Anthonares

I have been happily attending Michigan State University since the fall of 1999. It has awarded me undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Astrophysics, and is now hosting and funding my studies in the hydrological geosciences. Based in East Lansing, Michigan, MSU is only about an hour from my childhood home, and as such has been my college of choice since at least third grade. In fact, I did not apply for a single other school, and chose to stay here for graduate school because of the amazing opportunities it has given me. At a point in my life where I have watched good friends move away year after year, MSU has been my community. I want to see it thrive and grow as much as perhaps anyone.

So I was truly disappointed when I read in today’s issue of Science that the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) project is being delayed for at least five years. MSU’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory has been competing against the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory to design, build, and operate RIA for the last five years or so. The teams have spent millions on development and preliminary designs. And for good reason. In 2003 the DOE listed the RIA project third in a list of 28 major facilities it wished to build.

Basically, RIA would involve a very high-powered linear accelerator that would send ions of various nuclides hurtling towards solid targets at very high speeds. Some of the ions would collide with atoms in the target. This collision would produce various fusion products that would then decay to other nuclei. The Rare Isotope Accelerator would be capable of creating a vast array of unstable isotopes typically only produced in supernovae. This is important for nuclear physicists because studying the decay of unstable nuclei provides crucial data to test theories of nuclear architecture and of the nuclear forces themselves.

If you don’t typically hang around nuclear physicists, you may not be familiar with the chart of nuclides. It’s a handy way of displaying the elements and their isotopes in a much more organized fashion than the periodic table. The Chart of the Nuclides plots isotopes with their number of protons on one axis (typically the x-axis) and the number of neutrons on the other. The graphic at the top of this article is just such a plot. It illustrates the expected number of each nuclide that would be produced each second according to the Argonne Laboratory design.

You may be surprised to learn just how few of the possible isotopes we have actually discovered. Take a few minutes and explore the Chart of the Nuclides in its current form. The main page is an overview of the chart, and, if you click on a section it zooms in to show to average lifetimes of each isotope. But pay close attention to the vast number of white squares, those are the ones we think should exist but have never observed in the laboratory. Those white squares represent the great unknown territory of nuclear physics. If you’re interested in a bigger version, Chart of the Nuclides sells wall charts that are probably the geekiest posters you could buy (and I mean that in the best possible way).

RIA would fill in large chunks of that chart. It would push back the dark boundary of the unknown and expose the fertile ground of fundamental knowledge. But, it is expected to cost somewhere near $1 billion dollars. And, if I set aside my institutional loyalty for a second, I can think of some really great projects to spend a billion dollars on, the Terrestrial Planet Finder for instance.

Unlike the specious comparisons of NASA’s budget to the military’s, this is a serious issue. Where can the government get the greatest science return for $1 billion? Furthermore, where will that money go to benefit the national interests of the United States most highly? Nuclear and High-Energy Physics have reached a point where relatively little new ground can be broken at a cost of anything less than a few hundred million dollars. We seemed to have reached a point of diminishing scientific return in these areas. I am not at all suggesting that expensive research questions should not be pursued, but I do think we should ask which pursuit has the most potential to fundamentally alter our scientific and cultural understanding.

I would love for a nuclear physicist to answer this question. I would argue that the potential discovery of life on another planet would be of greater value than a deeper understanding of the nature of sub atomic particles, but it hurts me to make that statement. I want both goals to proceed, and I want MSU to host a facility that would improve its already world-class physics program. But more than that I want planetary science to be funded the way it should.