Faced with the topical image of the scientist (a loner locked in his laboratory, surrounded by pipettes and test tubes, or strange instruments that produce electrical discharges), in World War II Big Science was born: a large group of researchers, working together on a major project. An example of this was the Manhattan Project for the construction of the atomic bomb, a scientific-technological enterprise of a scale unprecedented until then. The science of the second half of the 20th century ceased to be the work of individualities to become the effort of more or less broad groups. Perhaps the last scientist working alone was the great Albert Einstein. Big Science usually implies, as its name suggests, greatness: huge amounts of money, which can reach billions of euros; a large number of scientists – never less than a hundred -; huge instruments, such as particle accelerators or a large number of machines, such as the numerous sequencers used in the Human Genome project. And of course, large laboratories, such as CERN, in Geneva or the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in the USA.
Elitism in Big Science
However, some criticize this way of research because it undermines the basic principles of science; in particular, the reproducibility of the experiments by independent researchers. Thus, how can the claim that a group has discovered a new elementary particle be verified if all those who are capable of doing so work in that macro-research group and there is no other accelerator capable of doing so other than the one in which the experiment? In addition, access to these gigantic facilities to carry out their own investigations is usually subject to a committee that evaluates their convenience and in which personal arguments and political pressure are not lacking. These are currently the top 10 science experiments in all fields: telescopes, accelerators, lasers, spaceships, computers … All for the sake of knowledge. At least that is how it should be.
1. Arecibo, a huge ear
Listen to the radio waves that are produced in the universe, that is the mission of theradio telescopes. As with optical telescopes, the aperture is decisive: the larger the size of the dish, the higher the resolution with which we will observe the different celestial objects and we will be able to detect increasingly distant objects. The largest radio telescope in the world composed of a single disk is the Arecibo radio telescope, embedded in a natural valley in Puerto Rico. In operation since 1963, it is 305 meters tall and is part of theNational Astronomy and Ionosphere Centerfrom Cornell University. With it they study the pulsars – stars of two and three times the mass of the Sun, with a size of the order of an average city and that turn a thousand times on themselves in a second -, the distribution of gas clouds in the Galaxy o radio emissions from the giant planets of the Solar System.
However, in radio astronomy it is not necessary to build increasingly large antennas: if we have two radio telescopes separated by a distance of 10 km and we make them point to the same place in the sky, using interferometric techniques, it will be like having a radio telescope with a 10 dish km. In this case, the largest antenna array is the Very Large Array in New Mexico: 27 antennas – each 25 meters in diameter? forming an immense Greek Y, which is equivalent to a 36 km radio telescope with the sensitivity of a 130 meter dish. But what will undoubtedly be the largest radio telescope in the world is being built in Europe. Instead of the classic satellite dishes, the ASTRON scientists in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands, have decided to seed the fields of the tulip country and part of Germany with small pyramid-shaped antennas linked together by fiber optics and controlled by the most supercomputer. world’s fastest, IBM Blue Gene / L. This distribution is equivalent to a radio telescope with an effective diameter of 604 meters.
2. LHC, the great particle accelerator
In 2007, the largest particle accelerator in the world will come into operation: Large Hadron Collider or LHC (Large Hadron Collider), at the CERN Center for Particle Physics, near Geneva. In a 27 km ring, subatomic particles will reach speeds close to those of light and will be made to collide in search of answers to the question that particle physicists have been asking for decades, what is the intimate and ultimate structure of the matter? To get an idea of its size: it would take us 4 hours to cross it and the interior of the ring would enter the islands of Bermuda, Monaco and four times the Vatican City. It is buried 80 m below the surface between the borders of France and Switzerland, and powerful magnetic fields are required to guide the protons as they travel through it, which are provided by superconducting magnets cooled to temperatures of the order of? 270 ° C. Among its objectives is to discover an elusive particle: theHiggs’ Boson, which is supposed to be? the mother of all particles ?, since it is she who gives the mass to the rest. If it were not found, it would be a severe blow to the so-called Standard Model of physics. Another objective is to find proof of the existence of super-heavy particles, which will be the evidence that one of the most beloved theories of theoretical physics, supersymmetry, which in essence seeks the unification of the four forces of the nature. In addition, in this accelerator is the largest detector in the world, the ATLAS. Its dimensions are impressive: 46 m long by 25 high and a weight of 7,000 tons, which means that it is one and a half times larger than the blue whale, the largest animal.
And all to record the passage of particles that are 100,000 trillion times smaller! Such an apparatus is going to observe the most energetic collisions that have ever been achieved in a laboratory. Such giants also have monstrous costs: 2,000 million euros for the LHC and 365 million for the ATLAS detector. The level of precision that must be achieved with these immense devices is such that even the practically imperceptible effects have to be taken into account; for example, that of the lunar tides in the particle beams, which represent 1 mm in 27 km. Negligible, but detectable.
3. ITER, the super stellar bottle
Bottling a star – this is the goal of all the world’s nuclear fusion programs. In essence, they consist of reproducing the processes that occur inside stars: heating a mixture of hydrogen isotopes? Hydrogen atoms that have different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus? at a temperature of the order of 100 million degrees Celsius so that, by fusion between them, helium and neutrons are produced and a large amount of energy is released. The fundamental problem is heating the hydrogen and keeping it that way. Reaching the required temperature is done by a combination of radio waves, electrical currents, and bursts of particles. Under these conditions, the hydrogen atom loses its electron and becomes plasma, the state of aggregation of matter above the gas and a prerequisite for fusion to occur. It is clear that there is no container that can withstand such temperatures without melting; then, to keep the plasma confined, either lasers or magnetic fields are used. The largest nuclear fusion reactor in operation today, Joint European Torus, JET (Great Britain), uses the latter. It is a reactor whose vessel has dimensions of 15 m wide by 20 high and 600 researchers from 20 countries work in it.
However, the largest installation of this type will begin to be built in Cadarache, France, and will occupy an area of 40 hectares with another 30 for additional equipment: it is ITER – a word that in Latin means road -. If, as expected, the organization is fully defined in 2006, the first fusion plasma will be obtained in 2016. The goal of ITER, whose reactor is 6 times larger than JET, is to show that critics of nuclear fusion are wrong when they claim that it is the energy of the future … and always will be. In short, to demonstrate that a commercial reactor can be built, that is, from which more energy is extracted than it consumes; theoretical calculations estimate that 10 times more energy will be obtained. The time frame within which ITER intends to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion is 40 years after it began. The bet is very strong, since the estimated operating cost is more than 220 million euros per year and there are no guarantees that it will work.
4. The IceCube, neutrinos under the ice
The world’s largest neutrino telescope is being built in Antarctica: theIceCube. Neutrinos are the most elusive known particles, capable of passing through a block of lead several light years in size without interacting with virtually anything. Therefore, its detection requires large instruments, usually buried under tons of rock in the mountains, as is the case in the Gran Sasso (Italy) or Canfranc (Spain) laboratories. The fact of having chosen Antarctica as the base for a large neutrino telescope has its reason for being that the ice that is under the surface is a large region to detect the few neutrinos of galactic or extragalactic origin that pass through the Earth, sufficiently transparent so that the light produced by the neutrinos when interacting with the ice reaches the detectors and is dark enough so that there is no interference from outside natural light. The predecessor of the IceCube wasAMANDA -Antarctic Neutrino and Muon Detector-, completed in 2000, where scientists buried 750 detectors under the ice. With them they recorded those faint flashes of light produced by the few neutrinos that cross the ice of the South Pole and demonstrated the viability and efficiency of a telescope of these characteristics. So the international community has launched to build the IceCube, whose “first light” will be seen in 2009 and will occupy an area of one cubic kilometer of ice. That is, 1,000 m wide by 1,000 m deep. With such an extension, experts hope to detect the passage of 100,000 high-energy neutrinos a year, which will serve to understand the explosive processes that occur both within our galaxy, the Milky Way, and in other nearby ones. This experiment, located under the Admunsen-Scott Station of the South Pole, will receive from the United States government 300 million dollars, about 250 million euros, in the next decade. With it, a new window of observation will be opened to the universe not yet explored, just as it will try to answer one of the greatest mysteries of astronomy since the middle of the last century: what is the nature of 90% of the matter with which it is made the universe, known by the name of dark matter?
5. Cassini, the largest planetary explorer 
On October 15, 1997, what to date is the largest space exploration ship ever built was launched. This is Cassini-Huygens, which reached Saturn on July 1, 2004 after passing through the vicinity of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter. The reason for these steps, called “gravitational aids”, is because there is no rocket in the world capable of carrying this 5,600 kg probe directly to Saturn; Of this weight, only 2,500 kg belong to the ship “dry”; the rest is the fuel needed for the trip. In order to get there, it had to pass near Venus twice and once near our planet in order to acquire the necessary speed that would allow it to arrive at its destination in the outer Solar System. The ship, which weighs as much as an adult African elephant, measures 6.7 m high by 4 m long, and has cost 3,270 million dollars, about 2,790 million euros. It has traveled 4,000 million kilometers in just 7 years and carries 18 scientific instruments from the European Space Agency (ESA), in addition to the Huygens probe. This one, weighing 320 kg, was successfully launched on the second largest moon in the Solar System, Titan, on Christmas Day 2004, arriving 21 days later. Huygens was emitting information throughout its descent to the surface of Titan until 3 hours and 44 minutes after it entered the atmosphere. Among the data he provided are the first sounds recorded on the surface of a body in the Solar System.
However, it is not the greatest instrument ever put into space. In this case, the prize goes to the International Space Station , with an expected final size of 110 m long – solar panels included – and a weight of 460 tons. There are serious doubts that all the planned modules will end up being built, but NASA hopes to have it finished in 2010. Its cost is also astronomical: 100,000 million euros, of which the part corresponding to Europe is 8,000 million. Despite ESA claiming that this is the cost of a cup of coffee for every European Union citizen every year for 10 years, very few see any value in what has come to be called the economic black hole of research. space.
6. Blue Gene / L, the fastest computer
Today computer science anticipates that it is outrageous, as Don Sebastián would say to Don Hilarión in La Verbena de la Paloma. In 2004 the fastest supercomputer was at the Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences in Japan, a monster with 5,000 processors linked by 2,800 km of cables that occupies as much as four tennis courts. Today it ranks seventh, and first place goes to Blue Gene / L , the supercomputer developed by IBM and by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It is a machine with more than 65,000 processors that can perform 280 billion calculations per second and consumes a fifth of the electrical power that the laboratory has destined for the computing division, just over 15 MW, almost what generates a small gas station. Initially the fate of this $ 200 million supercomputer is to simulate nuclear explosions and complex biochemical reactions.
For their part, researchers from the GridPP project are developing what will be the world’s largest computing grid, designed to manage the vast amount of information that will appear when CERN’s new accelerator is put into operation , or LHC. For example, the physicists developing the largest of the LHC’s detectors, ATLAS, plan to produce more than 10 million subatomic particle events. One of the last tests of this network consisted of transferring the content equivalent to 17,000 CDs in 9 days between the University of Edinburgh and the Rutherford Appelton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. But not all mathematics is done by computers; the human being is also a little walking computer. To find out how, what is considered the largest mathematical experiment in history was carried out for 3 years, which ended in 2003 and has involved more than 7,000 people. In it, an enigma that has intrigued scientists since 1949 has been solved: we have two ways of solving mathematical problems; a snapshot? that allows us to recognize immediately and without having to count that there are three coins on a table- and another is what they teach us in school? the classic techniques that allow us to add, subtract, multiply and divide-. Due to the large number of participants, it has been possible to discover general trends, such as the fact that women are faster when making instantaneous mathematical judgments.
7. LBA, the biggest environmental experiment
Greenhouse gases could cause an increase in the global temperature of the Earth in a value greater than double that predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations organization that brings together a large number of climatologists from all the countries of the world. These are the first results obtained by the largest climate prediction experiment in progress, published in the prestigious journal Nature. To do this, the calculation time assigned by private individuals on their own computers has been used and that follows the distributed computing model that has been so successful with the SETI @ Home program , designed to analyze the signals received by radio telescopes in search of possible emissions from extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the software platform used is BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Networking Programming), developed by the SETI @ Home team at the University of Berkeley. This project, which began on September 12, 2003, currently has more than 95,000 participants from 150 countries; To collaborate, just visit the website www.climateprediction.net. The first results point to a possible global rise in temperatures of 11 degrees Celsius on average.
On the other hand, this year the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) , the largest environmental experiment in history, is scheduled to conclude. This study focuses on how the Amazon rainforest and changes in land use in the region affect the atmosphere, both regionally and globally. In addition, the LBA also studies how climate changes influence the chemical, biological and physical functioning of the Amazon rainforest. The water and carbon cycles, agriculture … all these issues are taken into account when studying and predicting the effects that deforestation or fire have on one of the lungs of the planet; every year 20,000 square kilometers are lost only in the Brazilian part. Satellites such as Terra or Aqua, which NASA has in orbit, are key to this great environmental experiment. The LBA is already considered a complete success, with 61 projects completed and 59 still under development in which 17 countries are participating.
8. The Race for Giant Super Telescopes
If you want to observe the farthest and faintest objects in the universe, it is necessary to build large aperture telescopes, that is, with a large main mirror. For many years the record was held by the mythical Hale telescope in Monte Palomar , California, with a 5 m mirror. The new ones currently under construction, such as the Gran Telescopio de Canarias, are between 8 and 10 m in diameter. As with radio telescopes, advances in microelectronics and computing allow several independent telescopes to be coupled to form one with higher resolution. In this sense, the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (VLT) in the Atacama desert, Chile, is the largest in the world. It consists of 4 telescopes of 8.2 m in diameter, which if they operate together function as if it were a single 16.4 m mirror telescope. Behind them are the two Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, each with a diameter of 10 m and a joint aperture of 14.6 m.
