keeps getting in the way of their research.
This latest surprise is the most disturbing of all. Mike’s trip to Atlanta, after all, was something Donovan scheduled only two weeks ago, a visit to Centauri headquarters to answer questions about their research and development on a quantum microprocessor. But the practical production of such a chip is surely years away, and it’s at least possible that Donovan sent him out of town while he removed Paul and installed Samantha.
Until this morning, Mike had believed Samantha a candidate to direct the upcoming Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a particle accelerator on the border of Switzerland and France. Her success there is widely recognized, and Mike doubts she would have left her position just to become Mike’s Beam division head.
She’s here because she wants his job. Donovan surely knows this, so what the hell does he think he’s doing?
And what is Mike going to do about it?
It’s not like he can turn up the power on the super collider, it’s not like he can
will
Higgs into the detector. The work on this project is meticulous by design, a painstaking effort that requires enormously complex analysis of almost unimaginable amounts of information. The NTSSC as a whole produces enough data in a year to fill 40 million CDs, and even with their linked network of 150,000 Pentium CPUs—what they’ve taken to calling the “Texas Grid”—sifting through it all is a time-consuming process. The effort required just to maintain their cadre of processors is mind-boggling, and yet somehow he must manage both the teams that produce this kind of data and those who consume it.
If it were simply a matter of organizing the production and flow of information, Mike would be at ease. If it were only a matter of fine-tuning the hierarchy of physicists, of steering the general direction of the Higgs search, Mike would consider himself a perfect fit for the job.
It’s the human drama that complicates matters, that prevents the super collider from running like the well-oiled machine he once envisioned. Sure, he’s led teams before, but nothing could have prepared him for the sheer scope of the NTSSC. It’s as much a city as a scientific facility. Theoretical and experimental physicists, technicians, engineers, maintenance teams, business and clerical staff, political lobbyists, and members of the senior management team—like Landon Donovan and Mike—all working together within the fifty-four-mile oval circumference of the super collider. Nearly nine thousand dipole magnets accelerating protons along a closed path, traveling in opposite directions at velocities that approach the speed of light, colliding inside an underground detector as big as an eight-story building. It’s an extraordinary machine designed for an extraordinary task and populated, unavoidably, by humans with ordinary lives.
Humans who often produce remarkable ideas and sometimes make boneheaded mistakes. Who look to him for guidance.
A crazy thought, this.
Most days, Mike eats lunch on campus. He likes to visit the various NTSSC cafeterias and talk with regular physicists, men and women who spend their days with their sleeves rolled up, who are the belts and gears of this massive experimental machine. He wants to be a real person to them, not just a spokesman who makes strategic decisions and issues press releases. He recognizes the need for team structure, for management hierarchy, but he also dreams of a facility without layers of privilege, an organization of scientists whose only goal is the advancement of knowledge.
As much as he enjoys the responsibility for this immense effort, Mike sometimes longs for the simpler times at Fermilab, where he spent most of his time solving physics problems instead of coaching the efforts of others. This is something he could never admit to anyone, of course, especially not American scientists or (God forbid) Landon Donovan. To confess his lukewarm desire for power in this,
This latest surprise is the most disturbing of all. Mike’s trip to Atlanta, after all, was something Donovan scheduled only two weeks ago, a visit to Centauri headquarters to answer questions about their research and development on a quantum microprocessor. But the practical production of such a chip is surely years away, and it’s at least possible that Donovan sent him out of town while he removed Paul and installed Samantha.
Until this morning, Mike had believed Samantha a candidate to direct the upcoming Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a particle accelerator on the border of Switzerland and France. Her success there is widely recognized, and Mike doubts she would have left her position just to become Mike’s Beam division head.
She’s here because she wants his job. Donovan surely knows this, so what the hell does he think he’s doing?
And what is Mike going to do about it?
It’s not like he can turn up the power on the super collider, it’s not like he can
will
Higgs into the detector. The work on this project is meticulous by design, a painstaking effort that requires enormously complex analysis of almost unimaginable amounts of information. The NTSSC as a whole produces enough data in a year to fill 40 million CDs, and even with their linked network of 150,000 Pentium CPUs—what they’ve taken to calling the “Texas Grid”—sifting through it all is a time-consuming process. The effort required just to maintain their cadre of processors is mind-boggling, and yet somehow he must manage both the teams that produce this kind of data and those who consume it.
If it were simply a matter of organizing the production and flow of information, Mike would be at ease. If it were only a matter of fine-tuning the hierarchy of physicists, of steering the general direction of the Higgs search, Mike would consider himself a perfect fit for the job.
It’s the human drama that complicates matters, that prevents the super collider from running like the well-oiled machine he once envisioned. Sure, he’s led teams before, but nothing could have prepared him for the sheer scope of the NTSSC. It’s as much a city as a scientific facility. Theoretical and experimental physicists, technicians, engineers, maintenance teams, business and clerical staff, political lobbyists, and members of the senior management team—like Landon Donovan and Mike—all working together within the fifty-four-mile oval circumference of the super collider. Nearly nine thousand dipole magnets accelerating protons along a closed path, traveling in opposite directions at velocities that approach the speed of light, colliding inside an underground detector as big as an eight-story building. It’s an extraordinary machine designed for an extraordinary task and populated, unavoidably, by humans with ordinary lives.
Humans who often produce remarkable ideas and sometimes make boneheaded mistakes. Who look to him for guidance.
A crazy thought, this.
Most days, Mike eats lunch on campus. He likes to visit the various NTSSC cafeterias and talk with regular physicists, men and women who spend their days with their sleeves rolled up, who are the belts and gears of this massive experimental machine. He wants to be a real person to them, not just a spokesman who makes strategic decisions and issues press releases. He recognizes the need for team structure, for management hierarchy, but he also dreams of a facility without layers of privilege, an organization of scientists whose only goal is the advancement of knowledge.
As much as he enjoys the responsibility for this immense effort, Mike sometimes longs for the simpler times at Fermilab, where he spent most of his time solving physics problems instead of coaching the efforts of others. This is something he could never admit to anyone, of course, especially not American scientists or (God forbid) Landon Donovan. To confess his lukewarm desire for power in this,
Similar Books
The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire
Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus
