Nobel Dreams: Gary Taubes Pulls Back the Curtain

"I will give you my priority: to be first and to be correct is the most important. To be first but to be wrong I think is not as good." -- Sam Ting

In the event that you've not heard, because so many other news stories are splattering against the media fan, Nobel Prizes are being distributed this week. By week's end prizes for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize will be given. When I saw the Physics prize in the news I immediate thought about the maneuvering that takes place behind the scenes when Nobel Prizes are doled out. 

I'll confess that my "education" on this topic is limited due to having only read this one book, but it was still pretty enlightening, even if some critics call it somewhat flawed.

The book, which I still have, is titled Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment (1986/1987). In it the author, Gary Taubes, gives account of the race to discover the W and Z bosons at CERN, research that resulted in a shared 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics between Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer.

[EdNote: A boson is a type of subatomic particle that has an integer spin (0, 1, 2) and acts as a force carrier in the universe.]

The book focuses on Rubbia, the Italian experimental physicist who pushed CERN to convert its Super Proton Synchrotron into a proton–antiproton collider and who led the UA1 collaboration that detected the particles. Those bosons carry the weak nuclear force and finding them confirmed the electroweak theory that unifies the weak force with electromagnetism. Van der Meer’s contribution was the stochastic cooling technique that made it possible to accumulate enough antiprotons for the collisions to succeed. 

Taubes spent months at CERN interviewing physicists. In the book he explains the accelerator physics and detector work clearly enough for a general reader while spending most of his attention on the people. 

What set the book apart, and made it controversial, is the portrait of Rubbia. Taubes presents him as brilliant, relentless, and often abrasive: skilled at politics and fundraising, willing to drive a large international team hard, and, in Taubes’s narrative, prone to overstating or rushing results. 

The book follows both the successful W and Z discoveries and later, less successful claims—including an early top-quark announcement and “monojet” events that Rubbia suggested might point to new physics—that did not hold up. 

Contemporary reviews in the Los Angeles Times and Time described the book as unusually good at showing big science as a human enterprise of ambition, rivalry, and luck, not only as a search for particles. Rubbia, however, called much of it rubbish, or more accurately, "Terrible," and that Taubes had not understood how discovery works in large collaborations. Some colleagues defended Rubbias integrity while still acknowledging the force of his overbearing personality.

As for me the biggest takeaway was how competitive things get when a Nobel Prize is at stake. And the amount of money involved. Carlo Rubbia’s role was to conceive the project, force it through CERN, and run the UA1 detector collaboration that claimed the signals. The 1984 Nobel was for that work, and hundreds of people were involved. The prize was not for a mad scientist holed up in his laboratory beneath the clock tower.

The book is now dated in its physics—the top quark and Higgs boson came later—but it remains a sharp early example of investigative science writing about how Nobel-level experimental particle physics is actually done: huge machines, large collaborations, and careers shaped as much by persuasion and competition as by data.

TRIVIA: Alfred Nobel, for whom the prizes are name, made his fortune from explosives patents and the companies that manufactured them. At his death in 1896 he had 355 patents and a large international industrial estate. That estate continues to fund the Nobel Prizes.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Reds

Red is the heartbeat of the visible world.

"I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell."
— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

"A thimbleful of red is more potent than a bucketful."
— Henri Matisse

"Red is the color of life. It's blood, passion, rage."
— Mary Hogan

 

Related Link:

Renegade Theater's RED Proves Worthy of John Logan's Masterful Play

Uprooted: The Ralph Kand Story, Part 16. Coming to America

Ralph worked at the American army base for three years after the war. There were no life and death close calls or drama of that sort. It was disheartening for him to see Europe parsed out between the Allied powers and so many free peoples now placed under Stalin's regime. For this reason he never ceased from his longing to reach America.

Housing had been arranged and a measure of normalcy began to settle in as life routines took shape. Eventually Ralph began to date and at one point developed a serious relationship with a young Jewish woman named Elka. The relationship broke off because Elka would be unable to have children because of "experiments" the Nazis had performed while she was in a concentration camp.

There were countless Eastern Europeans seeking refuge from the Soviet darkness and much of the paperwork Ralph was processing involved helping these refugees reach America, his own dream. Working there helped him see that it was possible. Germany, rebuilding from the destruction caused by the war, could hardly absorb these masses.

For Ralph, the war had ended, but there was still the question of where he would go.

Returning to Estonia was out of the question. The Soviet Union had taken control of the country again, and thousands of Estonians who had fled west faced the same problem. They had survived the war, but they no longer had a country to which they could safely return.

For several years Ralph worked for the Americans in Europe. His ability with languages helped him, as did his typing skills and experience with office work. By then he had learned English well enough to make himself useful. He worked with paperwork involving refugees and displaced persons, people who, like himself, had been left stranded by the war. There were hundreds of thousands of them across Europe.

In June 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act. The law created a special means for European refugees and displaced persons to immigrate to the United States. The original legislation authorized the admission of more than 200,000 people during the following two years. Many came from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, countries that had been overrun during the war or had fallen under Soviet control.

The process was not simply a matter of buying a ticket. Applicants were screened and had to meet American immigration requirements. Arrangements generally had to be made for employment and housing so that the newcomers would not become public charges. Churches, relief organizations, relatives, employers and ethnic organizations helped find sponsors and jobs for those who qualified.

For an Estonian such as Ralph, the new law offered something that had been missing since he left home in 1944: the possibility of beginning again somewhere permanent.

Ralph decided on America.

He remembered boarding a ship crowded with displaced persons, many of them Lithuanians. His recollection was that there were about 600 aboard. The ship was supposed to be bound for New York, but according to Ralph it was diverted and eventually landed at New Orleans.

Records from those years show that ships carrying displaced persons regularly left European ports, particularly Bremerhaven, for the United States. New York received most of them, although Boston and New Orleans were also ports of entry. Ralph remembered the year as 1948, which would place his voyage near the beginning of the American displaced-person resettlement program.

Whatever the name of the ship, Ralph had finally crossed the Atlantic.

After everything that had happened since leaving Estonia—the fishing boat, Danzig, the refugee camps, his travels across Germany and Austria, imprisonment, the end of the war and his years working for the Americans—he was now in the United States.

He eventually made his way to Minnesota.

Ralph settled in the Twin Cities, where employment opportunities were better. Minnesota also had a growing community of Estonians who had escaped their homeland during and after the war. Like Ralph, many had no expectation that they would soon be going home. Estonia remained incorporated into the Soviet Union, and it would remain so for decades.

As Ralph built his American life in the Twin Cities he found work, married and started a family, remaining there through most of his working years. English, which had once been simply another language he was trying to learn, became the language of his new country.

But he never forget Estonia.

In February 1950, only a relatively short time after his arrival in America, a man identified in the Estonian-American press as Ralph Känd took part in an Estonian Independence Day radio program at the University of Minnesota. He spoke in English, giving listeners a brief account of Estonia. 

It would have been an appropriate subject for him. Estonia had declared its independence in 1918, only a short time before Ralph was born. He had grown up during the country's brief period of independence, watched the Soviets occupy it, lived through the German occupation and then fled when the Russians returned.

Though America was now his home, but Estonia remained part of him.

There were other Estonians who ended up in Minnesota following similar paths. Some settled in the Twin Cities; others eventually made their way north. One of the better-known Estonians in Duluth was Paul Vesterstein. After fleeing Estonia in 1944, Vesterstein eventually reached Augsburg, Germany, where he lived among roughly 2,000 Estonian displaced persons. In 1949 the Duluth YMCA sponsored him, allowing him to immigrate to the United States, arriving with a small suitcase and 28 cents in his pocket. Known locally as "the Count",he became a successful businessman and remained actively interested in Estonia throughout his life. Years later he would even import Estonia pianos to the United States.

There was something about Minnesota that was familiar to people from Estonia. The northern climate, forests, lakes and long winters were closer to the country they had left than much of America was.

Ralph, however, did not initially settle in Duluth for those reasons. He went where there was work. Duluth came much later.

After Ralph retired, his wife reached the point where she needed nursing-home care. Ralph brought her to Duluth. With employment no longer determining where he needed to live, he could choose where he wanted to spend his remaining years.

He chose Lake Superior.

Ralph found an apartment facing the lake. The climate and landscape of northeastern Minnesota were familiar to him, but it was the great expanse of cold water outside his window that most reminded him of Estonia and the Baltic Sea.

And Ralph didn't just look at it. He swam in it, which was how I met him.

One day in the early 1990s I was sitting on the beach at Park Point reading when I noticed an older man making his way toward the water. One of his legs was badly withered, the result of the childhood injury he had lived with nearly all his life. The other was strong.

He entered Lake Superior and swam for perhaps twenty minutes.

Eventually he came out of the water and made his way toward where I was sitting. We began talking.

