Inside Vancouver
The Time Machine - continued
By Bruce Grierson published Dec 1, 2008
It's been called the biggest scientific project ever. And Vancouver scientists are poised to help understand the origins of the universe.
Lockyer's a little like that, too. Officially, the 55-year-old Ontarian is a quark man. "My claim to fame was having measured the lifetime of the B quark," he says. (In case you're wondering, it is one-trillionth of a second.) To be a quark man is to be intensely curious about what happened in the first few frames of a movie we walked in on partway. The universe was the ultimate factory for quarks moments after its birth; few are produced in nature today. We can make them ourselves in particle accelerators, which are like time machines in this respect. It's a virtual trip worth taking because something dramatic happened in that Goldilocks moment (the nuclear soup was neither too hot nor too cold, but jussst right) that tipped the balance of matter and antimatter in our favour. And so we have something-chairs, skyscrapers, dogs, omelettes-rather than nothing, and human minds able to ponder the question, Where'd the antimatter go?
"The definition of antimatter is that if you combine a particle of antimatter with its opposite, it creates two photons"-particles of light, Lockyer explains. "So what has happened in the early universe is that all the particles of matter and antimatter have found their mates, they've created a universe of photons. And the ones that didn't find a mate are what we're made out of." It's a pretty cool mystery when you frame it this way, one that puts all genealogical questions in the shade. Where did my original dance partner disappear to, the one who was about to sweep me into her arms and turn me into light?
Lockyer isn't the kind of monklike purist who ponders such things to the exclusion of real-world trifles: fashion, nutrition, personal hygiene, other people. He is, unlike the particles he's chasing, quite interactive. And though it was from boson-hunting at Fermilab in Chicago that TRIUMF plucked him, he spent many years teaching physics at the University of Pennsylvania, trying to make muons fun for the Simpsons generation.
