Fusion Article, Part 3:
If Potter is driven by perfection, then he is
merely a reflection of the culture at Sandia
National Laboratories. And if the quest for
fusion is intensely competitive, Moonily
quixotic, and at times downright nasty,
then Sandia mirrors, among its myriad
projects, many of those same
contradictory characteristics. Top secret
or otherwise, spread over the dusty
27-square-mile patch of Kirtland Airforce
Base, the projects include the training of
honeybees to detect land mines, the
invention of a foam that kills anthrax, the
making of a synthetic sludge, and the
perfecting of various micromachines,
some so small as to be undetectable by
the human eye, which might be used to
lock down nuclear weapons. Sandia is the
home to Teraflops, the fastest computer in
the world, as well as the birthplace of
moly-99, a radioactive substance widely
used in medical procedures. On the east
of the base, behind three rows of
concertina wire, is a cluster of foothills
rumoured to be now-empty nuclear silos.
They seem to stand as a reminder of how
closely the isotopes of Thanatos and Eros
can be held in the same idea, for it to be a
real idea, a saving idea, both have to be
there, threatening to undo us and remake
us at once. To obliterate and immortalise.
Potter couldn't care about all that. 'My job
is to work with the personalities here,' he
says, now pacing the high bay, twitching
with pent-up energy. He slips behind a pig
(a radiation shield), and checks a silver
box that houses a cryogenic pump. He
monitors the tech crew, confers with the
lead scientist on the shot, keeps
everything running on time. 'You've got
your top of the Ivy League class,' he
continues. 'You've got prima donnas with
huge egos. And you've got technicians
who at least graduated high school.
Nobody can operate without the other.
The first thing that happens with two
strong personalities is clash. It's my job to
go to one and bring him up and maybe
bring the other one down and then bring
them together.'
Of course, there are days when everything
feels charged with Shakespearean plots
and counterplots, days when tension fills
up around the Machine. All of it is caused
by the Machine, which rarely exists, of
course, in its aluminum-and-Rexolite
grandeur, oblivious. There is head-butting
between the young comers kicking with
ideas and the upper echelon of Z veterans,
who ultimately hold the power here. There
are Iagos trying to ice someone else's
idea in order to promote their own. (The
lab rewards the best with bonuses.)
'I've become a lot more aggressive,' says
Melissa Douglas, one of only three
women among the 60 full-time scientists
who work on Z. 'You have to really stand
your ground. It was very hard for me to do
that at first.' In four years on the project,
she remembers her worst day as the one
when she delivered a seminar and a
colleague heckled her mercilessly. Why?
Was she that stupid? Did her PhD in
plasma physics and her postdoc at Los
Alamos make her that inept? So she took
her weakness, her insecurity, her lack,
and shot it into the Machine, and it came
back as power, 290 terawatts' worth.
As have others. Marriage is shot in. Love
is shot in. Innocence and experience and
numbers are shot in, and come back as
something almost holy.
While many of these scientists consider
themselves agnostic, they are quick to
admit that they still find themselves in
thrall to the unknown, to the force that
pulses through the Machine. 'In a deep
sense, I would say that my greatest
satisfaction here comes from the act of
creation,' says Jim Bailey. 'Because what
we're trying to do is create knowledge that
didn't exist before. Whether that brings us
closer to God or not, I don't know. It
brings us closer to an understanding of
the universe, and if you want to think of
God in those terms, then I suppose you
could define it that way.'
Melissa Douglas describes the charge of
joy she gets from a perfect photograph of
a Rayleigh-Taylor instability taken inside
the vacuum chamber by a pinhole camera
at the moment of the wire array's
implosion. 'A beautiful picture!' she says,
holding up a snapshot that looks more
like a Rorschach test - kind of blobby with
spikes and valleys. 'It sounds ridiculous,
but when I first saw it I jumped and
hopped around the room. Ecstatic. Just
amazing. Being around this machine, you
can't help but feel awe. The universe is
mathematical and, you know, God is a
mathematician.'
And Jimmy Potter - Jimmy Potter is
clearing the high bay as sirens sound for
all personnel to vacate the Machine and
retreat to the control room. Today's shot
will attempt to find a way to bombard the
wire array uniformly with electricity, so
that each last kilovolt of energy can be
accelerated into the Machine and come
back as more. 'I mean, how do you
explain all this to someone outside of this
place?' he says, gesturing toward the
Machine. 'We don't make a product that
can be sold. You can't really see what's
going on on in that vacuum chamber. I
usually just tell people I work with X-rays.
That we've got a big machine doing big
things, and one day we're gonna change
your life.'
Dawn inside the Machine, and it's silent.
The frogmen and the men in white and
blue jumpsuits are arriving, shaking off
their sleep, downing coffee. Jimmy Potter
got the shot last night, downloaded the
diagnostics, sent everyone home saying
they'd take apart the Machine today, and
then drove the half hour to his house, over
the mesa and the beautiful landscape, to
his wife and kids, trying to forget this
place for a few hours. At 5.30am, he was
back, rallying the crew, which now has
sluggishly begun its work, drilling and
hammering at the vacuum chamber.
The people of Z admit there's a new inten
sity, especially given the Machine's recent
exponential gains. There's something to
prove - and they need to prove it fast.
Plans to win funds to build a cheaper,
intermediary machine named ZX, one that
will lead to X-1, are the stuff of new worry
and hope. And, like life on the edge of any
new frontier, there is still the possibility of
danger.
But there are dreamy days here as well.
There are times when some Z scientists
find it hard not to let there minds wander,
to entertain versions of fusion-propelled
rockets arcing the local solar systems, of
fuel stations on the moon or Io or Pluto,
wherever you can pick up a little lithium
and water. And there are others who
imagine it as the Peace and Love
Machine, who've put their trust and
idealism for the best possible world in Z.
And to get Peace and Love from the
Machine, they have to shoot in their
souls, holding nothing back.
Now the crane groans over its huge tracks
above the Machine, preparing to lift off the
8,000lb crown of the vacuum chamber.
Last evening, the Machine inhaled the
sun, this room filled with lightning, and
then everything exploded. Now, when the
crown is unbolted, hitched to a hook, and
lifted away by the crane, a group of men
tentatively peer down into the Machine,
goggle-eyed, perhaps expecting to find
some traces of gold dust or, more
absurdly, a pile of confetti - or, by some
miracle of the universe, maybe a fully
formed angel, sleeping with its white
wings pleached and sooty, its legs
twisted under its body, both comical and
impossible.
So the men look and look, down into the
centre of Z, the womb of the Machine, for
some message there sent back from the
invisible world. But it is just a well of black
space - plasma and atoms unable to hold
the weight of their gaze, the chill of their
wonder. |