I knew nothing about the man standing before me. I did not know about Estonia, his brother Karl, the Russians, the Germans, the fishing boat, the torpedoes, the refugee camps, the jail cell or the years he had spent trying to find a country where he could live in freedom.

Then he asked me a question. "Would you like to hear how learning new languages saved my life?"

I said yes. 

"Come over to my apartment and I will tell you stories." And that was how this all began.

Ralph's final years were spent in Duluth, always in an apartment that faced the Great Lake Superior, kindling memories of the days of his youth in Tallin on the Baltic Sea, reminiscing over photos of his cousins, brother, father, mother and friends, especially Eitsi, his first love. It was his hope to die facing the lake, but that's another story.

 

THE END

Ralph's 1938 confirmation party. Brother Karl on right.

RELATED 

UPROOTED: Intro and Part One

UPROOTED: Part Two

UPROOTED: Part Three
UPROOTED: Part Four
UPROOTED: Part Five
UPROOTED: Part Six

UPROOTED: Part Seven   

UPROOTED: Part Eight  

UPROOTED: Part Nine

UPROOTED: Part Ten

UPROOTED: Part Eleven

UPROOTED: Part Twelve

UPROOTED: Part Thirteen

UPROOTED: Part Fourteen
UPROOTED: Part Fifteen

Uprooted is a true story about a man with a singular quest: Freedom. This longing for freedom is one of the primary reasons people leave their homelands, often at great personal sacrifice.

Uprooted: The Ralph Kand Story, Part 15. Safe At Last

Here and there he saw medics attending to wounded. Directly in his path he saw a civilian bent over a Nazi soldier whose breast was decorated with medals.

"Help me," the man said.

Ralph looked down and saw that the body lay headless. The man was trying to remove an officer's patent leather high-top boots.

"Come on. Get over there. Put your hands under his armpits so I can pull his boots off."

"Filthy cur," Ralph hissed.

"Where are you going? Look at these boots. My shoes have no soles."

German countryside. Natl WW2 Museum

Ralph was already walking away. There were more than two dozen dead from whom the man could have had shoes if he needed them this badly. Ralph rubbed the side of his nose with his fingertips and scratched at his cheek as he shuffled toward the road. He half turned and saw the man now on the ground with his foot pushing into the dead officer's crotch, yanking with both hands on the unyielding boot.

For half an hour Ralph continued along the road beneath an overcast sky. Suddenly an American jeep sputtered up behind causing him to jump as he was lost in his thoughts.

"Need a lift?"

Ralph studied their faces. This could turn out all right. In the next instant he was heading west answering questions and telling his story.

"Let's get you registered," one of the American G.I.'s said when they reached what appeared to be a base camp of sorts.

"Your English is pretty good," said the other who had been driving.

"So's yours," Ralph replied and the soldiers laughed.

He was ushered into a large hall where a small waiting area had been roped off. A soldier instructed him to fill out a form, which he accomplished with minimal assistance. His handwriting was primarily block letters but all the important words were legible when the clerk reviewed it.

"Take a seat over here," he was instructed. About twenty minutes passed and another voice barked, "Kand!"

The room where refugees were being processed was full of tables and chairs. The man who called was across the way, gesturing with an open palm, "This way."

One of the soldiers who picked him up on the road came over and said something to the man processing Ralph’s paperwork. The man looked at Ralph with an inquisitive gaze. “He says you told him you were the second fastest typist in Estonia.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why not the fastest? That’s something of a bizarre claim to make.”

“I didn’t want to sound like I was boasting, sir.”

“But you are boasting.”

“Yes, I understand that.”

These Americans laughed, too. The war must be going well for them. He had a hard time grasping their easy-going manner in such a harsh world.

“You also speak three languages?”

“Four fluently. And a bit of Finnish, Czech and a few words a Frenchman taught me. Enough to get by anyways.”

The Americans lowered their voices to confer. Then the one who was seated said, “We’ll have to give you a typing test. We’re short on typists here and long on paperwork.”

“Come with me,” the soldier instructed.

Ralph limped to the far corner of the room where an idle typewriter awaited him. The soldier pulled the chair away from the table, inviting Ralph to take a seat.

