Monica Dunford finds physics cold and boring until she gets a summer job in a lab that changes everything.
Monica Dunford is an experimental high-energy particle physicist working on the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. She is currently at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Prof. Dunford’s research ranges from combing through petabytes of data in search of new elusive particles to crawling in small, dusty places connecting thousands of kilometers of cables.
This story originally aired on February 8, 2019 in an episode titled “In Love with Science: Stories about loving science”.
Story Transcript
I was in crisis. It was my freshman year of college and I discovered that I hated chemistry. Well, actually, let’s be honest. I was bad at chemistry. Every single one of my chemistry experiments was ending in explosion. If the purpose of the course had been to create the perfect mushroom cloud then I would have been acing the class.
Now, to make matters worse, my backup plan, which had been to major in creative writing, was going even worse. I had never seen grades so low. Suddenly that year which had started off with such youthful optimism was literally going up in smoke.
So one day after one of my physics classes, the professor was announcing that they were looking for help in the summer in the labs. I wasn’t interested. Physics to me was everything that was boring. It was cold. It was passionless. I mean, honestly, does anyone like boxes on an incline? I mean, does anyone here get excited about friction?
So they would be paying six bucks an hour, he continued, and I suddenly stopped and looked up. Six bucks an hour. Now, that was a rate a girl could sell her soul to the devil for. So I applied and, much to my surprise, since I basically met none of their requirements, was accepted.
The first day on the job was one of those typical Southern California days, beautiful blue sky, not a cloud to be seen, perfect temperature. The professor of the lab took me downstairs into the basement and it was cold, dark and loud. He swung open the door in one gesture and says, “This is my lab.”
And I am greeted with what looks like a pile of junk. Off to one side there was this water tank made out of plywood and trash bags and in the middle of the room was a table that was full of scraps and other bits of wire. Then off to one side there was this freezer that looked just like the one my dad had got at a garage sale for like 15 bucks and my mother was so pissed.
Then I thought to myself, “This surely can’t be cutting edge research. This junk pile here cannot be cutting edge research. I mean, there must be some mistake. The real lab must be behind some door somewhere. This can’t be it.”
But he was in another world. He gazed around the room like a man in love. “This is my lab,” I whispered.
Now, my 19-year-old self looked up at him and thought, “What a loser. What a loser. Am I really going to spend my summer in this cold, dark place?”
But six bucks an hour is six bucks an hour so that’s how I spent my summer, in that cold, dark place.
And it was assembly line work. I was basically working on putting together light-sensitive light detectors called PMTs. I would take one out of the box, I would put it on the table, I would test it. I would put it into the tank of water, I would test it. I would into the freezer, I would test it. I sent all this data to some graduate student upstairs who I never saw, and I did this hundreds of times.
There was no moment of epiphany that summer. There was no moment of revelation. There was no moment of even real fun. But it was in that junkyard that I discovered and learned how to do cutting edge research.
I remember once, I was sitting at the table trying to fix something and I went through a bunch of papers looking for the instruction manual. And I had to break out in laughter because it was like I have left the instruction-manual territory long ago. This is cutting edge. When something arrives to you sleek and fancy, like your iPhone, that’s no longer cutting edge. That’s production.
Research is a long and winding road full of twists and turns and sharp jabs sometimes. And it is, therefore, by definition just messy.
So one cold, dark lab led to another. I found myself working in labs, working in mines underneath mountains, in mines that were 2,000 meters underground. In going dark and deep I discovered a love for the vast and infinite.
Now, I’m a particle physicist, which means that I study the tiniest particles we know of, tinier than any atom. Yet these particles hold the key to a lot of things about the universe. For example, why is there no antimatter me? Why do we have galaxies? Why are we even here? These were the questions that I wanted to find the answer to. This was part of that long, windy road that I wanted to be on.
Besides, I realized I kind of liked the junkyard feel. Actually, as a matter of fact, my grandfather actually owned a junkyard. So it was, in a sense, sort of like coming home.
After I finished my PhD I couldn’t get on a plane to Geneva fast enough. In Geneva, Switzerland they were building the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine built by man, or so it’s marketed. It was about to turn on. It was about to start. And my timing was going to be perfect. I wanted to be right there in the middle of it when it started.
