the improvement of kaolin (china clay), which is used in the ceramics and paper industries. Dark-coloured impurities, like iron oxide, tend to be paramagnetic and can be removed from the non-magnetic kaolin using high-gradient magnetic fields. This process increases the “whiteness” of the material, producing a higher grade, and therefore higher value, product.

To separate the magnetic impurities, the raw material is suspended in a wet slurry, and passed through a filter canister in the magnetic field. The filter is typically a fine ferromagnetic matrix, which in its most simple form is similar to steel wool. This matrix creates the high localized magnetic-field gradients that attract and hold the impurities. The system contains a so-called reciprocating canister to avoid downtime while the filter is flushed once it is saturated with impurities. This works by building two filter matrixes into a single long canister such that the filters may be alternated in the magnetic field – one filter processes the slurry while the other is being flushed.

The superconducting magnets used produce a field of 5 tesla and are cooled to 4.2 K using liquid helium. A magnet with a 1 m bore, coupled with a reciprocating canister developed by Carpco, can process over 100 tonnes of material per hour.

In general, magnetic-separation systems operate in demanding environmental conditions, so there is a clear need to have fully robust magnets and to save helium. For example, it can take three weeks to transport liquid helium by sea and river from Sao Paulo to a Brazilian mining site, losing over 30% of the liquid along the way. To avoid further losses, the system uses low-loss cryogenic techniques developed originally for MRI magnets. Specifically, so-called cryocoolers use a fixed volume of helium gas to cool the radiation shields between the room-temperature outer cryostat and the liquid- helium vessel.

To allow the operating costs to be recouped, the magnet must be able to operate for at least 8000 hours per year (i.e. 92% of the time) without interruption. Modern magnets easily meet this standard – even in the most hostile environments.

While high-gradient magnetic separation can be applied to materials that can be suspended in slurry, this is not possible – or desirable – for many materials that could be purified using magnetic fields. An alternative method, known as open-gradient magnetic separation, segregates a stream of dry material falling from a conveyor belt through a field gradient in front of a magnet.

Physicists at Oxford Instruments have designed a cryogen-free “racetrack-coil” magnet to produce the highest possible field and field gradient outside the system, with a geometry that matches the material feed. By removing the liquid-cryogen volume and using a closed-cycle refrigerator operating at 4 K to cool the system, the magnet coil – and thus the region where the field gradient is highest – can be brought close to the outer wall of the cryostat body and the flow of material.

The high field gradients generated by the superconducting magnets can be used to separate weakly magnetic granular materials, such as sand, soda ash, marble and diamonds. In contrast, permanent-magnet separators do not provide a sufficient field and field gradient to separate these dry materials effectively.

Magnets for surgery

An exciting new application for superconducting magnets is a magnetic navigation system that could potentially allow surgeons to steer catheters through the brain and the vascular system. The device that is being developed by Stereotaxis Inc. in St Louis, USA, may allow instruments to be fed through these pathways to deliver drugs, carry out biopsies, close aneurysms and make electrical maps of the heart wall.

The anticipated possible speed and ease of these procedures could potentially offer many benefits to patients and doctors, including more rapid surgical response, a lower level of surgical support and consequent cost savings. Faster procedures could potentially improve patient recovery times. Meanwhile, the number of procedures abandoned due to an inability to properly position the catheter may be greatly reduced.

Oxford Instruments is building a series of magnets for these systems, the first of which was installed earlier this year at the Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St Louis (see figure). Meanwhile, Stereotaxis has developed a range of catheters, each with a small magnetic tip, designed to be oriented by changing the relative magnetic fields of three orthogonal superconducting coils positioned around the patient’s head or chest. Each coil generates a magnetic field of up to 5 tesla, giving a projected field of 0.3 tesla at the centre of the set of the three magnets.

Very high stresses are generated in the magnet coils and surrounding structure due to the high rates at which the magnets are ramped in order to rapidly, and frequently, change the direction of the magnetic field. Intensive finite-element modelling played a key part in the successful magnet design. The magnets have also been designed so that patients may be positioned within the system easily, and so that X-rays can be taken to monitor the position of the catheter tip in real time.

