The Telescope in the Ice Read online

  “You know everything has a history,” he says. “Listen to this:

  “One time I was there standing on the dock. I got my little barge pulled up, and there’s this old guy with a German accent. Comes and says, ‘Vat are you doing?’ heh, heh. So, I tell him. He says, ‘Oh! We did that in Lake Constance in nineteen thirty…’ three, or something—before World War II. And I eventually looked it up. It was an old guy by the name of Regener. He actually made the first measurements in the lake all those years before. I don’t remember what the hell he was using … I think maybe he lowered Geiger counters down or something [correct] … But it was just a marvelous moment, because … [mimicking the old man] ‘I did this back in the thirties!’ [and himself] ‘C’mon!’”

  This was indeed a marvelous visitation. Erich Regener had been both a “diver” and an “air rider” in what Pierre Auger called the heroic period of cosmic ray physics. He had begun dropping his “Bodensee Bombe” into the Bodensee, which is the German name for Lake Constance, in 1928. He wasn’t fishing for muons; they hadn’t been discovered yet. He was trying to answer the central question of the day, which was whether cosmic rays were particles or electromagnetic waves, that is, light, and he cast his vote in favor of the second hypothesis by christening his small research vessel the Undula. Regener also measured the intensity of cosmic rays as a function of height in the atmosphere, but he wasn’t an air “rider” exactly. He came up with the innovation of attaching automated recording devices to his scientific instruments, so that he didn’t need to ride into the air with them in the way that Victor Hess had when he had discovered cosmic rays sixteen years earlier.

  Learned had no idea where his career was going in his school days. He thinks the best analogy would be not “a mountain campaign,” which is usually focused on a specific objective, “but an exploration of new and ever-exciting territory”—an attitude that would help very much as he went on to pioneer neutrino astronomy. At Lake Chelan, he made his first baby step by being the first to count atmospheric muons in an open body of water, rather than an enclosed tank or detector.

  As his time at the University of Washington was coming to an end, the head of his lab, an old cosmic-rayer named Bob Williams, asked him what he wanted to do next, and John responded with three experiments that intrigued him. In those good old days, you could get a job without a formal application. Williams called Fred Mills, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and Mills simply created a position at a high-energy cosmic ray experiment on Mt. Evans in Colorado, the closest 14,000-footer to Denver.

  Learned was connecting with the heroic age there again, since one of Auger’s mountaineers, Nobel Laureate Arthur Holly Compton, had established a laboratory near the summit of Mt. Evans shortly after a road had been built to it in 1927. There, Compton had proven that cosmic rays are made up mainly of charged particles, thus proving Regener wrong. A few years later, the Italian physicist Bruno Rossi (who, as it turns out, was Kenneth Greisen’s doctoral adviser) used data he obtained on Mt. Evans to make the first accurate measurements of the muon’s lifetime.

  The outward—and outdoor—aspects of John’s new position made it a natural fit, of course; but he was also a natural for the research group in Wisconsin that he had unknowingly joined. It was known as CCFMR, after the names of the professors involved: Dave Cline, Ugo Camerini, William F. “Jack” Fry, Bob March, and Don Reeder.

  * * *

  In the late sixties and early seventies, the physics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison was the crossroads for a surprising number of people who would play leading roles in the invention of neutrino astronomy later on—and in AMANDA and IceCube in particular. CCFMR was the energetic center of it all.

  One of the many dreamers who passed through Madison during these years was Leo Resvanis, who would eventually become the flag-bearer for a still unrealized attempt to build a kilometer-scale neutrino telescope deep in the Mediterranean, off the coast of his native Greece. In my first conversation with Leo, he introduced himself in tones of surprising dignity with, “I am a Wisconsin-style physicist.” He was speaking of the atmosphere that swirled around CCFMR.

  “These guys were as good as they come!” Leo writes. “Very smart and very creative, but with a fantastic nose/gut feeling for physics. In a spirit of total anarchy (i.e. antidiametrically opposite [sic] to Committee Physics) they put their finger on fundamental questions.… There is a proverb you must have heard: ‘a Camel is a Horse designed by a Committee.’ They were driven by a pioneering spirit. This you do not find in today’s experiments.”