We were working nights and days and weekends to get this machine working, to get the detector working. I work on the ATLAS experiment and it’s one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. It’s big in every dimension. It’s five stories tall, it’s 7,000 tons, it has more than 3,000 kilometers of cable and, most importantly, it has a 15-page author list.
So I was working on the electronics and I was doing everything from testing the electronics to making sure they're working correctly to literally on my hands and knees, crawling under the floor to run cable.
And we were running into problems everywhere. This is the detector that took 15 years to build and we were getting cables coming from the U.S. that weren’t fitting to electronics boards that were coming from Brazil, that weren’t interfacing with other boards that were coming from Germany. So there we were, working, as I said, nights and weekends just to get this thing running.
Now, at the same time there were 15 pages of other physicists and technicians who were working on getting the accelerator working, the LHC. The LHC is basically the easiest thing you could design. You take two things, in our case protons, and you smash them together. Out of that collision comes a lot of stuff and the ATLAS detector is like a gigantic camera taking a picture of all of that stuff. So we were like working like mad to get the detector working and the LHC team was working like mad to get the accelerator working and it was all coming to the day of first beam.
Finally, the day of first beam arrived and it was a big event. Hundreds of news agencies descended on CERN like some sort of swarm of locusts. They were just flowing everywhere. It was so big that we were actually the Google emblem for the day. So to fail on this day would be to fail in front of every Google user on the planet.
So it was pretty tough. The pressure was high. I kept telling myself that I was excited but the truth was I couldn’t sleep. I kept staying awake at night thinking to myself, “Please, God. If it fails, don’t let it be my cable.”
Just to up the ante a little bit, we were going to do this, we were going to run the beam literally for the first time in front of the press. We weren’t going to do a single test run beforehand. We were just going to do it right in front of them.
Now, at the time, that sounded like a good idea, but in retrospect it was probably pretty stupid. So the LHC, therefore, was going to throw us a little bit of a softball. Usually, we take two beams and we collide them together but that’s pretty hard to do. The beams are microscopic. And our detector has to be timed to the nanosecond. So if our detector is not functioning correctly what it means is that, essentially, we take the picture at the wrong time and we miss the event. We were very afraid that this would happen.
So the LHC was going to send a single beam around and it was going to smash that beam into a metal plate. That was going to be the equivalent of a floodlight of particles. The logic behind this was basically, well, we've got a hundred million channels. Let’s just hit them all. One has to be working.
And so that’s what we did. We sent around a single beam and we tried to hit every single one of our electronics simultaneously.
On the day of first beam, I remember walking into a control room and I was passing news truck after news truck after news truck, and my heart just sank at each one. It’s not that I was afraid of failure. Research is all about failure. It’s about failing, tweaking, failing, tweaking, tweaking again, failing again. It was failure going viral. It’s one thing if your experiment doesn’t work as planned. It’s a totally different thing when your grandmother calls you to tell you your experiment didn’t work as planned.
So on the day of first beam when the LHC called the ATLAS Control Room to tell us that they were sending beam, it’s like the entire room just stopped breathing.
Now, the ATLAS Control Room is the absolute antithesis of that physics junkyard feel. It has very sleek, modern desks. It has an almost apologetic number of flat-screen computers, it has huge projected monitors across the front showing a variety of diagnostics and screens. There's not a single piece of trash. It’s immaculately clean. So if you leave in anything, like a little scrap of paper, it’s gone, like a fairy just took it away.
I think the press must have been a little misled when they were standing in the Control Room because I think they must have been expecting production. They must have been expecting something sleek and cool and fancy. But despite the look of the Control Room, this was still cutting edge. So when beam arrived at the detector there were no lights. There was no flashing anything. There was no immediate indication that beam had even arrived or that we had recorded it. All there was was a bunch of physicists hunched over their computers desperately looking for that beam data.
Finally, somebody found it and they brought it on to one of the monitors in front of the room.One head looked up, two heads looked up, and suddenly everybody looked up.And there it was.Data.For the first time in 15 years, data.After so much sweat and toil and pain, data.For me, it was as if this room full of photographers and full of cheering physicists just fell away. I stood there and I found myself a woman in love. Thank you.