But the race for the greatest continues. The University of California together with the California Institute of Technology are designing the California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT) , a 30 m diameter telescope. Of course the Europeans don’t want to fall short and they also have their own extremely large telescope, with a mirror between 50 and 100 m in diameter, which is expected to come online in 2015. Of course, high-energy astronomers don’t want each other. left behind and have built their cosmic ray observatory in Mendoza, Argentina, the Pierre Auger Observatory, whose detectors occupy an area of 3,000 square kilometers, which records the subatomic particles that arrive from outer space with an energy that is 10 million times greater than that achieved with the most powerful particle accelerators that human beings have ever built. To do this, by the end of this year the 1,600 planned detectors will have been placed – each one filled with 12 tons of water ?, as well as 24 telescopes destined to observe the weak blue light emitted by cosmic rays when they collide with the nitrogen atoms of the atmosphere. 350 physicists from 15 different countries participate in this project. But the most surprising thing is that its cost will be about 40 million euros, 4 less than initially budgeted. Now they want to build an analogous one in the northern hemisphere, possibly in the US.
9. LIGO, a few kilometers long arms 
In the vicinity of Livinsgton, in the state of Louisiana, and in Hanford, Washington, are the largest gravitational wave detectors in the world: LIGO. In these two locations there is an L-shaped structure where each of the arms is 4 km long. The objective of these instruments is to confirm one of the most striking predictions of Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, gravitational waves. According to this theory, which explains what gravity is – a measurement at each point of the curvature of spacetime in which we live – different phenomena in the universe, such as the explosion of a supernova or the collision between two black holes, must produce some disturbances in the fabric of space similar to the waves that a stone generates when it falls on the calm surface of a pond. The real problem is detecting the passage of these waves through our planet. To do this, two laser beams are interfered, which run through each of the arms of the L, where what physicists call an interference pattern is produced: a set of bands that alternate dark and light. If a gravitational wave were to pass, this interference pattern would change, but by a minimal amount, on the order of one billionth of a millimeter, or one hundred millionth of the diameter of a hydrogen atom in an arm 4 kilometers long. The reason to use two similar detectors separated more than 2,000 km from each other is to be able to eliminate all those local interferences due to micro-earthquakes, air disturbances, the passage of a train or a commercial plane … which may seem like real detections. If a gravitational wave were to pass the Earth, it should be observed simultaneously by both detectors.Now, to identify the celestial source from which it arose, a third detector is needed. For this reason, LIGO North Americans collaborate with other projects, such as the European VIRGO, which is located near Pisa, Italy, and was launched in July 2003. This instrument, a joint Italian-French project, is smaller than its North American counterpart. : the arms are 3 km long. For 2012 NASA and ESA want to send a detector of these characteristics into space: 3 spacecraft flying in a triangular formation and 5 km apart.
10. NIF, a superlaser for nuclear fusion
The world’s largest laser is being built at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California and is expected to be fully operational by 2010. It consists of 192 ultraviolet laser beams enclosed in a space of the size of the Roman Colosseum. With such an apparatus it will be possible to reproduce the physical conditions in which the center of the Sun is found. Therefore, one of the objectives of this center is obvious: to study what happens to matter when it is subjected to very high temperatures and densities. . The most fascinating thing is that, to achieve this, those almost two hundred ultraviolet lasers of such a mammoth construction will be fired on a target whose size is smaller than that of a pellet from a compressed air rifle. Such a tiny target is made up of heavy hydrogen, that is, hydrogen that has a proton and a neutron in its nucleus – the nucleus of “normal” hydrogen consists of only one proton. But do not think that these are sustained shots: each laser pulse, each burst, will last about 3,000 millionths of a second. When the pulses enter the target chamber, they will produce a flash of X-rays that will converge on the center of the chamber, right where there is a small plastic ball that stores the heavy hydrogen inside. NIF technicians assure that the 100 million degrees necessary for nuclear fusion to occur can be achieved.
In essence, the NIF is an alternative to ITER. While the latter uses magnetic fields, the NIF intends to test the feasibility of achieving nuclear fusion through laser bombardment: it is called inertial confinement. The question, as in the case of ITER, is whether the NIF scientists will be able to make this process profitable. Or what is the same, obtain more energy than it needs to function. In this sense, experts consider that 15 times the energy consumed by the system will be obtained. With an estimated cost, only in its construction, of 3,400 million euros and more than a hundred scientists proposing experiments, that such a monster depends on a laboratory essentially destined for military research has aroused harsh criticism in different sectors of North American society.
Miguel Angel Sabadell
