Robert Wilson constructs “Acqua Alle Funi,” also known as the Hyperbolic Obelisk, in 1978. Photo: Fermilab
Robert Wilson was a man born out of his time.
He lived in America from 1914 to 2000, but he really belonged to the central Italy of the 1500s. He knew this, but was determined to make the best of the opportunities afforded by the 20th century.
Robert Rathbun Wilson was a son of a small American township called Frontier, Wyoming, but while his intellectual brilliance and talents soon took him to many more interesting places, he never forgot or underestimated his roots in small-time America.
His academic success took him to California, where he studied physics to doctoral level, studying under Ernest O. Lawrence on the theory of the cyclotron. By the time the United States entered the war he was working with Robert Oppenheimer, who recruited him as a group leader at Los Alamos, where he contributed to the building of the first atomic bomb. He then retired to a more peaceful existence as a professor at Cornell University.
When in the 1960s United States decided to build the world’s largest particle accelerator, Robert Wilson was the obvious choice of a man to build it. A site was chosen on the prairie, 40 miles out of Chicago. Boring, flat farmland is not a very exciting place to attract the brains that would clearly be needed to man it.
“Acqua Alle Funi” has stood in the reflecting pond in front of Wilson Hall since 1978. Photo: Reidar Hahn
Robert Wilson was up to the challenge. His own personality and reputation were sufficient to attract the talent he needed, and he soon had a small team of potential group leaders with the requisite skills.
The site, about 10 square miles in extent, comprised more than 50 farms whose owners had been reimbursed by the government, some woods and an old cemetery. Wilson had the clapboard houses moved physically to make a charming little artificial village, found a site for the accelerator, which was to be a circular structure about a mile across, designed and built a laboratory building 15 stories high, stocked the site with a herd of American bison and the lakes with trumpeter swans, arranged for some of the land to be turned from farming back to its original tall grass prairie, and covered the site with sufficient roads for access. Characteristically, the roads are named after the Indian tribes that once inhabited the area.
As well as being a scientist, he was a sculptor and an architecture enthusiast, and the design of the high-rise building bore his influence. He covered the site with large abstract sculptures of his own design. At one time he took a course in welding so that he could realize his own art work. One of the pieces was an obelisk, placed at the end of a reflecting pool situated in front of the high-rise laboratory building. He called it “Acqua alle funi.”
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In the early 1500s, Bernini and Michelangelo were busy building and decorating St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome. Some years later, it was desired to re‑erect in the middle of the circular colonnade an enormous monumental pillar from antiquity that was there. The pillar, made from granite and weighing many tons, was to be brought to a vertical position and dropped into a prepared hole so that it would stand and occupy the most prominent position at the center of the most important piazza in the world.
Elaborate preparations were made for the raising. A huge wooden structure was erected, with pulleys and ropes enabling the column to be pulled up by the combined efforts of hundreds of workers. A day was set aside. Everything was ready for the effort. As an additional guarantee of success, the Pope decreed that no one was to speak while the work was in progress, so that the instructions of the overseer could be clearly heard. The penalty for speaking is variously reported as having been death or excommunication.
The work began. The workers toiled at the ropes, and the pillar began to rise. The hot Roman sun ascended in the sky. As the angle of the great stone obelisk increased, so did the temperature of the ropes. The energy expended by all those people pulling heated them, and the blazing sun did nothing to help. In due course they became so hot they began to smoke. If they caught fire, the obelisk would come crashing down. It might even shatter.
The obelisk in St. Peter Square in Vatican City was erected in 1586. Photo: Staselnik
It was at this time that one of the workers, a Ligurian sailor called Bresca, decided that the rule of silence was less important than the success of the project. He shouted out: “Acqua alle funi,” meaning “water to the ropes.” The astounded overseer, realizing that this was useful advice, had water fetched and poured on the ropes. The project was saved. The obelisk adorns St. Peter’s Square to this day.
When it was reported to the Holy Father, he decided on clemency. The punishment was lifted, and the brave worker was rewarded. He and his heirs were given the privilege of a monopoly in the sale of palm leaves to pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square on Palm Sunday of each year. Apparently the family survives, and still enjoys the privilege.
Wilson erected his obelisk on the site of his laboratory in May 1978.
Frank Beck is a retired CERN staff member living in England. He spent two years at the Fermilab as head of research services when the Energy Saver was being commissioned.
Editor’s note: For more about the construction and installation of “Acqua Alle Funi,” including historic photos, check out the History and Archives Project website. A May 1978 FermiNews article (see page 2) reports on the sculpture installation.
Japanese researchers have been with Fermilab from the beginning. This picture was taken on Feb. 11, 1972, when Fermilab’s Main Ring accelerator achieved 100 billion electronvolts. (Eighteen days later, its energy would double to 200 billion eV.) From left: Jim Griffin, Bob Wilson, Dave Sutter, Ned Goldwasser, Tom Collins, Shigeki Mori, Ed Hubbard, Ernie Malamud. Photo: Ryuji Yamada
It was 1971, and Fermilab was unexpectedly in a crisis: The magnets in the newly constructed Main Ring were shorting out daily. Engineers repaired the magnets during the day, allowing physicists to attempt tuning the beam at night. After many weeks of diligent work, the team achieved a circulating beam.
