By the second half of the 20th century, physicists were on a mission to find the ultimate building blocks of the universe—what you get when you zoom in all the way to the tiniest bits that can’t be broken down anymore. They had a kind of treasure map, a theory describing what these building blocks are and where we might find them. But to actually find them, researchers needed to re-create the blistering-hot conditions of the early universe. That’s why, in the 1970s, a major national laboratory entrusted the late physicist Helen Edwards with a huge task: overseeing the design and construction of the then most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the first of a new generation of particle colliders built to uncover the inner workings of the universe.
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Katie Hafner: In July of 1983, just outside Chicago, a physicist named Helen Edwards was standing in the control room of one of the most ambitious machines ever made: the Tevatron. For the last four years, she’d been leading the charge to design and build it.
The Tevatron could recreate levels of energy that existed just after the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. And it would allow Helen Edwards and her colleagues to probe into an atom, deeper into the subatomic world than anyone had gone before. They’d be looking for some of the ultimate building blocks of the universe. What you get when you zoom in all the way to the tiniest thing that can’t be broken down anymore.
But the first question: would it work?
Paul Czarapata: There was a sense of anticipation, there was a certain nervousness. But Helen knew it was going to work. There was no doubt in her mind that this was going to work.
Katie Hafner: A colleague turned on the beam.
I’m Katie Hafner, this is Lost Women of Science, and today, Samia Bouzid brings us the story of Helen Edwards.
Samia Bouzid: If you drive 40 miles west of Chicago, you’ll find yourself in the Illinois prairie, at a kind of intersection between the past and the future.
On one side you’ll pass a field of bison, like the ones that used to roam the open prairie hundreds of years ago. And then you’ll see a huge building with Gothic inspired architecture and two symmetrical towers that was built as a cathedral of science, a symbol of the cutting edge research happening on these grounds.
This is Fermilab, a national laboratory funded by the Department of Energy. And it’s here that a scientist named Helen Edwards arrived in 1970 to work on one of the simplest, yet most ambitious questions physicists had ever asked.
Paul Czarapata: People wanted to know, what makes us? How are we put together? We were trying to probe deeper into the particles of nature.
Samia Bouzid: Paul Czarapata joined the lab as an electronic technician in 1972 and eventually worked his way up to become a division director. But back then when he was just starting out, the lab out on the prairie was a bit like a scrappy community living out on the frontier. They were building and innovating, working in jeans, getting their hands dirty. They had a tight budget and big dreams.
Paul Czarapata: You know, it sounds a little bit simplified, but saying that it was the quest for everything, it really is what it is.
Samia Bouzid: The quest for everything. That’s what particle physicists were after in the mid 20th century, when Helen was just starting her career. They wanted to know, what do you get when you drill down into an atom? What was at the heart of everything?
In 1967, the U.S. government decided to build Fermilab to try to find out. The plan was to blast particles at extreme speeds through an underground ring called a particle accelerator. And as these particles collided with a target or with each other, they’d release a shower of tiny subatomic particles. And physicists could trace this fallout, kind of how you might look at debris from a tornado to reconstruct how much energy it had and what path it took. It was a way to explore what these particles were like.
So basically a particle accelerator is like a powerful microscope that lets us see a realm that microscopes themselves can’t make out. And they’d been around in some form for a few decades at this point. There was one at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and at CERN in Geneva. And by 1972, there was a new accelerator running underneath these Illinois fields. But even as the first protons shot across it, physicists were itching to build something even more powerful.
Paul Czarapata: If you could get higher energy, you would have more… a bigger hammer to smash particles is what it amounts to, a bigger microscope to look into what happens.
Samia Bouzid: And they were dying to do that. They were kind of like ocean explorers who had just gone out on a boat, studied a few fish, and caught a glimpse of something just out of view. And suddenly their boat wasn’t enough; they’d needed a submarine.
The scientists at Fermilab had seen the shadows below the surface, and now they needed a new machine that could reach higher energies and take them even deeper into the atom than before.
And so in 1979, the director of Fermilab announced official plans to build a new accelerator called the Tevatron. The goal was for the Tevatron to run through the same tunnel that held the existing accelerator ring, but double the energy of the collisions. That was no small task. The director chose two scientists to oversee the whole project. And one of them — the one who would oversee the design and construction from beginning to end — was Helen Edwards.
Helen was a physicist from Detroit, Michigan. But she could have easily missed her chance to get into physics at all. She grew up in the 1940s with dyslexia, long before dyslexia was widely understood to have nothing to do with intelligence. So her parents didn’t think she was very bright.
But that didn’t stop her. Helen went her own way. She chose Cornell for her undergraduate studies, getting a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1957. Then she stayed on to get her master’s degree. And in 1966, when she was 30, she got her PhD in experimental physics.
For the next four years, she worked at Cornell as a research associate, developing particle accelerators in the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies.
