Sample Writing

3 poems
By Alex Corella
Robert A. Boit Writing Prize - 3rd place

And I woke up two days later,
on a beach, with Elvis.
I stared into the blazing sun,
feeling how it
wormed its way under
my skin and into the surrounding sand,
amplifying
the throbbing in the
back of my brain.
The cold
tide desperately grasped at my
ears before being sucked back into
the blue.
A foil potato chip
bag glided up and out
of the waves next to me.
I watched as it
reflected the intense
warmth above
onto The King’s shades
before being snatched up
by a nearby seagull.
Sweat streaming from
my pores, washing
away in the waves,
I had only one question
rolling around in my
aching mind
and it spilled out
before I could lock
my mouth, “Aren’t you hot
in that damn polyester
suit?”

We took a walk, you and I,
in the middle of that warm July night.
We strolled in silence along the sleepless shores
until we reached the spot on the sand
where we first met.

You turned your eyes above,
searching the stars for constellations,
while I searched the stars for a reason.

And as if a part of Hera’s cruel plan,
Cancer, the ferocious little crab,
jumped out of the black sky
and fastened its claws tightly around my mind.

I thought of our numbered summer nights
I though of all of the dreams that lay abandoned
I thought of the masses beneath your flesh,
and how my rage grew with them.

I forced my gaze from the sky
and back down to you,
only to find that you were lost
in your own battle
with Hera’s little minion in the sky.

I sit amongst the sea of flesh lolling in the balmy waves of oil and sweat slowly congealing beneath the cool summer breeze. Some greased up college boy plays ukulele while the girls swoon around him. Laughter rolls up and onto the shore as a puppy chases a little boy into the water and under the pier. Soda cans pop open and chip bags crunch while people sit and read their gossip magazines. The boy cries out. The murmur of soda cans and chip bags ceases. The ukulele is silenced. Mommy to the rescue. A lifeguard follows close behind. Mommy screams for her little boy not to touch the bloated body of the seal that has washed up next to him. A fishing line wrapped securely around its neck, cutting the flesh and releasing the putrid internal odors that all of us have bottled up inside. Another lifeguard is on the scene – two shovels in hand. Fishing line still around its neck, the seal is heaved into a shallow grave. The boy runs off into the ocean again, puppy following close behind. The rustling of chip bags and the pop of soda cans can be heard in the distance as the college boy strums his ukulele.

The Biggest of the Particle Colliders--but the Baddest?
By Fangfei Shen
DeWitt Wallace Prize - 1st place

When was the last time you walked through a solid wall? Within the bounds of our universe's laws, the correct answer is never--unless you are incomprehensibly lucky (or unlucky). Surprisingly, and against our intuition, there is a non-zero probability of being able to walk through that wall. Thanks to the phenomenon of quantum tunneling, waves can travel through barriers. And thanks to French physicist Louis de Broglie, we know that all matter has wave-like properties, which are most apparent at small scales--namely atomic and subatomic. However, a walking human still has a de Broglie wavelength of approximately 10^-37meters. That means you and I both exhibit wave-like properties, but these properties are negligible since we are not very effective waves (for comparison, our wavelengths are a trillion trillion times smaller than the wavelengths of electrons traveling through a CRT monitor). As a result, it will take us virtually all of eternity to finally walk through that wall. While it is not impossible, in the very strictest sense of the word, to get through the wall, it might as well be impossible.

This particular revelation, of the impossible being not exactly impossible, has never appeared in the headlines of any major news agency. When was the last time you saw an article titled "Walking Through Walls: Quantum Tunneling Triggers End-of-Privacy Fears"? However, what has appeared in the news are reports such as "Collider Triggers End-of-World Fears" from Time, or "The final countdown? Should we be concerned when the world's largest subatomic particle experiment is switched on in Geneva?" from The Guardian. The object of scrutiny here is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its non-zero--but assuredly virtually impossible--probability of wrecking our world.

The LHC, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), is next in the line of a series of particle accelerators, and it is the most ambitious one built to date. What are particle accelerators? They are devices that contain electrically-charged particles and drive these particles to high speeds. If you still have a cathode-ray tube television or computer monitor you are in fact the owner of a particle accelerator. However, the LHC is a much more serious particle accelerator than your average CRT. A CRT will accelerate an electron to about 1% of the speed of light. The LHC will accelerate a proton (which is nearly two thousand times more massive than an electron) to 99.9999991% of the speed of light. The faster a particle travels, the more energy it has. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but the LHC will propel particles to a billionth of a fraction of a percent away from this peak velocity.