  Bob Morse, who would become one of the main pioneers of AMANDA, is also a CCFMR alumnus. He did his graduate work in Madison with a different group, then left to pursue opportunities in Colorado for about six years, and returned to become a senior scientist with CCFMR in 1975. A happy and inspired expression lights up his face when he thinks of those days. “There was a lot of disciplined thinking, but as far as actually staying on message and on target, it was a little loose,” he recalls. “And so what happened is, is you said, ‘Oh Jesus Christ, we’ve got a test run coming up in three weeks! We better start to think about this!’ you know.… We weren’t as scared as we should have been is the best way to describe it.”

  “Style: fast, smart, intuitive, irreverent,” writes John Learned in characteristically unmediated prose. “Willing to try many new techniques and tricks to get the physics answers … go for broke in physics and when not doing physics, party hard. Except for Fry and Reeder, lots of womanizing.… Emblem, the UW† red flying-cock-and-balls, as was painted on our research trailer at Argonne‡.… The style [stood in] particularly … strong contrast to the other boring uptight HEP§ folks at UW, who all scoffed at our image but looked on with envy at the fun we were having. And in the end, despite a few miscues, we did better physics.”

  Jack Fry, the official leader of the group, had a knack for staying ahead of the curve. In 1952, he took the bold step of switching from cosmic ray detection to the accelerators, several years before the latter began to produce high enough energies to be of significant use in particle physics. An aficionado of Italian culture, he was best known outside the academy for his work on the acoustics of the Stradivarius. He built and conducted research on violins.

  Learned believes Ugo Camerini was “the real center of action” and sometimes refers to CCFMR as the “Camerini group.” The son of a Milanese Jew who had moved his family to Brazil to escape Mussolini, Camerini had a long and splendid résumé in cosmic ray physics. After completing his undergraduate work in São Paulo, he re-crossed the Atlantic to join the renowned Powell group at the University of Bristol, where he assisted in the discovery of the pion, high in the Pyrenees. Cecil Powell later won a Nobel for this discovery. Camerini never actually obtained a doctorate, because he couldn’t be bothered to submit a typed version of his thesis. He was in too much of a hurry to start on his next project: building the highest cosmic ray station in the world, at about seventeen thousand feet on Mt. Chacaltaya in Bolivia, where, in 1947, the discovery of the pion was confirmed.

  “Ugo never finishes anything; his students finish things,” says Morse. “Ugo would just throw these gems out and would hope that the students caught them, or caught most of them, and then he was off to something else.” Learned suggests that he “gave off sparks.”

  Bob March had studied at the University of Chicago under Fermi. As the story goes, the FBI once asked Fermi to fire March for refusing to spy on his own parents, who were members of the Illinois Communist Party, and Fermi nobly refused. Along with most if not all of the CCFMR group, March opposed the Vietnam War—during which era, according to Learned, “there were huge political divisions in the Department, ranging from the wild eyes in HEP to real John Birchers in low temperature physics (more or less scaling with physics energy range!).” In other words, the higher the energy they were studying, the more leftist their politics.

  Learned describes March as “a most inte
resting character, one of the most brilliant people I know.” He was a renowned teacher and popularizer of physics—he hosted a radio show in Madison for many years—and he took a special interest in the culture of the field. One of his causes was to increase the number of women in graduate student and faculty positions. In 1970, he wrote a book named Physics for Poets, which led to a course on the subject at Madison. The idea caught on; similar courses are now offered at virtually every college in the United States, and other scientific fields have followed suit as well.

  Although one doesn’t hear stories about Don Reeder’s extracurricular interests, one does hear that his colleagues thought of him as a solid physicist and a genuinely decent person. Dave Cline once admitted that Reeder probably helped Fry counterbalance the craziness of Camerini and March—and especially of Cline himself.

