Prof. Rabinovitch from the Hebrew University warns against the tendency to stick to 'applied science'. And told about his excitement as a theoretical physicist from the discoveries made in Sarn by his experimental friends and those that are expected and not expected in the future.
Today's governments have no patience for basic science, as can be understood from the lecture of Prof. Eliezer Rabinovitz, professor of physics from the Hebrew University and chairman of the National High Energy Council at the National Academy of Sciences, to members of a delegation of Israeli journalists who came to CERN on a tour organized by the National Academy of Sciences and Arts, Following the accession of Israel as a full member of Sarn.
"The effort to bring Israel to CERN is a multi-year effort. For many years we lived here as a couple without a chuppah and sanctification" said Prof. Rabinovitch. "It's true, but every time one side tried to institutionalize the relationship the other hesitated, in Europe they didn't really want Israel as a full member and from our point of view - we don't want to pay. Even in Israel, the understanding that being a hitchhiker is not good has matured. It blocks us from moving forward. We made a great effort that warmed my heart. The concentration of the Israeli contribution is an extraordinary combination of forces, both in Israel and despite the greatest opposition in the world, there were many friends and in the end we reached this moment. This moment is important not only from a scientific point of view, but also from other points of view."
"There is something to learn from CERN from an administrative point of view, crisis management - they managed a massive crisis of a major malfunction, and came out of it. There is a lot to learn about the economic aspect as well, and in general this company opens up many horizons for us."
"I am a scientist, and I want to describe to you the spirit that drives the people working in the field. Physicists, especially theorists, have megalomaniac aspects. You all know the advantage of NOH, a very basic principle that is not taken into account in Israel - no one controls the people. We are creatures at a height of two and a half meters, and we have the ambition to describe the universe - the ability to understand both the big universe, both the small things as we do here and the moment when everything came together, when the universe was small."
"Not only do we want to do it, we want to do it in a way that the human eye can see so that we can see the laws of nature and its equations on one presentation. Although Democritus in Abdra sat and thought about it and he was the first to receive a grant for basic research from his townspeople. About a hundred years ago in the Encyclopedia Britannica they calculated that this was a purchasing power equal to a million pounds of that time, today it is a much higher amount."
Fear of a new Middle Ages
Human society was complicit in this megalomania that began with Democritus. She encouraged the desire and patience to understand what is happening around us. We may come to a day when we don't have it. The great fear of an outbreak of a certain disease (in the life sciences we know less than in physics) that will cause the disintegration of systems and then all our knowledge will be lost.
"A very smart Jew named Klein, got a job in Sweden in the twenties of the last century. He came up with a revolutionary idea, at that time they knew two interactions - electromagnetic and gravity. He claimed that it is too much and one force is enough - the force of gravity and provided that it operates in five dimensions, from an experimental point of view the possibility of having one small dimension was not ruled out. He received something completely non-trivial - that from the equations of the general theory of relativity (which will be 100 years old next year), it can be proven that a person standing in a 5-dimensional accelerator will see both the theory of gravity and electromagnetism as one force. His friend - Pauli, a very well-known and very venomous scientist, wrote to Klein when he received the professorship in Stockholm: "I am not of the opinion that finding new laws of nature and looking for new directions of research are your great strength. Even though you always had ambitions in this direction, it was much better when you were a shoemaker - when you worked out formulas in theory... leave serious things to people more suitable."
"Pauli was a recognized scientist, which Klein was not. We have thoughts about what we want - Giora Mikenberg and Elam Gross (the two senior Israeli experimental researchers at Seran, whose lectures we also transcribed and will bring them later this week AB) sent us from nature the fact that there are lower barriers. As for the Higgs boson, we knew we would learn something new when the dust settled. The rest is in our imaginations as theorists. The results we received are that everything that scientists from the Technion, the Weizmann Institute, the Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University thought could be and were looking for has not yet been found. We feel like Klein who received the letter from Pauli."
To the Israeli journalists who came on a delegation to CERN, Prof. Rabinovich said: "You are coming here due to the fact that the accelerator is not working. The accelerator will double its energy - this is important, but it is only doubling. We already know what happens at low energies, it is maybe 2% of all knowledge. In terms of the spirit of the unit, there is no certainty today in the field that we will learn something new or that we will discover something new. There is great concern. It's easier for theorists because if the topic doesn't work, you can simply move on to another topic. The experimenters work and dedicate many years to build these experiments. And this is a question that will be faced by the company in the future. In recent years we have become accustomed to the fact that if we invest money, we want to know in advance what will come out of it. There is a dissonance between research and knowing in advance what you want. If I know in advance what I will find, why do I need to build this device in advance? Why do I need the testers? I already know what will happen. The whole point of research is to go looking for what you don't know. For many years, we called it WIN WIN and the Higgs was an example of that. Either way, something new will be learned. It may well be that the new thing we learn will be that there are no new particles at the energies we can reach, even though we expected them."
Should we keep sailing the ship? Will we sail only if we know there is America across the ocean? Maybe it will already be like in the case of Columbus after a long time when most of the crew rebelled? Or maybe we are willing to make the trip even if we don't know that America is there? We are just studying the ocean. That's a question we don't know how to answer, but we need to present our receipts by now.
Physical background
All the particles that make up the material nature we know and in addition to them the Higgs particle (with the exception of the problem of the dark matter that separates sleep from our eyes) these are the particles that build the standard model. There are four basic interactions. Not all particles can participate in every interaction, and together they cover all the forces of nature known to us - the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravity.
Gravity is the weakest. If I take a glass of water and leave it, it will be attracted to the earth, meaning it will fall, if I do it on the moon, it will still fall because both the moon's gravity and the earth's gravity pull it, but what will happen if I put it on the table? All the force of the earth is defeated by a small piece of the table, so this is proof that gravity is a weak force. If the dark matter exists and it only responds to the force of gravity (because that's how it is in its AB definition), there are quite a few chances that we won't see its particle manifestation. There are plenty of more optimistic ideas on how to find it.
"The discovery of the Higgs showed that it is possible to compress all of nature into one slide. The discovery pushes us to want to understand more and more. For example, the discovery that the Higgs particle weighs 125-126 GEV is a discovery that makes us think about big things, but for that we need to check what happens at higher energies. If we do not find or discover that there is no new physics even at very high energies, there is a possibility that our universe is unstable, and the next Copernican revolution will be that the stability of the universe can be called into question, perhaps it is part of a superspace, we will have to find out how it happens that we live on the border of its stability ?”
"If in the next two years after the accelerator is working we find these things, we will be happy to tell you." Prof. Rabinovitch concludes.
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