For some physicists, a love of science is developed at an early age.
"I was always interested in science, even when I was a little kid," says physicist Al Stetz. "It started back in the '40s, right after the Second World War, when I got a magazine called Popular Science. It just fascinated me -- even before I could read. I'd pester my poor parents to make them read it to me over and over again until they were ready to give up.
"That was a period in the '40s when the development of the hydrogen and atomic bomb took place. These were fascinating topics to the general public and magazines like Popular Science wrote a lot about them. I learned little by little about nuclear weapons and nuclear physicists, and about the kind of intellectual development that went into it. It was the golden age of nuclear physics."
It figures that Stetz eventually found himself smashing atoms at TRIUMF (a national research facility). "TRIUMF was my stomping grounds for many years," he says. "My interests had to do with the interface between particle physics and nuclear physics -- what the one field can learn from the other."
Stetz has also done a lot of work at the Los Alamos Pion Facility. Pions are considered stable particles, as far as physicists are concerned.
"Our idea of stable is somewhat different from other people's," Stetz says. "Pions only 'live' for about 26 billionths of a second. That's a long life for a particle."
Don't even ask about "virtual" particles, the ones with short lives. And just where do they go when their time's up? According to physicists, they just disappear. Nuclear physicist Dave Axen describes quarks and pions as "point particles."
"We're studying the fundamental forces of nature at even smaller distances," he says. "For the smallest distances that we can measure, all the properties of the electron are contained in a volume that's even smaller. We say that protons are made of quarks. If the quarks are also point particles, then that's the end of the story."
The story began in the '50s for Axen. Like Stetz, he started his career when nuclear power was all the rage.
"The nuclear power program was starting up in Canada and the United States," Axen says. "It was a rather exciting time, with dynamic and impressionable people getting involved, and nuclear issues and advances were in the newspapers all the time."
Physicist Janis McKenna also started her career in the '50s. She says that time was an exciting one for science. "So many things were happening," says McKenna, who works at Stanford University. "It was really a burgeoning thing and it was a tempting profession to be sure."
McKenna says she enjoys the research part of her job immensely. "I find it interesting to discover new things," she says. "We're lucky because we work on research that's so important, and yet people don't often think about it. It's difficult to think about particles of matter that you can't even see."
McKenna advises potential nuclear physicists to be prepared for hard work. "It's an extremely long road to get to a place where you can do the kind of work that really makes a difference," she says. "You must be prepared to apply yourself to your studies. Expect to spend long hours in the lab while you're at university. Then you'll need to put a great deal of effort and time into your thesis before you get your doctorate."
As a professor, Axen has worked at numerous facilities around the world. After finishing his PhD at the University of British Columbia, he spent some time at the Rutherford Lab in England before returning to help with the development of TRIUMF back at his alma mater. Axen then went to CERN in Switzerland to watch protons and anti-protons destroy each other. Now he's back at UBC wondering about quarks and point particles.
"If we could look at even smaller and smaller distances, things would look more and more like empty space," he says.
Axen suggests that it doesn't matter how good your microscope is. These pesky particles that make up everything you see around you will still appear as points, or singularities. "If we can confirm that the constituents of the proton are point particles, like electrons, then we have completed this field of research."
So what makes a rock solid? According to Axen, it's the interactions between the point particles. "These particles are really little points of energy that are interacting with each other," he says. "And if you look at them with less magnification, what you see is that blob of interaction."
Disturbing as it may seem, Axen is telling you that the very chair you're sitting on is just a bunch of energy points interacting with each other. Hopefully they'll keep interacting until you get up.