What's Next in Physics - The Wait for the New Collider is Over

I like to read Scientific American for its coverage of physics - it does it better for a non-physicist like me than any other publication... visit the web site for a special issue and some excellent graphics.

They call it the tera­scale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion.

To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the tera­scale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts).

What lies in wait for us at the tera­scale? No one knows.

But radically new phenomena of one kind or another are just about guaranteed to occur. Scientists hope to detect long-sought particles that could help complete our understanding of the nature of matter. More bizarre discoveries, such as signs of additional dimensions, may unfold as well.

Physicists are also drawing up plans for a machine intended to succeed and complement the LHC more than a decade hence, adding precision to the rough maps that will be deciphered from the LHC’s data.

At the end of this “journey” to the tera­scale and beyond, we will for the first time know what we are made of and how the place where we briefly live operates at bottom. Like the completed LHC itself, we will have come full circle.

Judah Folkman's Contribution to Medicine

Today's news says that Judah Folkman dies at 74. His story is important in many ways, including how a scientist can be caught up in cancer politics. He remained steady and respected through it all.

Read more at The New York Times: says Folkman was a path-breaking cancer researcher who faced years of skepticism before his ideas led to successful treatments. Dr. Folkman, a professor at Harvard and director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston, is considered the father of the idea that tumors can be kept in check by choking off the supply of blood they need to grow. The approach is now embodied in several successful cancer drugs, most notably Avastin, by Genentech.

“His vision and ideas literally changed the course of modern medicine,” said Dr. William Li, a former student of Dr. Folkman’s, who is president of the Angiogenesis Foundation, an organization that promotes the promise of Dr. Folkman’s approach. Angiogenesis refers to the formation of new blood vessels.

Dr. Folkman’s work created a frenzy in 1998 when a front-page article in The New York Times reported how two drugs he had developed had eradicated tumors in mice. The article quoted Dr. James Watson, a Nobel laureate for discovery of the structure of DNA, as saying, “Judah is going to cure cancer in two years.”

But some other scientists had trouble replicating Dr. Folkman’s results, and the biotechnology company with rights to the drugs gave up on them to save money after the drugs did not seem to work as well in people as in mice.