A hemispherical cryostat, quite unlike any conventional superconducting magnet, is used to provide a compact system (see figure). The current leads in the magnet are made from high- temperature superconductors so that the magnetic field can be increased quickly without generating high heating losses. The system also uses a closed-cycle cryocooler operating at 4 K that condenses the liquid-helium vapour so that it falls back into the liquid-helium vessel. This so-called recondensing system reduces the amount of liquid helium required and eliminates the need for a large helium reservoir in the operating theatre. When in use, the magnet should require only 30 litres of helium per month.

Like many technologies, elements of the new superconducting-magnet designs draw heavily on previous experience. For example, the heavy iron shielding on the Carpco magnets helped us to develop stress-modelling and engineering techniques that are now being applied to the Stereotaxis magnets. Similarly, one of the first liquid-helium recondensing systems was used in a Carpco magnet, and this technology is similarly being extended to the Stereotaxis and other systems. As our engineering experience continues to grow, it is likely to enable more and more superconducting-magnet applications in the future.

Beyond understanding 2

Over the past 15 years there have been significant increases in the coverage of science in the mass media and the number of hands-on science centres in the UK, two developments that would be expected to foster better “public understanding of science”. But as noted in Who’s Misunderstanding Whom? (see links), a new report on the relationship between science and the media, recent attempts to introduce genetically modified (GM) crops and foods in the UK have “re-ignited a sense of frustration about the difficulties of conducting science in a society where public knowledge about science relies upon increasingly unreliable mass media”.

Commissioned by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) and written by Ian Hargreaves, professor of journalism at Cardiff University, Who’s Misunderstanding Whom? is a commentary on the existing literature about science and the media, including a recent report by a House of Lords select committee that reached many similar conclusions (Physics World April p15). One surprising fact to emerge is that there has been very little quantitative research into the interaction between scientists and the media, and almost none into science on television.

Indeed, as part of the report, Hargreaves asked a group of journalists how accurately and fairly the mainstream media represents science and scientists: a large majority replied either “satisfactorily” or “inadequately”, with none replying “very well”. However, they were just as adamant that scientists did not understand the workings of the media. A recent article by Roger Highfield of the Daily Telegraph – voted the best paper for science in the new report – gives some idea of the environment in which the science writers on national newspapers work: “[The public] distrust hacks as much as boffins. But scientists could still learn from journalists. Journalists think carefully about their audience and communicate accordingly. Each day I search […] to find news of interest to my readers (not to educate them with what scientists think they ought to know). I face stiff competition within the paper. To carve out a slot among column inches of murder, politics and mayhem, I file three or more stories daily. Most never make it into print.” (Science 2000 289 59).

Stressing that the media is not a single entity, Hargreaves focuses on “mediation” as a two-way process that involves the traditional mass media (which is pretty diverse), the new media of the Internet, specialized media (such as scientific journals) and hidden media (e.g. the customer information gathered by supermarkets).

The report is essentially a call for social scientists to become involved in the public dimension of science. While natural scientists might be wary of such a manifesto – fearing a repeat of the recent “science wars” between physicists and sociologists – they must accept that this is part and parcel of living in a world that increasingly relies on science. Particular recommendations in the report include: the establishment of major datasets to track public understanding of and opinion about science; research into “risk communication” to reflect the fact that science does not always give black and white answers; and the replacement of the label “public understanding of science” with something more neutral, such as science and society (as suggested by the Lords). Hargreaves acknowledges that his recommendations will “require serious commitment of funds and talent, comparable in scale to the building of social science databases in now traditional areas of interest such as class, poverty and social attitudes. It is a task not yet seriously attempted”.

With individual scientists doing more than ever to contribute to the overall activity of science and society, the issues raised by Hargreaves call, first and foremost, for actions by the government, the research councils and big business. Such action is needed to ensure that their investments in science – investments that history has shown are good for society – are not jeopardized in the future.

Hawking: the cardboard creation

Robin Hawdon, the author of this new play staged by the Theatre Royal, Bath, is on the defensive from the start. His notes in the programme begin with the following admission: “I am well aware that, in writing this play, I am laying myself open to assault from all sides.” He expects flak from scientists, theologians and philosophers. He has already received a lot from Stephen Hawking, who has objected strongly to the play. He regards it as a “deeply offensive” invasion of his privacy, and has dismissed it as “a stupid and worthless play” (Physics World August p8).