And while she was there she worked with Bob Wilson, who was the director of her lab and who’d go on to become the director of Fermilab a few years later. And he realized right off the bat that he was working with a remarkably intelligent person. So shortly after Bob Wilson moved to Fermilab, he brought Helen with him. And when it was time to pick the people who would make the Tevatron a reality, Helen was an obvious choice.
And it’s worth pointing out that at the time there weren’t very many women in physics at all, let alone in leadership positions. But no one doubted for a second that Helen Edwards was the person for the job. I talked to several people who worked with her at various points in her career. And they all agreed on a couple things. She was an ingenious scientist. And a little bit terrifying.
Tim Koeth: Helen would just come in, slam her fist down, and say, what we’re gonna do is this. She had this brilliant internal computer that knew just the right thing to do.
Paul Czarapata: I’ve seen grown men quake in their boots at the mention of Helen Edwards.
Todd Johnson: I felt very intimidated because she was such a strong personality and such a talent and an expert.
Samia Bouzid: And now it was up to Helen Edwards and her colleagues to pull off something no one had done before.
To double the energy of the existing ring, the Tevatron would need to boost particles up to truly absurd speeds, like just a hair below the speed of light. But to do that without building a bigger ring, they had to get creative.
In your standard accelerator ring, there are powerful magnets steering beams of particles in a circle. But at the kinds of energies physicists dreamed of creating in the Tevatron, regular magnets wouldn’t be able to keep the beam on track. So Helen’s challenge was to lead the design and construction of an accelerator that used a new kind of magnet: a superconducting magnet.
Superconducting magnets are made of a special material that’s kept about as cold as outer space, just a few notches above absolute zero, like the coldest possible cold. And at these temperatures, the electricity running through the magnets doesn’t encounter any resistance. It just glides on through. And that makes it easier to create a stronger magnetic field than it is with regular magnets. Here’s operations specialist Todd Johnson.
Todd Johnson: The larger magnetic field allowed them to build a machine that would double the energy and stay in the same tunnel.
Samia Bouzid: But designing that superconducting accelerator was hard.
Todd Johnson: The technology was known, but it was kind of in its infancy and certainly not on this kind of scale. We’re talking, there’s like a thousand magnets, and they’re, you know, 21 feet long.
Samia Bouzid: And each of those nearly a thousand magnets needed over 20 miles of superconducting wire twisted into cables and coiled up inside. So Fermilab placed an order for 15,000 pounds of this stuff — which was way more than had ever been made before.
But even once they had all that in hand, the construction itself was not without its mishaps. The team melted holes in their magnets on more than one occasion. And at one point, Helen discovered a flaw that required around a hundred magnets to be remade. But they pushed ahead with all hands on deck.
Paul Czarapata: We were building things. We were actively installing magnets. We were testing systems. We were doing whatever it took.
Samia Bouzid: Paul Czarapata.
Paul Czarapata: Back in the early days, there was a lot of cross divisional work. If you drove down the road and you saw somebody pulling a cable and they needed help, you’d stop and help.
Samia Bouzid: As for Helen, she had a hand in everything. She was designing the machine. She was turning wrenches. She was managing the staff.
Paul Czarapata: She was behind everything that happened every day. Sometimes I wondered if she lived there 24 hours a day.
Samia Bouzid: The construction took four years. Little by little, magnets got installed, piping went in, and the accelerator grew one section at a time. And then finally, in 1983, the last magnet was in place. And a few months later, the accelerator was complete.
Paul Czarapata: When you stood back and looked at this, you’re looking at a circle that’s nearly four miles around and you wonder how we’re going to get this little particle beam all the way around that great big circle.
Samia Bouzid: That July, the team at Fermilab nervously crowded into a room to watch the first accelerated beam shoot around the ring. And then…
Paul Czarapata: The joy of seeing it all come together is just indescribable. To hear the champagne bottle corks popping and to see the greats of science in that room, happy, laughing, having a toast to it, it’s an incredible thing to see.
Samia Bouzid: The Tevatron worked. It was the first superconducting ring anywhere. But even as glasses clinked and people cheered, Helen’s mind appeared to be elsewhere.
Paul Czarapata: Helen, like the rest of us, she was enjoying the moment, but you could tell that the wheels were starting to turn about what’s next.
Samia Bouzid: The next big question was, could they smash the records made by other particle colliders and plunge even deeper into the atom?
BREAK
Director: Very uncomfortably on the platform are Rich Orr, Helen Edwards and Dick Lundy.
Samia Bouzid: At a ceremony for the dedication of the Tevatron, Fermilab’s director recognized Helen Edwards and the other leaders of the project.
Director: Representing an extraordinary staff that took a “gee whiz” list of 4,000 tons of steel, and 650 miles of niobium titanium, and 40 acres of super insulation, and 30,000 microprocessor chips, and made that into a working accelerator capable of doing great science.
Samia Bouzid: He went on to say that it was now their privilege—
Director: To look in a place where no one has ever looked before, to observe deeper into the core of the atomic nucleus than has ever been probed, to measure in a domain more remote from human experience—much more remote than the surface of the Moon or Venus. To be able to recreate, in microcosm, the conditions which existed in the earliest instances after creation.