Things get interesting when these high-energy particles collide. Typically, you would expect two crashing particles to shatter into their smaller subparticles, just as you would expect two colliding cars to shatter into smaller automotive debris. However, with enough energy something strange happens. Remember Einstein's famous equation, E=mc²? It shows that a little bit of mass can be converted into a lot of energy. The starkest example of this is the atomic bomb. And importantly, for the particle accelerators, the reverse also holds true. Energy can be converted into mass, resulting in the formation of new particles larger than the colliding ones. This would be like two cars crashing only to form a truck. Much of the knowledge in particle physics is derived from experiments with particle accelerators. The results of these experiments have been particularly helpful for formulating and supporting the Standard Model--which to this day is the most comprehensive model of particle behavior--and thus, of the structure of the universe.

In the Standard Model, the indivisible elementary particles constitute the very building blocks of the universe. The known elementary particles fall into three categories: quarks (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom), leptons (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino, electron, muon, tau), and gauge bosons (photon, gluon, and electroweak bosons). Up and down quarks make up protons and neutrons, and protons, neutrons, and electrons make up atoms, which make up molecules, which make up matter as we experience it. Previous experiments with particle accelerators have proved the existence of many Standard Model particles. Most recently, the top quark and the tau neutrino were finally detected by the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab (in 1995 and 2000, respectively). Other experiments are investigating the nature of these elementary particles. The newest completed accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (established in 2000) runs experiments for studying quark-gluon plasma, an elementary form of matter that existed naturally shortly after the Big Bang.

The LHC will be the most powerful particle accelerator to date and one can speculate about the powerful experiments that it will perform, and the light those experiments will shine on particle physics theory. The LHC consists of a 27 kilometer circular path through which particles are accelerated to high energies and then collided. The size of the project is breathtaking. The LHC physically spans the French-Swiss border, and its international collaboration draws in talent from over a hundred nations. The total cost of the project is expected to reach five to nine billion dollars. A project of this scale carries the hopes of the world’s scientific community. As physicist Stephen Hawking aptly said: "Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe."

Scientists behind the LHC seek answers to their questions, all aimed toward finding out more about our universe's structure. Will the Standard Model be upheld? What more will we discover? Will we find the elusive Higgs boson? The last is one of the most popular questions and is frequently cited by the media. All elementary particles of the Standard Model have had their existence verified--except for the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is a curious subject of speculation. Elementary particles were originally expected to be massless--yet experimentally that is not the case. A popular explanation is that a Higgs field, created by Higgs bosons, induces a mass upon passing particles. According to calculations, the high-energy beams of the accelerator smashing protons together should be sufficient to create and, more importantly, reveal the Higgs bosons--but the prospect of not finding any Higgs bosons is just as intriguing as finding it. The Standard Model may be the most complete model of particle physics to date, but it is by no means perfect. Whatever results the LHC brings, physicists expect to peer a bit further into the intricate workings of the universe.

According to CERN, protons collided by the LHC at such a high speed will recreate primordial conditions--that is, conditions reminiscent of the time right after the Big Bang—which will allow scientists to better understand how the universe began. Primordial conditions are exotic compared to our everyday world, and are prime breeding grounds for strange objects such as microscopic black holes (in theory, at least). If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, scientists will gain a valuable opportunity to study black holes in a laboratory setting. Black holes are singularities in space where the force of gravity grows so strong that even light, the universe's fastest traveler, cannot escape. Currently, the only black holes we know of are of the massive astronomical variety, far larger than the microscopic ones that may be produced by LHC collisions. However, theory does not dictate a lower bound on the size of black holes. Thus, two subatomic particles (in the LHC's case, protons) can form a black hole if they are brought close enough together.

The creation of microscopic black holes by the LHC would have an interesting implication: the existence of extra dimensions. While the LHC is the largest particle accelerator in existence, it is simply not powerful enough to produce black holes from particle collisions in only three spatial dimensions. Gravity in three dimensions strengthens at a rate inversely proportional to the square of distance; thus whenever distance is halved, the force of gravity is quadrupled. Yet, that is not enough power for the LHC to bring protons close enough together to form black holes. However, for every extra spatial dimension that exists, the force of gravity increases an extra twofold for each halved distance. Thus, gravity grows eight times as strong in four spatial dimensions and sixteen times as strong in five spatial dimensions whenever distance is halved. Where would we get those extra dimensions? Clearly, we only experience three spatial dimensions in our everyday lives. But what about extra spatial dimensions curled up at the atomic and subatomic scale? The existence of extra spatial dimensions present only at super-small distances is compatible with several theories, the most famous being String Theory. If more dimensions exist and show themselves at super-small distances, gravity will grow strong enough at those super-small distances that, when two particles collide, black holes can arise. But despite the important role the LHC may play in furthering our understanding of the very framework of our universe, the idea of LHC-created black holes has generated some negative attention.

