Bern – Energy and Time

Switzerland day 42: Bern & Einstein

Bern was where Albert Einstein was working as a patent clerk during his “miracle year” of 1905. In 6 months, he published 4 papers any one of which should have been worth a Nobel prize:

Photoelectric effect (submitted March 18, published June 9)
Brownian Motion (submitted May 11, published June 19)
Special Relativity (submitted June 30, published September 26)
Energy = Mass (submitted September 27, published November 21)

It’s probably the most productive year any scientist has ever had. None of the math was terribly hard, but each paper revolutionized an entire subject by looking at it differently.

September 30th: First target of the day was the Einstein Museum.

I got off to a rocky start in the museum, which restated a very wrong but perniciously widespread misconception.

This is wrong because (1) matter/mass/energy all bend space-time (not just space), and (2) time is always bent at least as much as space. Around the Earth, for slow-moving objects, gravity is more than 99.9999% due to bending of time, and less than 0.0001% due to bending of space. For extremely fast-moving objects it get closer to 50-50. So simplifying to “matter bends time” is OK and sometimes approximately correct, but simplifying to “matter bends space” is always wrong. Yet everyone does it. Jim Al-Khalili. Stephen Hawking.

Other than that, the physics was pretty good. However, a significant chunk of the exhibit was devoted to the rise of the Nazis and the development and use of nuclear weapons. I wasn’t expecting it to be so depressing.

Some random buildings in Bern:

We had lunch at the Äss Bar, a discount restaurant that gets 1-day-old bread from nearby bakeries and makes cheap sandwiches from it.

A famous clock tower was right on our way, so we waited for it to strike, but it was underwhelming. A few figures to the right of the red dial moved.

Farther down the same street was our second goal for the day: Kramgasse No. 49, the “Einsteinhaus”, the apartment where Einstein lived in 1903-5.

If you lean out Einstein’s window and look left, you can see the clock tower a half a block away. The theory of relativity is based on the behavior of “clocks” and “rulers”; I think I know what inspired the clock part. 🙂

Then we walked around town a bit.

Finally we had to head out for our drive to the Swiss Alps. They became obvious long before we reached them.

Switzerland day 41: Paul Scherrer Institut

Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of invisible game.
Rumi

September 29th: We drove 45 minutes down to the Paul Scherrer Institut in Villigen Switzerland. I picked up my previously-requested badge and dosimeter, and got a tour of where I might be performing my experiment next year.

The proton beam is accelerated to 560 MeV in a cyclotron under the surface in the foreground (which has a photo of what’s underneath it on top of it). It then goes out the right side of the picture, gets bent around through the upper right, and smashes into various targets in the rectangular gray enclosure in the upper left. Some of those targets produce pions, which decay into muons, which is what I need.

The mouth of the muon beam. I had originally thought that the beam was movable, but no, those magnets weigh like a ton each. The beam comes out at 1.5 m above the floor and I need to get my target there.

Aldo Antognini (my host) talking to students currently setting up an experiment in that bay.

Things were simpler in the 1950s, when Jeff Morrow could build a portable device to generate “mu mesons” to defeat The Giant Claw.

The particles were first called mesotrons (1936), then yukons after the particle predicted by Hideki Yukawa, then mu mesons after pi mesons were discovered, then muons after it was realized that they weren’t mesons at all but rather leptons, and that the real yukons were the pi mesons, which are mesons but still got shortened to pions. They were the first subatomic particles discovered that were not a component of atoms and thus seemed totally unnecessary, leading Isadore Rabi to quip “Who ordered that?”.

Anyway, I learned a lot about what I need to get done in the next couple of months before submitting the experimental proposal by January 10th. On the positive side, both Aldo (who gave me the tour) and Frank (who joined us for lunch) seemed positive about the experiment. Maybe they are getting a glimpse of how exciting it would be if this were correct.

On the negative side, there are lots of new issues to deal with, like getting insurance coverage, finding a second person to work with me, figuring out how to ship everything to Europe (and deal with customs etc.), running on Swiss 220V, dealing with beam impurities (including at least 10% electrons), and converting everything from wifi to hardwired ethernet (including optical ethernet links to get out of the sphere).

My biggest asset is that I am totally committed to making this happen. Whatever it takes, I will do.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.
William H. Murray

But of course, we eventually had to leave for Bern. Our hostel was near the Thai embassy, so, after checking in, we had dinner at a Thai restaurant. Our theory was that the embassy wouldn’t allow it to be mediocre.

the Thai dinner, I think a Pad Kee Mao and a Pad Thai.

Hostel 77 was easily the most expensive lodging of our trip, but was quite basic (e.g. shared bathrooms). It did come with a decent free breakfast though. Still, Switzerland is far too pricey to be a good place to retire on a fixed income.