Europe leaps ahead on physics frontier

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

MEYRIN, Switzerland - Adam Yurkewicz was born, raised and schooled in New York state, intending to become an engineer. But in 1996, during his junior year in college, he got hooked on quantum electrodynamics and other wild ideas from the frontiers of physics — and he's never been the same since.

To follow his vocation as a particle physicist, Yurkewicz has been a grad student in Michigan, an experimenter in Illinois, a postdoctoral researcher in New York, and other things in between. He is now working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, and living in France with his New York-born wife and their first child.

In short, Yurkewicz is a science nomad.

"I don't think I've lived in the same place for more than a year in the last 10," he said as he sat at a table outside the cafeteria at Europe's CERN particle-physics center, just outside Geneva.

There are a lot of brainy nomads hanging around CERN's cafeteria nowadays. The patrons hail from all over the United States, from Canada, from Russia, from Japan, from China, and of course from across Europe. "It's like a mini-U.N.," Yurkewicz said.

Changing of the guard
The buzz of activity at CERN's Swiss campus dramatically illustrates a changing of the guard on the frontier of physics, with Europe taking over from the United States. For the past 14 years, Europeans have taken the lead role in building and financing the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, which was started up on Wednesday. The U.S. federal government kicked in $531 million for construction.

The LHC is just this week's most obvious example of Eurocentrism in science: Less than 200 miles (300 kilometers) away, an even costlier international physics project, the $13 billion ITER fusion research center, is just getting started in southern France. And European officials are currently considering how to move forward with yet another fusion project, the $1 billion HiPER laser-fusion facility.

Meanwhile, in the United States, physicists were shocked last December to see Congress pull back on research spending, to the tune of $94 million. Financial support for ITER was virtually wiped out. It took months for some of that money to be restored in a supplemental funding bill — and while Congress dithered, scores of research positions were lost.

For decades, American know-how has benefited mightily from a "brain drain" of talent from Europe. It started in earnest when German physicist Albert Einstein and many of his colleagues fled the Nazi threat in Europe in the 1930s and relocated in the United States. That flow of expertise continued right through the space effort of the 1960s and '70s as well as the telecommunications revolution of the '80s and '90s.

USLHC Adam Yurkewicz, a postdoctoral researcher for Stony Brook University in New York, lives in France and works on the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS experiment.

Today, the United States still ranks No. 1 in most science and engineering indicators, but recent figures from the National Science Foundation indicate that the U.S. lead is eroding. And it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out that when it comes to cutting-edge physics, all roads are currently leading to Europe.

Michio Kaku, a widely known author and theoretical physicist at the City College of New York, traces the reversal of fortunes back to the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider project in Texas.

"Let's be blunt about this: There could be a brain drain of some of our finest minds to Europe, because that's where the action is," Kaku said. "We had our chance, but Congress canceled our supercollider back in 1994. We're out of the picture. We can basically tag along after the Europeans, begging them for time on their machine — but really, the action is in Europe now."

Dutch physicist Jos Engelen, CERN's deputy director general and chief scientific officer, pretty much agrees with Kaku.

"People now talk of an inverse brain drain," he said. "That is, on these projects, our American colleagues have no difficulty finding other American colleagues who want to join us."

Engelen's boss, CERN Director General Robert Aymar, put it even more starkly during a news conference after Wednesday's startup: "Whatever happened, the competition was won by CERN."

The scientific spotlight's shift to Europe raises a dilemma for Yurkewicz and his wife, Katie, a physicist who works in CERN's communication office. For the sake of their 6-month-old son and their families back home, they'd love to move back to the United States when Adam's postdoctoral stint ends next year. But they both realize their job prospects are a lot better if they stay at CERN.

"Whether I'd want to stay ... I haven't decided on that yet," Adam Yurkewicz said a couple of months ago. "Right now, it looks like a big advantage to be here."

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