By James Cox

Imagine a world where no one has yet landed on the moon. The space program doesn’t exist, except in the dreams of a visionary few. The transistor, the integrated circuit and the ubiquitous computer chip have yet to be invented. There is no such thing as a compact disc player because there are no lasers. Missing are entire fields of knowledge such as modern chemistry, materials science, nuclear science and molecular biology.

Worried about your health? You can forget about going to your physician for advanced diagnostic tests with X-ray devices, CAT and PET scanners, or a magnetic resonance imager (MRI), for they are nowhere to be found; nor is there any radiation-emitting equipment to treat cancer. Your diet isn’t very good, either; there’s no way to transport fresh vegetables and fruit long distances because there aren’t any jet airplanes or any automobiles or trucks equipped with internal combustion engines. Which probably doesn’t matter anyway, since without refrigeration you wouldn’t be able to keep perishable foods fresh.

That’s the kind of world we would live in — in fact, did live in — until after the foundations of modern physical science were laid by physicists such as Isaac Newton, who invented calculus and mechanics in the 17th century; James Clerk Maxwell, who created the theory of electricity and magnetism in the 19th century; and Ludwig Boltzmann, whose statistical mechanics brought deep understanding to the thermodynamics developed by other physicists during the 19th century.

Our own century has experienced the twin revolutions of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, which have forever altered our basic concepts of space, time and the structure of matter. The former enjoys great name-recognition through its association with Albert Einstein, known to many because of the famous equation E=mc2. Quantum mechanics, which had its origins with Max Planck and Niels Bohr in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and matured with the work of Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac during the 1920s, is less well-known to the public. But none of the electronic devices that are essential to modern life or, for that matter, any of modern science that depends on knowledge of atoms and molecules would exist without physics research and physics theory.

Of course, it is misleading to suggest that thermodynamics made the internal combustion engine inevitable or that the development of quantum mechanics made integrated circuits a foregone conclusion. We might have learned all the quantum mechanics we could have ever wanted to know but still never have recognized the possibility of applying that knowledge to invent a transistor or a microprocessor. Certainly, failure to recognize that possibility would have denied us the economic and social benefits of whole new technologies and deprived science of tools and instruments that have made it possible, in turn, to dig even deeper into fundamental questions that would otherwise have been inaccessible to experiment. Lasers and computers provide two excellent examples of this kind.

It therefore seems clear that when we ask the old “chicken-and-egg” question about basic science versus engineering and technology, the answer is that sometimes one comes first, sometimes the other, but they are surely joined at the hip.

A New Golden Age

Developments in physics in the realms of the very large and the very small are continuing in our own time at a rapid pace, and their ultimate influence on our way of life can only be imagined. This truly is the golden age of astrophysics; the new knowledge being gained will profoundly affect our understanding of basic physical law and our sense of place in the universe. In the realm of the very small, advances in atomic, molecular and condensed-matter physics are leading to new materials and fabrication techniques that will make much of our present-day capabilities seem crude by comparison. (Imagine going to the hardware store for a spool of wire and being able to choose whether you want “regular” or “superconducting.”)

Indeed, research in nuclear physics being conducted here at Old Dominion in partnership with nearby Jefferson Laboratory is in the vanguard of these recent developments, as several of the articles in this issue of Quest indicate. An important new kind of laser known as a free-electron laser, or FEL, has just started operation at the Lab, with unique capabilities for use in both basic and applied areas of research.

At an even smaller level, we have learned that protons and neutrons — previously thought to be the smallest components of atomic nuclei — are ultimately composed of particles called quarks and gluons and that, as a result, our understanding of nuclear physics is still in its infancy. One might venture that understanding the inner workings of nuclei in terms of the elementary particles that comprise them might eventually lead to a “chemistry” for the nucleus, just as ordinary chemistry is now understood in terms of electrons outside nuclei. Although the specific benefits of this nuclear chemistry might be hard to predict in detail, it would have been equally hard to predict modern chemistry and all the benefits that flow from it on the basis of Niels Bohr’s first successful model of the hydrogen atom earlier this century.

Dangers of Leadership Lost

Unfortunately the policy consensus in Congress that has supported research in physics and other basic physical science has seriously eroded since the end of the Cold War. With the perceived elimination of that threat has come a desire to concentrate more heavily on finding cures for major diseases, realizing and exploiting the benefits of molecular biology and enhancing our economic well-being.

These are all worthy goals with which we can all agree, but the mistake being made is assuming that they can be attained by pouring money only into medical research, narrowly defined, and in making better mergers and acquisitions. As noted earlier, past progress in medicine and molecular biology has been closely coupled with and supported by essential concepts and instruments provided by physics and the other physical sciences. It is likely that this beneficial relationship will be even more important as increasingly sophisticated problems are encountered in the future.

On the economic side, the ability of our country to retain leadership in the new global economy will increasingly depend on highly sophisticated products rather than commodity items. This, too, will be sustainable only in concert with scientific leadership in the fundamental sciences, a leadership that will be extremely difficult to recapture if ever lost. The danger, then, is that citizens and their representatives will come to believe that basic science is a luxury without realizing how it is intimately connected to the solution of the real-life, practical problems all of us care about so directly.

The challenge that physicists and, indeed, all scientists face is to inform our fellow citizens and representatives of the many threads that are woven into the fabric of scientific progress: to become spokespersons not just for “my” science but for all of science. I strongly believe that a public properly informed about the need for all the sciences will support a balanced program of research. That job, necessarily, must be the responsibility of the scientific community.