But they ran into another second stumbling block: While they could accelerate the beam easily up to 10 billion electronvolts, they hit a wall at higher energies, setting off another couple weeks’ worth of nose-to-the-grindstone work. The cause of the rampant failures had proved mystifying.
Ryuji Yamada accompanied a welder to a malfunctioning magnet. “I just watched the repair process,” recalled Fermilab’s first Japanese researcher. The welder cut through the vacuum pipes between the magnets. Yamada noticed stainless steel slivers falling to the floor. He collected the slivers and examined them back at his office. They turned out to be stainless slivers with greatly increased magnetic permeability.
“Although welders cleaned the inside the vacuum pipe, they could not do a perfect job,” he said. “At low field, the slivers were lying down inside the pipe, but when the magnetic field increased they were sucked inside the magnet gap and stood up and stopped the beam.”
One cleaning regimen overhaul later, the Main Ring was restored to full operation, achieving the goal of a 200 billion-electronvolt beam within five years, as originally planned by founding Director Robert Wilson. Over the following years, the beam met, then exceeded, the goals. And so did the influence and impact of physicists from Japan.
Ryuji Yamada is one of the scientists who, in 1972, helped the Main Ring accelerator achieve 100 and up to 200 billion electronvolts. In this picture, 100 billion electronvolts is indicated in the meter just above the controls. Photo: Fermilab
Throughout the 1970s, Yamada continued his critical contributions to Fermilab’s high-energy physics program. Director Wilson had begun a project for developing superconducting magnets for the Energy Doubler, which was later assigned a more ambitious beam energy goal of 1 trillion electronvolts and renamed the Tevatron. So Yamada got to work, starting a new superconducting magnet testing group for Tevatron magnets. Masayoshi Wake, a scientist at the Japanese high-energy physics laboratory KEK, also contributed substantially to the project. Together, they forged inroads for a collaboration that would soon be formalized.
In 1978, Japan hosted the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Tokyo. Leon Lederman, who would take over as Fermilab director the following year, talked with KEK Director Tetsuji Nishikawa on future collaboration, including the Tevatron Collider project.
DOE signed a formal collaboration with Japan on November 11, 1979. The deal was an opportunity for Japan to grow its high-energy physics experimentalist community, with an end goal of investing more homegrown talent into expanding KEK. In an effort led by scientist Kuni Kondo, Japan formed the initial CDF collaboration with Italy and the United States and remained heavily involved in the Tevatron collider throughout its 30-year run, as well as the CDF detector, from constructing detector components, to analyzing jets, and taking leading roles in the top quark and Bc meson discoveries. Scientist Shigeki Mori, who helped the Main Ring reach an energy of 200 billion electronvolts, was one of the early contributors to this effort.
Scientists from the University of Tsukuba and KEK stand in front of the CDF detector in 1984 at Fermilab. From left: Shoji Mikamo, Yoshio Hayashide, Akihiro Yamashita, Hitoshi Miyata, Kiyoshi Yasuoka, Taku Yamanaka (KTeV experiment), Shinhong Kim, Kuni Kondo, Yoshinobu Takaiwa. Photo courtesy of Shinhong Kim
One member of this cohort was Taiji Yamanouchi, who served as an assistant director and head of the Fermilab program planning office. Before the U.S.-Japan collaboration began, he was part of a group led by Lederman that discovered the Upsilon particle in 1977 using the Main Ring beam. (The Upsilon particle is made of a bottom and antibottom quark.)
About 20 other Japanese researchers were on site at any given time, creating a prominent community in Wilson Hall, where they had lunch together frequently. One of these other researchers was Shinhong Kim, who joined CDF in 1980 and became the CDF Japanese group leader in 2000.
“Japanese researchers contributed to the construction of the detectors and the physics analysis in each U.S.-Japan project, such as CDF, E704, E782, KTeV, DONUT, SciBooNE and so on,” said Kim, a professor at the University of Tsukuba. “They brought in unique detector technology and new analysis methods into the collaboration. In these projects, we saw that the diversity made the collaboration more fruitful.”
Approximately 50 Japanese researchers earned Ph.D.s through their work at Fermilab, and many of them, as originally planned, have used their expertise to build other international research endeavors.
Kim, for example, now collaborates with Fermilab as leader of the Japanese-led cosmic background neutrino decay (COBAND) experiment. COBAND hopes to see far into our universe’s past by finding neutrinos formed shortly after the Big Bang, similar to studies on the cosmic microwave background radiation. Under Kim’s guidance, the project is currently developing superconducting far-infrared photon detectors.
About half of the 55 current members of the Japanese users community at Fermilab work from their own institutions like Kim. Those on site are not concentrated in one area of the lab as they once were at CDF. Rather, they now participate in 11 different projects or experiments.
The future for U.S.-Japan partnership remains bright. The 1979 agreement is renewed annually when representatives gather to discuss project updates, future funding and new ideas.
The 30th Anniversary Symposium of the U.S.-Japan Collaboration in High Energy Physics was held in Hawaii on Oct. 20-21, 2010. The proceedings of the symposium show further details of the collaboration.