This is perhaps too harsh for a play that is clearly intended as serious. Talking to several non-scientists buttonholed at random during the interval of the performance that I attended in Oxford, I discovered that they found much of the material it covered absorbing. But it is flawed and compares badly with two very successful plays about physics and physicists – Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker and Michael Frayn’s recent Copenhagen (Physics World July 1998 pp35-36).

Perhaps the strongest criticism will come from a quarter Hawdon did not anticipate: drama critics. The play is severely lacking in dramatic content. In fact, it is not really a play at all, but a mixture of documentary about Hawking’s life, popular-science lectures and philosophical debate. There are only three main characters – Hawking, played by Stephen Boxer, Hawking’s first wife Jane (Teresa Gallagher) and God (Robert Hardy).

God does succeed dramatically when He is given the chance, which Hardy takes with evident relief. Like Hawdon, God too is on the defensive, but for a different reason. Science and scientists, epitomized by Hawking, are threatening to make Him redundant. He is presented as mischievous and engaging, rather like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust in fact, and he sets out the argument right at the start: does He, God, exist?

As shown in the play, He certainly has one divine attribute – He is omnipresent, since God and Robert Hardy also play the parts of about 12 other people who enter Hawking’s life. This is often quite a good device, since it allows effective asides when Hardy swaps persona from an assumed role back to being God, but at other times it wears thin.

As a debate about the possibility of belief in God in the light of the findings of science, I felt that God and Stephen Hawking succeeded quite well. The two sides of the argument are fairly presented, and Hawdon has some good lines for both believers and unbelievers. But I was disappointed at the way the science was put across and found the representation of Hawking’s life, including quite private aspects, problematic.

Let me start with the science. Hawdon clearly has a great desire in this play to get across his own fascination with the workings of the universe and employs two devices to do so. First, innumerable colour pictures – of the Earth seen from space, spiral galaxies, mathematical equations and stained-glass windows – are projected onto a huge round screen at the back of the stage throughout the play. Second, the development of the action is often interrupted for what might be called popular-science primers.

The first of these – given by the famous Hawking voice synthesizer – is the best and most authentic. But it is followed by several others, some of which are simply done by God standing at a lectern and reading from notes, while different pictures that are meant to evoke the content are projected onto the screen. This rapidly gets boring, and the science is seldom sharp and sometimes garbled. Meanwhile, the scenes in which Hawking is shown with other scientists, for example in working discussions with Roger Penrose, simply do not ring true.

Opinions will differ on whether it is acceptable to put living people and relatively intimate details of their family life on stage. I would not, and I can certainly understand Hawking’s annoyance. However, I will only comment on what seem to me to be theatrical difficulties. Can it work as drama? Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power was intensely dramatic, but the television dramatization that followed relatively soon afterwards was a pallid affair. Similarly, the facts of Hawking’s life – Jane’s intense Christianity, his own agnosticism and the break-up of their marriage – could have been the stuff of high drama, but they did not work here on stage.

To achieve this would have required considerable artistic licence and a much more robust treatment. With dead subjects, an author can take almost any freedom for the sake of a good plot. Here, Hawdon was inevitably inhibited. And although he did quite enough to offend Hawking, it meant (for me at least) that the personal drama did not enhance the philosophical debate in the way one would have liked. Yes, Hawking’s physical handicaps were used to cast doubt on God’s goodness, but here, as in all the personal aspects in this play, one was presented with (generally) restrained fly-on-the-wall documentary, not theatre.

In fact, the irony was that nearly all of the real people shown in the play came across as cardboard creations or even cartoon characters (Einstein, for example, woefully lacked gravitas) and only God had the freedom to be a real person. Hardy was invariably at his best when playing Him. Stephen Boxer, as Hawking, had an especially difficult task – making a person denied most normal means of expression expressive. This again makes me wonder if Hawking’s life is the stuff of true drama, even if many people who see this play will come away deeply impressed by his fortitude and achievement.

* God and Stephen Hawking continues at the Richmond Theatre, London, from 2-7 October (tel. +44 (0)20 8940 0088) and at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, from 9-14 October (tel. +44 (0)1483 440000)

Astronomers close in on swelling star

The Hubble constant, which is the rate at which the velocity of a galaxy increases with distance, is one of the most fundamental constants in cosmology. Astronomers can only obtain an accurate value for the constant using ‘standard candles’, which give reliable and accurate measurements of the distance to receding galaxies. One such class of standard candle is the Cepheid variable stars, which vary in size and brightness with a period that is correlated with their intrinsic luminosity. But astronomers also need a further independent measure of the distance to closer Cepheid variables to calibrate this relationship between period and luminosity.

