Things I've Learned with Professor Barry Blumenfeld

As a child, Professor Barry Blumenfeld, professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, already knew that he wanted to pursue a career in science.

After doing his undergraduate work at MIT and attending graduate school at Columbia, Blumenfeld went to live in Switzerland for a decade and worked for the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) before coming back to the United States and joining the faculty at Hopkins.

Blumenfeld sat down with The News-Letter and talked about his experiences working for CERN, as well as the latest project that has him smashing protons in Switzerland.

News-Letter (N-L): What led you to pursue a career in physics and astronomy?Barry Blumenfeld (BB): The big incident was [in] 1957: You had Sputnik. Science came to the forefront. I was about 10 years old, so I was obviously influenced by that a great deal, plus I just found that interesting.

N-L: So you knew as a child that this was what you wanted to do?BB: Well, science was certainly interesting. It didn't become exclusive until quite a bit later.

I didn't decide to be a physics major until my freshman year in college, I suppose. I probably applied as an undergraduate originally in engineering. I just found physics to be more interesting . . . because it is.

N-L: I've heard that you've done a lot of stuff with CERN. How did you get involved with them?BB: I was a graduate student in physics at Columbia University. There was a visiting professor from CERN at Columbia who was working with a Columbia professor who was trying to set up an experiment at CERN. I had this visiting professor for a course and learned about CERN in Switzerland.

It sounded incredibly cool, so I approached the Columbia professor to see if he needed any graduate students for a new project in Switzerland and he took me on. He sent me to Switzerland and I stayed there for 10 years.

N-L: And what exactly is CERN?BB: It's not what you would call nuclear research. It's really particle physics. It's an international consortium that now [has] something like 20 European countries that pooled their resources and built this scientific facility.

The United States has what's called "observer status," where you're not really a member, but you work there. I've been working there for 38 years now. For a little bit of the time, I was actually a CERN employee, but just a tiny fraction.

N-L: Can you explain what you are doing with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN?BB: Now, the Large Hadron Collider is about the sixth experiment overall that I'll be doing at CERN. It's been a long time since I've lived there full time, but it's just another in a long series of experiments. The Large Hadron Collider will be the world's highest energy collider.

Basically, what happens is that you smash protons together head-on and you look for new things to come out of those collisions. The primary example that people talk about is the so-called "Higgs particle," which is a particle which is theoretically predicated but hasn't been observed yet.

People have been looking for it, including me, for decades now, and either it doesn't really exist - in which case something even more interesting would exist - or we just haven't had enough energy until now.So by going to the higher energies of the Large Hadron Collider, we hope to either see this particle or find something even more interesting.

N-L: Some people believe that the Large Hadron Collider will create black holes that will destroy the planet. Could you talk about that?BB: Yeah, you hear things like that occasionally. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. They've said that about older colliders also and it didn't happen.

Although the energy of the Large Hadron Collider will be higher than anything we've had in a controlled environment, we are constantly bombarded by high energy cosmic rays that have much higher energy and the earth is still here and has been for a long time.

N-L:So how long have you been working at Hopkins, exactly?BB: I came to Hopkins in 1979, so we just passed 30 years.

N-L: What is your most interesting experience working either at Hopkins or at CERN?BB: Well, they're very different. When you're a professor, you spend a lot of your time teaching and talking to students, educating students, encouraging students.

When I was at CERN full time, I was just a full-time researcher and spent 110 percent of my time doing the research, so it's kind of different.

Since I came to Hopkins, I've actually worked on experiments in California, New York [and] Illinois. I'm still working on an experiment in Illinois. I worked on experiments at CERN as a professor at Hopkins. It's just a totally different experience.

N-L: So what projects are you working on now, either for CERN or other research projects?BB: The Large Hadron Collider [for CERN] was supposed to start last year but it had a little problem because of the scale of [it]. It took about a year to resolve and it's starting up right now.

Hopefully, we'll be back to where we were supposed to be a year ago by Thanksgiving.

N-L: So will you have to be doing some travelling to Switzerland in the near future to work on the Large Hadron Collider?BB: The part of the Large Hadron Collider I'm involved in is actually in the data and getting the data distributed to 100 sites around the world, so I can do most everything I need to do by [using the] Internet. However, I'd certainly like to go back to Switzerland.

N-L: Do you have any advice for undergraduates who want to go into physics and/or astronomy?BB: Study a lot. Be flexible. Things change. If you're going to do something on the cutting edge, what's the cutting edge today won't necessarily be the cutting edge 20 years from now.