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- GENEVA (Reuters) - Physicists
claimed Thursday to have created a new form of matter and said their pioneering
work could lead to innovations useful in everyday life.
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- They said further laboratory research must be carried
out to duplicate more closely the conditions they believe existed in the
microseconds after the Big Bang that created the universe.
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- ``This is a step in research...This is not the last word,''
Luciano Maiani, director-general of the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics (CERN), told a news conference called to explain the significance
of the breakthrough.
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- Earlier in the day, CERN announced that scientists working
since 1994 had created a new form of matter through experiments which smashed
together heavy lead ions in a fireball to prove a theory that for years
had existed only on paper.
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- By generating collisions at temperatures 100,000 times
as high as at the sun's center and at energy densities never before reached
in laboratory experiments, some 500 scientists from 20 countries isolated
tiny components called quarks from more complex particles such as protons
and neutrons.
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- This provided ``compelling evidence'' for the existence
of a new state of nuclear matter, the quark-gluon plasma, CERN said.
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- This scientific breakthrough is an important step in
understanding the early state of the universe created some 12-15 billion
years ago in a massive explosion or Big Bang, it added.
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- The next challenge in the high-energy science falls to
the United States, where a new national facility has just been built on
Long Island in New York. The so-called Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
(RHIC) is due to begin experiments this year.
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- The Geneva-based CERN is winding down its current research,
but expects by 2005 to have on line a new accelerator, the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC). It will continue experimental heavy ion research at higher
temperatures and densities.
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- ``We believe that five years from now, even after RHIC,
with a much more powerful apparatus, this kind of physics will still be
interesting,'' Maiani said.
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- HOW DOES CERN RESEARCH HELP MANKIND?
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- Maiani, an Italian physics professor who heads the research
center backed by 20 countries, was asked how the latest research could
help improve the lot of mankind.
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- ``Electricity was invented because people asked questions
about magnets and charges. When (James) Maxwell wrote his equations, he
was driven by the pure desire to know the laws of nature. We know of course
after 100 years that our life would be very different and very difficult
without electricity,'' he said.
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- ``One could say the same thing about quantum mechanics.
The need that pushed people like (Werner) Heisenberg or (Nils) Bohr, or
(Albert) Einstein or (Louis) de Broglie was to understand the behavior
of the atoms.
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- ``They could not imagine that without them, we would
not have today the laser, the transistor, the computer, etc.''
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- Maiani concluded: ``So I think one has to see our efforts
in basic research as a long-range force...A force which will lead to innovation
in society in the long term.''
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- ``We cannot imagine today what it will be, but without
a long-range vision, we would have no real innovation in society,'' he
said. ``Particle physics have given proof of that...We would not have the
World Wide Web, which was invented here (at CERN), without particle physics.''
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