Shri Kulkarni and co-workers from the Palomar Observatory determined the distance to Zeta Geminorum by measuring variations in its angular diameter that were a thousand times smaller than the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. They achieved this remarkable resolution using a technique known as interferometry, which has been used in radio astronomy for decades but has only recently been available to optical astronomy. Using the Palomar Testbed Interferometer, they combined the light from two telescopes 110 metres apart to achieve the same resolution as a single telescope with a diameter of 110 metres.

Several teams are now using optical interferometry, but this is the first conclusive observation of variations in the diameter of a star. The team has obtained preliminary results that agree with other techniques for measuring the distance of Zeta Geminorum. They hope to increase the accuracy of their measurements to within five percent, at which point they will be able to make a significant contribution to fundamental cosmology.

Quantum theory beats diffraction limit

Computer chips are made using a process called optical lithography, in which light traces out patterns on a photosensitive substrate covering the silicon. The problem for chipmakers who want to make ever smaller components is that materials needed for lenses and other optical components are not effective at wavelengths below the ultraviolet. Optical lithography therefore cannot produce features smaller than about 100 nm.

Last year, Eli Yablonovitch and Rutger Vrijen proposed using ‘classical’ two-photon techniques to double the resolution of integrated circuits. In the latest work, researchers show how entangled photons could theoretically improve resolution down to 25 nm. When two or more particles are entangled, the wavefunction describing them cannot be factorized into single-particle wavefunctions, so entangled photons effectively behave as a single unit and their energies are combined. The wavelength of N entangled photons would therefore be reduced by a factor of 1/N, decreasing the smallest feature size possible on a chip to l/2N. “We get round the frequency problem by the back door,” says Sam Braunstein of the University of Wales, Bangor. “It’s like using light at a higher frequency, because the photons act cooperatively.”

The researchers consider the simple system in which chips are patterned in two dimensions using two interfering light beams. They say that in this set-up pairs of entangled photons could easily be produced using ‘optical parametric down-conversion’, a process first carried out in 1995. High-energy photons pumped into a crystal would undergo non-linear diffraction and be ‘split’ into two correlated photons.

Unlike other lithographic techniques under investigation, such as those using electrons or ions, this quantum method would require chip manufacturers to make only relatively minor changes to their expensive production processes, says Braunstein. However, several technical hurdles need to be overcome before this technique can be put into practice, such as finding a substrate that can absorb entangled photons.

The physics of human traffic

It is straightforward to incorporate the obvious physical attributes of people in a crowd, like pedestrian mass and velocity, into the simulations. But Helbing’s team went on to include psychological tendencies in the model by likening them to the kinds of interaction that take place between particles. The tendency of people to stay away from each other is represented by a mutually repulsive force. A ‘body force’ opposes body compression in crush situations. The desire to maintain a certain velocity-dependent distance from other people and the walls is modelled, together with the tendency to follow other people.

The simulations, which measured the efficiency of evacuating a room under different conditions, illustrated three effects. Firstly, at an optimum pedestrian velocity the room empties in a regular and well-ordered manner. But when the ‘desired velocity’ increases – when people are in a hurry – a crowd builds up at the exit, and pedestrians leave the room in irregular bunches. Secondly, the time it takes to evacuate the room increases above the optimum velocity. As people become more impatient, a feedback loop emerges in which people become injured and impede traffic flow further. The third process identified by the simulation is mass behaviour, with two extremes of purely ‘herding’ or purely ‘individual’ behaviour. The simulation showed that a mixture of both behaviours was the best solution for finding hidden exits in a smoky room. Herding often blocks a single exit and overlooks other possible exits; but people behaving as individuals move in different directions, obstructing each other and keeping information to themselves.

The good news is that most of the dangerous situations can be avoided by making exits wider. Columns situated asymmetrically in front of exits can also prevent the critical build up of crowds. The team now hopes to compare its findings with real data such as video footage of panic escapes and alternative theories.