CONTINUED HERE

RELATED 

UPROOTED: Intro and Part One

UPROOTED: Part Two

UPROOTED: Part Three
UPROOTED: Part Four
UPROOTED: Part Five
UPROOTED: Part Six

UPROOTED: Part Seven   

UPROOTED: Part Eight  

UPROOTED: Part Nine

UPROOTED: Part Ten

UPROOTED: Part Eleven

UPROOTED: Part Twelve

UPROOTED: Part Thirteen

UPROOTED: Part Fourteen

Uprooted is a true story about a man with a singular quest: Freedom. This longing for freedom is one of the primary reasons people leave their homelands, often at great personal sacrifice.

 

Uprooted: The Ralph Kand Story, Part 14. Americans--First Encounter

Upstairs, Ralph and the other prisoners were taken to a makeshift desk where German police prepared their release papers. From there they were escorted to a storage room to retrieve their belongings.

The process took time, and Ralph complained.

“Don't be a brute,” one of the policemen told him. “We're civilized people. Keep your head.”

Ralph in his mother's arms, 1924

The officer took Ralph into the storage area. Though Ralph had arrived with very little, what remained in his pack mattered to him. He had photographs of his mother, Karl, his cousins and Eitzi. The German searched the shelves until he found it. “Is that yours?” the officer asked.

Ralph nodded. A few minutes later he was outside.

Released prisoners were moving in different directions. Some had homes to return to. Others appeared to have nowhere to go. Across the square Ralph could see the damaged courthouse. Other buildings nearby had also been hit during the bombing raids.

Franz found him. “I'm going to Munich,” he said. “It looks like the war is almost over.”

Franz had heard that the Germans were emptying the jail because the police were needed elsewhere and the authorities no longer wanted responsibility for feeding and guarding prisoners. “The Americans are coming this way,” he said.

That caught Ralph's attention.

Franz wished him luck.

“Auf Wiedersehen.”

The two men embraced.

“Auf Wiedersehen."

Ralph started west. Within an hour he was outside the edge of town, walking through farmland and rolling countryside. Other people were traveling the roads as well, some carrying packs or suitcases.

By mid-afternoon Ralph was walking along a winding road when he saw German soldiers coming toward him. There were hundreds of them, moving quickly in the opposite direction.

Ralph stepped onto the shoulder of the road and kept walking.

Then he heard a cannon. An explosion struck near the German column. The soldiers scattered into the fields on both sides of the road.

With the road suddenly clear, Ralph could see what was happening. Coming from the other direction an American tank appeared over the rise, American infantrymen moving with it.

Another round exploded nearby. Ralph realized he was between the two forces. He saw a farmhouse and headed for it as quickly as his bad leg would carry him. An older German farmer stood at the doorway, waving people inside and directing them toward the basement. Ralph went down with the others as gunfire continued outside.

When Ralph nobbled down about a dozen people were sitting along the walls of the basement. “Where are you from?” a woman asked.

“Czechoslovakia,” said a heavyset man.

She looked toward Ralph.

“Estonia.”

“You're a long way from home.”

“Yes.”

The skirmish outside did not last long, but no one moved. Eventually they heard footsteps upstairs. A door opened and floorboards creaked above them. Then the basement door opened.

A soldier came down the stairs carrying a rifle. Another followed. They were Americans.

The soldiers looked around the basement. They were searching for German troops. Finding none, they lowered their weapons. One of them spoke. “Anybody speak English?”

No one answered.

Then Ralph said, “I speak a little English.”

The American looked at him. “Ein bisschen?” he said, laughing.

Ralph understood.

“Tell them they're free to go,” the soldier said. “We're looking for German soldiers.”

Ralph translated the message into German. The people began getting to their feet.

Outside, Ralph could see bodies in the field. The American soldiers left to rejoin their unit. The German farmer offered the others something to eat and told them they could stay the night if they needed a place to sleep. 

Ralph declined the offer. Ralph declined the offer. "I'll press on," he said, stepping down to the stone-terraced walk. As the others chose to accept the farmer's kindness, Ralph headed back across the grassy field toward the road.

CONTINUED HERE

RELATED 

UPROOTED: Intro and Part One

UPROOTED: Part Two

UPROOTED: Part Three
UPROOTED: Part Four
UPROOTED: Part Five
UPROOTED: Part Six

UPROOTED: Part Seven   

UPROOTED: Part Eight  

UPROOTED: Part Nine

UPROOTED: Part Ten

UPROOTED: Part Eleven

UPROOTED: Part Twelve

UPROOTED: Part Thirteen

Uprooted is a true story about a man with a singular quest: Freedom. This longing for freedom is one of the primary reasons people leave their homelands, often at great personal sacrifice.