Like its predecessors, the Large Hadron Collider has not been without rumors of doomsday scenarios. When the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, NY started operation, there was fear that its experiments would create an earth-ending black hole. That fear now lingers around the operations of the LHC. The concern is that these microscopic black holes will grow and swallow up everything in its vicinity, including us and the Earth. Another fear is that the collisions will create theoretical particles called "strangelets" that would convert all the ordinary matter in the world (you and me included) into "strange" matter (comprised of up, down, and strange quarks), and also create a nice but apocalyptic explosion in the process. The scientific community is not without its doubts on the issue. In 2000, a paper published by Italian physicist and Nobel Peace laureate Francesco Calogero, entitled "Might a laboratory experiment destroy planet earth?" detailed anxieties associated with the start of LHC experimentation. The situation was worsened in 2008 by the lawsuit brought to federal court in Honolulu by Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho over those concerns, with the goal of stalling LHC operation.

While committees have been created for the sole purpose of determining the safety of the LHC (and other similar particle colliders), their reassurances--given strictly--boil down to one of high improbability: near zero, may as well be zero, but not precisely zero. Microscopic black holes do have a non-negligible chance of forming. If microscopic black holes do form, they will most likely burn out in an explosion of elementary particles and radiation instead of growing in size and swallowing the earth (our certainty regarding this matter is due to theoretical work of Stephen Hawking). Strangelets exist at energies much lower than the LHC collision energies, and strangelets forming in the LHC would be akin to having ice cubes form in boiling water.

However, any answer but "zero" seems to raise enough public concern that CERN officials are now instructed to state the probability of disaster as zero rather than trivially small. Remember how you will never walk through a wall even though there is a non-zero chance that you can? With these doomsday predictions, we're dealing with similarly small probabilities but any answer other than zero seems to trigger enough worry for the media.

Headlines of doomsday are much more exciting and eye-catching. "Collider Triggers End-of-World Fears" is more gripping than "Scientists Seek Higgs Boson through Collider Operations." Even the title of this essay falls into the same trap: "The Biggest of the Particle Colliders--but the Baddest?" isn't the most comforting of titles. The public is unfamiliar with the details of particle physics. Even if Higgs bosons or microscopic black holes are observed, as topics of theoretical rather than applied science, their discovery will not affect our lives very much--unless of course, the process of finding them destroys the earth. This explains why the media, in an attempt to make the LHC seem more interesting and relevant, has a tendency to exaggerate the fears of doomsday regarding the LHC. Such stories have proved to be dangerous--and even deadly. A jarring news report from the BBC last September revealed that a sixteen-year-old girl in India committed suicide out of fear of the world ending. Where was the blame placed? The news report traced it back to a series of sensationalized television discussions on the doomsday scenarios the operation of the LHC may bring. With this sensational tale, we see an extreme example of where irresponsible media coverage on the LHC can lead to.

This is a pattern that doesn't manifest itself only when a particle accelerator is being built. The media covers other less apocalyptic--but nevertheless worrying--science stories as well, causing public scares of smaller magnitudes to arise. A report titled "Is it Mutant or Health Food" by USA Today, in 2008, highlighted some hurdles in making irradiated food readily available in the market. One of these hurdles was overcoming consumer concern. The media’s choice of language (e.g. "Mutant" to describe irradiated food, or "End-of-World Fears" attached to the LHC) does nothing to soothe popular fears over cutting-edge scientific topics.

The sensationalism also draws its roots from a tendency to blend science with science fiction--as seen in manifestations of the LHC in popular culture. The LHC has served as a subject in many works of fiction, but, not surprisingly, its portrayal is often not reflective of reality. Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is a prime example: the LHC is relegated to the status of a creator of anti-matter weapons. Even the real-life fears of the LHC seem to be the stuff of a sci-fi movie: a black hole or a strangelet destroying our planet is a plausible sci-fi scenario. As Dennis Overbye of The New York Times writes, “Doomsday from particle physics is a part of culture.”

Misinformation (or rather, "uninformation") coupled with sensationalized media reports inflames an unjustified fear towards science. The reporting on the Large Hadron Collider is a garish example of this strange situation, and it points to a larger problem. As long as the public continues to buy the media’s overdramaticized stories, the media will not change its sensationalistic approach to science news. We need to stop fretting over exaggerated and fictionalized fears of the “dangers” of science.