Milky Way’s central black hole located

Ghez and colleagues collected infrared images of the nucleus of the Milky Way over a four-year period using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The positions of the stars nearest Sagittarius A* change significantly in only a few years, so the team were able to measure the stars’ velocities in the plane of the sky. The velocity vectors implied that the position of the black hole coincides with Sagittarius A*. The team went on to deduce the acceleration of the stars. The acceleration vector of an orbiting body points towards its centre of rotation, so the three stars’ acceleration vectors should intersect at the location of the black hole. Ghez and co-workers established that they intersect within 0.002±0.0016 parsecs of Sagittarius A* (1 parsec = 3.26 light years).

The orbital periods of the stars may be as short as just a few decades. “There is something quite grand in the realization that we can expect, with a little luck, to see the Galactic centre rotate at least once in our lifetimes”, says John Kormendy of the University of Texas at Austin. Other studies have indicated that the black hole has a mass 2.6 million times greater than the Sun, and a similar radius to the orbit of Mars around the Sun.

CODAG: watching dust gather

The CODAG experiment recreated for the first time conditions in the early solar system in order to observe the dust clustering process. Micron-sized silicon oxide grains were injected into a chamber filled with low-pressure gas to simulate the pre-planetary nebula of dust. In the very low gravity environment of the space shuttle, it is thermal activity – or Brownian motion – that drives dust particles of this size to collide and stick together, a process called agglomeration. Microscopes inspected the motion and clustering behaviour of the particles and the team compared their findings with predictions from numerical models. “We saw, for the first time, the onset of dust accumulation”, Blum told PhysicsWeb, “so our concept of planetesimal formation as a dust aggregation process is correct”.

The particles formed two main clouds, in which twelve distinct clusters emerged. But the astronomers were surprised to find that the clusters were much more linear and less sheet-like than predicted. Numerical simulations had suggested that the mass of a cluster would be related to its size raised to a power of about 2. But the clusters observed were very elongated, implying a power of only 1.3. When the long thin clusters collide, they are much more likely to make contact away from their centres, resulting in fluffier, less dense aggregates. Astronomers may now need to rethink their theories of how such particles would stick together to form larger bodies.

Blum and co-workers also confirmed that, as expected, electrostatic interactions between dust particles are negligible. This scenario is likely to be similar to conditions in the early solar environment, in which the dust and gas nebula would have provided a shield from the ionising effects of solar radiation. However, the CODAG experiment did not take into account magnetic field effects, and experiments are now being devised to establish the possible role of magnetic forces in the aggregation process.

The bubble bursts for shrimps

Scientists originally thought the shrimps’ snapping sound was produced by mechanical contact between opposing sides of the claw. But Barbara Schmitz, a biologist at the Technical University of Munich, and Lohse noticed during other studies that bubbles formed near the shrimps’ closing claws. They suspected that when a shrimp’s claw snaps shut, a jet of water is forced out at such a high velocity that the pressure drops below the vapour pressure of water. The reduced pressure inside the water jet then causes the tiny air bubbles that exist in seawater to expand rapidly. As the water pressure returns to its normal level, the air bubbles implode and generate a shock wave that is sufficient to stun or kill nearby small prey.

Claws: the movie
Claws: the movie
(1.2 MB)

To test their theory, Lohse, Schmidt and co-workers at Twente and the University of Marburg in Germany tethered seven shrimps inside an aquarium and gently nudged their claws to persuade them to snap shut. A hydrophone recorded the sounds emitted and a high-speed camera observed the behaviour of the bubbles. The team’s suspicions were confirmed when they found that the main peak of the ‘snap’ always coincided with the collapse of the cavitation bubble, not with closure of the claw. Lohse would now like to know if the collapsing bubbles can also produce light, a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. “It would be neat if light came out of the bubble,” he told PhysicsWeb. “We will have a look with a photomultiplier out of curiosity”.

Snapping shrimp usually exist in such large colonies that there is a permanent background noise in much of the world’s shallow oceans. The noise level has severely limited the use of sonar for scientific and military applications, and covers a frequency range so broad that it is impossible to filter out.

The competitive edge in science

Scientists make peculiar competitors.

Consider the studies on quarks at CERN in Switzerland and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. In February scientists at CERN announced they had “compelling evidence” for a soup of free quarks and gluons at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) (Physics World March 2000 p5). In June physicists at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) began looking at quarks at ten times the energy of the SPS. Meanwhile, CERN scientists are building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in six years’ time will study quarks at 30 times the energy of RHIC.

