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Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics

By Sharon Traweek

This book was, in all honesty, not the easiest read, even for a book about particle physics. Sharon Traweek delved into the world of particle accelerators in the nineteen-eighties and the culture surrounding it. In doing so she revealed all the completely separate and distinguishable communities contained within it. Her book begins by giving the reader a tour of the two main locations of her research, the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) and the Ko-Enerugie butsurigaku Kenkyusho (KEK) in Japan. She describes in depth all the different levels of the particle physics community. It was amazing to me how many different distinguishable communities where contained within the particle physics community as a whole. There are the Theorists, the experimentalists, the technicians, the engineers, the administrators, and the random assortment of people responsible for the upkeep and operation on all non-technical aspects of operation. She showed that all of these groups, even though they worked together in the same lab, they were in fact separate groups. “It is easy to distinguish between the groups at the cafeteria. The physicists are dressed most casually, in shirts with rolled sleeves and jeans or nondescript slacks. They disdain any clothing that would distinguish them from each other. The style to which they conform, furthermore, maintains a carefully calibrated distance from fashion, quality, or fit…Engineers and senior technicians seem to affect either a collegiate style (khakis, button-down Oxford shirts, and crew-neck sweaters) or a studiously informal appearance (polyester pants and lightly starched shirts). Administrators wear classic business attire, but leave their jackets in the office. Secretaries, administrative assistants, and the few female, administrators dress informally but not casually, in dresses and pantsuits.”(p.25) That is another subject she frequently diverges into in depth discussion about, women in the workplace. According to her research and observations, almost all aspects of the labs were male dominated. Women scientists were far and few between and, although many women worked as secretaries, females rarely obtained administrative positions. On the other hand, some departments were women dominated. For example, wherever she traveled, she noticed that the group that staffed the library was always majorly dominated by women. This being said, another thing she noticed was that the head librarian was in fact male. The most surprising exception to Traweeks male domination rule was the accelerator operators. It was, according to her, one of the only groups that were, at any given time, a more or less fifty-fifty split. It just goes to show that even in a place that you would never think of as center of culture and cultural diversity, many distinguishable, separate groups will form. Traweek continues by diving into the o so interesting world of detectors. Detectors are the things that give accelerators their purpose. They, as their name suggests, are used to detect particles created by collisions between the high speed particles. There many different kinds of detectors but, the most predominate of the time were known as bubble detectors and spark detectors. I will start by explaining the origin of bubble detectors. “Bubble chambers were developed by Donald Glaser at the University of Michigan in the early 1950s; in 1960 they brought him the Nobel Prize. 3 He is quoted as saying that he decided to persevere in his studies on bubble chambers because of a conversation over a few beers with fellow physicists: After several pitchers of beer we began to wax philosophical about  physics. One of the boys, looking dreamily into the pitcher of  beer before him, saw the usual streamers of bubbles and remarked,  "You can see tracks in nearly everything." Just for fun  I actually exposed some beer to gamma rays the next day in the  laboratory. Nothing happened. 4 <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">”(p.51) <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 6pt;"> I personally found this story to be quite humorous. I mean, how many major scientific discoveries are made on the bases of beer. Anyway, bubble chambers work by capitalizing on the fact that as streams of accelerated particles move they radiate discrete packets of energy known as photons. These photons are then absorbed into the chambers medium, usually pressurized liquid hydrogen, which will start to boil. The pressure in the chamber is then increased to compensate for the increased heat trapping the bubbles in place therefore creating a visible path for physicists to study. Most of the other detectors work in a similar fashion. Detectors like spark detectors are an array of ultra sensitive wires that react with particles and recorded the data directly into the computer. Without these apparatus the accelerators would be effectively useless.

There really is not much more I can say about this book. When picking it out I really thought that the world of particle physics and linear accelerators would have been much more interesting than it actually is. Most of a particle physicists job is to simply do analysis on the data collected from their brief experiments. All in all I found that the book was very informative but, at the same time difficult to read due to my personal lack of interest.