  Cline is still remembered as the most remarkable member of the group, and from the late sixties to the mid-eighties he was also at the top of his game. The sheer number of cutting edge projects he engaged in, all over the world and all at the same time, simply boggle the mind. He was one of the main players in the breathtaking drama that has been particle physics for the past half century, and he stayed at the forefront until the moment of his sudden death, at the age of eighty-one, in 2015. John Learned describes him as “perhaps the most maniacally physics-focused person” he ever knew. Cline was a founding member of one of the collaborations that discovered the Higgs boson, and his main interest in the last few years of his life was the cold dark matter.

  His tendency to take pretty much everything to the extreme may be explained by a tinge of fanaticism in his upbringing: Cline was born in Kansas City, Kansas, to accomplished and loving evangelical parents. “The psychology of religion is powerful, and it had me in its grips,” he once told me. In his youth he always thought he would be a philosopher, but during a short stint in the army at a guided missile facility near El Paso, Texas, he developed an interest in physics. “Then I started realizing … that philosophy can’t teach you anything either. So, actually the only way you can learn anything is physics. [It’s] the only thing that controls the universe. God must have started physics, period, you know,” although he added that he had taught too much astronomy to believe in God.

  He majored in physics and minored in philosophy at Kansas State University, got a masters in physics at the same school, and then proceeded to Madison to pursue a doctorate under Jack Fry. He ended up doing his thesis research in Berkeley on a new method for detecting elementary particles called the bubble chamber. (Fry had again demonstrated his foresight by collaborating with Berkeley on the bubble chamber work.) After earning his degree in 1965, Cline returned to Madison and proceeded to rise through the ranks faster than anyone else ever has in the physics department, becoming a full, tenured professor in only three years.

  Those were the days when the standard model of particle physics was coming into focus. At the center of this advance was so-called electroweak theory, a construct that unified the physics of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear fields, the latter of which is closely tied to the neutrino. The standard model could be used to make detailed predictions about particles that had yet to be discovered, including the carriers of the weak force, the W and the Z. So Cline, being an experimentalist, got right on the case.

  In 1969, at the tender age of thirty-six, he was the lead author of the “E1A” proposal for the very first experiment to be run at the national accelerator laboratory, not yet named Fermilab, that was just being built in Batavia, Illinois. (Until the end of his life, Cline proudly pointed out that he wore visitor badge number one for Fermilab.) The most important goal of E1A was to discover the W using a beam of high-energy neutrinos. Thus “neutrino physics was one of the major justifications for building the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.” But Bob Morse believes the proposal had even wider implications than that: “Other people have said that it outlined every important aspect for the next twenty years in neutrino physics. I mean the E1A proposal is a remarkable document—Dave Cline! It’s just hidden away as a proposal, but it’s gold. It’s absolute gold.”

  The EIA experiment had been conceived by the comparatively sober-minded Alfred Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, but Mann had been so impressed with Cline’s work that he recruited him early on in order to “add more weight to his proposal.” They then brought in the brilliant and hotheaded Italian physicist Carlo Rubbia, who was a professor at Harvard at the time.

  The story of the E1A experiment is told elsewhere. While it did not produce the W, it did result in the discovery of the so-called neutral current interaction in which a neutrino interacts with a proton or neutron without dying, as it does in inverse beta decay. This was an important advance, but the problem was that first they thought they’d discovered it, then that they hadn’t, and finally that they actually had; so the joke was that they discovered “alternating currents” and Cline earned the nickname “A.C.D.C.” His caution may also have cost him a Nobel Prize, since a group at CERN made the discovery while he was still dithering, and they did win one.

  But Cline and Rubbia were not the sort to look in the rearview mirror. They moved on to a new experiment at CERN, where they detected both the W and the Z in 1983, and this led to Rubbia’s winning a Nobel the following year. (It’s impossible to know what might have gone on in the back rooms of the Nobel physics committee, but we do know that Cline was nominated by more than one Nobel laureate. It could be that his American citizenship was a strike against him. There was tremendous competition between Europe and the United States at the time, and this was the first Nobel that CERN ever won.)