Media accounts often portray this situation as if the labs are locked in nothing more than a heated battle for a trophy. (The quest for the Higgs boson, pitting CERN against Fermilab, is another example.) The coverage tends to emphasize the posturing, claim-staking and antagonism, implying that one lab’s gain is the other’s loss.

If so, the two labs are also engaged in a lot of perverse behaviour. After all, the Brookhaven lab is building magnets for the LHC, and is a hub for dozens of American institutions contributing to the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Both CERN and Brookhaven also have staff members who are – officially and unofficially – helping the other lab’s projects.

Two kinds of competition

Politicians and journalists are bound to find such behaviour mysterious and self-defeating. When they compete with others in the same field, the aim is to secure a prize: an electoral victory or a news scoop. To gain it means beating your opponents: your strength is proportional to their weakness. This is political competition.

But athletes, artists and others who work in a creative community of performers know another kind of competition. In performance competition, the aim is to achieve a superior level of performance. Individuals enhance their own performance by sharing and cooperating with others as much as possible.

To call this “friendly competition” – in other words, to imply that it is simply political rivalry minus the antagonism – would be wrong. The primary goal is different: it is to see the overall performance level rise. If your competitor is strong, so are you. It is not that the competitors do not care about winning. They are striving to win. But in performance competition, winning is not everything, or even the most important thing.

Drew Hyland, a philosopher from Trinity College in Connecticut, has argued persuasively that winning is indeed not the most important thing in true competition. Hyland finds two features of competition especially significant. One is that competition is collaborative: “com-petitio” literally means to seek or strive together. The second is that competition elicits a superior level of play from its participants. As Hyland points out, competitors are thrust by their mutual struggle into situations of greater than normal “immediacy, intensity and immersion”, in which they can do things that they could not otherwise – or at least not as well.

What he calls “alienated” competition – when competition degenerates into mere opposition – amounts to a breakdown of true competition. What is essential for true competition is a collaborative and mutually supportive community, in which performers take risks and respect each other’s risk-taking – however much they may also be merciless critics of each other’s performance.

Hyland points to familiar features of competition that support his argument: the concern for improvement and excellence in performance (for “doing it right”); the desire to seek difficult (not merely obtainable) goals and to find challenging (not merely beatable) opponents; and the fact that competition is fun. Of course, performance competition in science can degenerate into political competition, where the quest for priority, publicity or prizes becomes paramount.

And the competitive situation is more complicated in science where industrial or governmental sponsors are involved. When the stakes are high, sponsors may try to shape the game as a political competition. In 1952, for example, Brookhaven scientists came across a magnet technique known as “strong focusing” that vastly improved accelerator beams, and excitedly communicated the information to colleagues/rivals at CERN and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

They were astounded when the US Atomic Energy Commission asked them to keep the details a secret. (It was too late.) The commission, it transpired, was also sponsoring a top-secret accelerator-based technique to make weapons-grade nuclear material, for which the agency thought strong focusing might be applicable.

The critical point

When discoveries in science are difficult and counterintuitive, and the stakes are high, it may make military or economic sense from a sponsor’s point of view to require the participants to behave as though they were involved in political competition. The discovery of atomic fission on the threshold of the Second World War is a classic military example. The fierce political battles that erupted after the war among high-energy physics labs for accelerators and detectors is another instance.

Recently, the agencies sponsoring American participation in the LHC have proscribed Americans from formal collaboration on ALICE, the LHC experiment dedicated to heavy-ion physics. (Ironically, ALICE’S magnet, inherited from a previous experiment, was largely paid for by the US Department of Energy.) The principle seems to be that the limited US funds for heavy-ion research ought to go to Americans. Still, Brookhaven and CERN heavy-ion researchers are finding informal ways to collaborate via e-mail, visits, phone calls and other means. “We do everything together,” one told me.

Politicians and journalists will not be able to understand such behaviour. They think that because prizes and prestige are involved, the aim of the game is to do everything one can, within the rules, to win. They think all competition is political competition.

But artists, athletes, scientists and others who work in a community of mutually supportive creative performers will smile. They know that, in reality, being part of such a community is the truest way to compete.

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