Who cares about Fermilab? (Part II)

In an earlier post I pointed out that the entire computer industry owes its success to high energy physics (HEP); that medical imaging would not be where it is today without physics research done a few generations ago. In this second installment of "Who cares about Fermilab?" I raise awareness of research in retinal implants and track their development back to, you guessed it high energy physics.

In a 2007 article, written by Emily Singer, that appeared in the MIT Technology Review, she interviews Alan Litke, a physicist at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) who's applying his particle detector expertise to neurobiology in what is titled the Retinal Readout Project.

Litke and his collaborators modeled their [artificial retinal] chip after the silicon microchip detectors that line supercolliders to capture signs of elusive, high-energy, subatomic particles, such as the Higgs boson.

So once again I ask "Who cares about Fermilab?" The answer might just be we all do, or should, because we just never know what good may come from deep under the ground where particles collide at near light speed.

Who cares about Fermilab?

Who cares about Fermilab? Well, more accurately, "Why should I care?" I'm asked this quite frequently by my Wall Street colleagues, knowing that I had worked at Fermilab (for most of the 1990s). "Why should I care if some scientist loses his job?", they ask. "Can't they just go back and teach at a university?" or "What does it mean to me if the Higgs boson is discovered?" These questions may best be answered by going back about three generations.

In the late 1890s the British scientist Joseph John "J J" Thomson conducted a series of tests on the then mysterious cathode rays (e.g. electrons). His apparatus consisted of two charged plates inside an evacuated glass tube, a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). A generation after JJ Thomson, in the 1920s, the concepts of the CRT were applied to produce oscilloscopes. Twenty years later the Allied forces in World War II used CRTs, along w/ radar, to detect enemy airplanes. The television, medical imaging and computer industries, just a single generation later, would never have flourished without the ground breaking work of JJ Thomson. You would not be reading this article now without the efforts of the early pioneers in high energy physics (HEP).

Who cares about Fermilab? Perhaps the question should be "Why don't we care more?" Will the discovery of the Higgs boson have a direct and life changing effect on us now? Many doubt it will, but then again could anyone, in JJ Thomson's time, have predicted the life changing technologies that emerged just a few generations later?