  Since the prize is awarded every year, it can become a bit ho-hum for the casual observer. But the W/Z discovery was a true watershed, as it provided dramatic confirmation of the standard model, which was still relatively young at the time. The only particle physics discovery that has rivaled it in excitement over the past thirty years is probably the Higgs, and Cline, of course, was involved in both.

  The seventies were heady days. He and his collaborators used to sign off on letters with “the force is with us,” alluding to both the weak force and the new movie Star Wars. Having passed through Berkeley at just the right time, Dave had also evolved into a true “hippy radical.” In the book Nobel Dreams, he refers to himself and Rubbia as “radical, crazy people.” He “once visited Rubbia in Geneva in 1972 dressed like Buffalo Bill, with a white suit and a white cowboy hat, and his shoulder-length hair.” When he was reminded of this, Dave responded, “Not exactly, but, you know, it is possible.… In those days … we were euphoric.”

  Part of the reason it’s possible is that he was into clothing. In the 1970s, while he was living in Madison, he and his second wife, whom he had met at Berkeley, were running a successful string of fashion boutiques in San Francisco and Hawaii, which was where she lived. He didn’t mention this moonlighting job to his Wisconsin colleagues, “because I was already crazy enough, you know? This is one more level of craziness. This woman, by the way, was very beautiful.” To give an idea of his dedication to physics, however, he made the conscious and difficult decision to dissolve this marriage in order to focus on finding the W, because he didn’t think the added travel would be fair to his family. Until the end of his life, he questioned the wisdom of that decision.

  * * *

  The CCFMR group employed a Madison bar named the 602 Club, “painted a bilious green inside,” according to John Learned, as a sort of ad hoc conference room. Bob March’s holding of court there virtually every afternoon became a Madison institution.

  “That was a weird club. That was one of my favorite places,” Cline recalled. “Madison … was one of the most interesting and liberated cities in the world, and the 602 Club was our place to go.… You’d meet very crazy people.”

  “That’s where future chancellor John Wiley used to drink a lot of beer,” adds Bob Morse, “except on Sunday night when it was closed and we had to go to Glen and
Anne’s, heh, heh, heh.…” (Wiley, a friend and fellow grad student of Morse’s, would play a huge role in both AMANDA and IceCube decades later.)

  “You know, the 602 Club was a great place to drink, because they had sixteen-ounce schooners of beer for a quarter, and they didn’t have a goddam juke box, which means that you were forced to actually talk to people instead of all this blaring music. We had people from the art department, the philosophy department.… Basically, it took all of nature’s two-standard deviation misfits, and you threw them all into this one club. We all got along fine.”

  * * *

  Francis Halzen entered this milieu in its heyday, 1971, and his invitation to work in Madison was proffered, appropriately enough, in a bar. This was a very different bar from the 602 Club. It was located in a hotel in the resort town of Méribel in the French Alps.

  He was attending—or, actually, about to leave—that year’s Rencontres de Moriond, a prestigious, invitation-only gathering of particle physicists that took place annually at one French ski resort or another. They were purposely called “rencontres” or gatherings, rather than conferences, because the purpose was to create an intimate atmosphere “in beautiful and inspiring surroundings” in order to encourage the creative exchange of new ideas. The Moriond gatherings still take place, but they’re more frequent and less exclusive than they used to be. In those days, the participants took a break to ski during the day and played music for each other at night, and it was considered bad form even to take a phone call. The talks were delivered in the hotel bar at Méribel. The speaker’s blackboard was set up behind the bar itself.

  Francis was a rising star in theoretical particle physics at the time. He turned twenty-seven just a few days after the gathering ended. He was finishing up a two-year fellowship in the theory group at CERN, and he had a permanent position waiting for him back home in Belgium, at the University of Leuven. He’d been invited to speak at Moriond on the basis of a paper he’d written with a theorist roughly his own age who had recently moved to CERN from a post-doc in Madison. Francis claims that this paper “would basically have gotten me a job anywhere,” and it already had produced an offer from Caltech. He recalls looking out on the audience during his talk and seeing an Italian physicist sipping a cognac.