Samia Bouzid: Helen and her colleagues had a roadmap of sorts, a theory called the Standard Model that tied together work from thousands of physicists. And it outlined a set of fundamental particles that were believed to underpin most of the universe, from the way the Sun shines to the way an electron whizzes around a nucleus.
But many of these particles had not yet been discovered.
Todd Johnson: And the thought is, well, we think they should exist, but they probably have not existed since the Big Bang.
Samia Bouzid: Todd Johnson again.
Todd Johnson: And so let’s see if we can get energy density high enough that they will start to show their face again.
Samia Bouzid: If you imagine for a moment that Fermilab’s operators were in fact ocean explorers, diving to new depths, the Standard Model was like a map outlining what creatures were believed to exist and what they were like. In reality, the Standard Model was just a map to particles rather than fish. And now these scientists finally had the tool they needed to look for some of the ones they’d never seen before.
But the day-to-day work of the Tevatron was not especially glamorous. On average, the Tevatron created about 10 million collisions every second, each one spewing hundreds of particles. So there were reams of data to work through. And there was never a precise moment of discovery, like pulling a dinosaur fossil out of the dirt or spotting a rare bird. Discovering a particle took time.
Todd Johnson: The discovery itself was not a day. It was an announcement after many months of data analysis. So, you know, you collect the data and build up the statistics and you look for the little bump building up…
Samia Bouzid: That bump being some kind of signal amid the noise, presumably a particle.
Todd Johnson: …and finally somebody goes, “Okay, that’s high enough. We can say we found it.”
Samia Bouzid: It often took months or years of work to build up those statistics. And while the Tevatron delivered collision after collision, Helen remained at the helm of the project, overseeing the daily operations.
Todd Johnson: She always tried to keep up with exactly how the machine was doing from day to day and even on a smaller scale. You’d get a phone call at two in the morning in the control room and she wouldn’t identify herself, but she didn’t really have to. You’d hear this woman say, “Hey, how’s it going?” and you really ought to know how it was going.
Samia Bouzid: It was all pretty routine. Though, there was the one-time Todd’s wife called the control room. And thinking she was, talking to Todd, she asked, hi, how’s it going?
Todd Johnson: So she gets this download of the machine status. She’s like, okay, uh, may I just talk to Todd Johnson, please? And the guy turns around and he goes, Todd, Helen’s on the phone and she asked to talk to you specifically. I’m like, okay, what did I do? And I pick up the phone and my wife goes, hi, how’s it going? And immediately I know what happened.
Samia Bouzid: But aside from that things mostly hummed along. And then every once in a while, there would be some whispers around the department. Here’s Paul Czarapata:
Paul Czarapata: We would hear through the grapevine that there’s going to be an announcement on Thursday, or there’s going to be a special symposium on Friday, or there’s going to be a lot of people here Friday. So we knew that something was coming and there was a certain anticipation with that.
Samia Bouzid: Something big came in the spring of 1995. On March 2nd, Fermilab announced a monumental discovery from the Tevatron: a missing piece of the Standard Model that they’ve been after for decades: the top quark. It was the last of six types of quarks to be discovered, and as the most massive of them, it took the highest energy to find. But now, this particle — which was believed to have briefly existed at the beginning of the universe, nearly 14 billion years ago — now existed once again inside this tube.
Samia Bouzid: Over the years, the Tevatron kept doing its work and Helen got involved in new projects. She worked on developing new accelerator technology at Fermilab, and she spent time in Germany developing a superconducting collider there. And as the years went by, her famous intensity never waned. Tim Koeth saw it when he joined Fermilab as Helen’s grad student in the 2000s.
Tim Koeth: So you see all these scientific debates, the engineers and the physicists… Helen would just come in, slam her fist down, and say, nope, what we’re gonna do is this. And the whole room would be quiet and then there’d be a little murmur and everybody would shake their head in, in agreement. It was just, it was obvious the minute she spoke that that was the right thing to do.
Samia Bouzid: This happened time and time again.
Tim Koeth: I noticed very early on that Helen rarely explained why we were going to do something. And at first I thought it was just because she was the boss. But that was not the case. She wasn’t just pulling rank. She clearly knew just the right thing to do. And it was such a, at such a core level in her, it probably never made it to the level where she could quickly articulate the reasoning behind it. So it went from decision to edict. It never, it never went through any negotiation phase. That was amazing to watch. You became bewitched by her.
Samia Bouzid: At Fermilab, Paul Czarapata had plenty of his own encounters with Helen’s stunning intelligence. He remembers asking her a technical question one time.
Paul Czarapata: …and she looked and said, okay, hold on a minute. And she disappeared back into her office and I thought, well, maybe she has a book and she’s going to look it up or whatever. Instead, she came back with a scrap of paper and had the complete derivation of the answer.
Samia Bouzid: Helen meant business. Her whole career, all she ever wanted was to get stuff done, quickly and correctly. And according to everyone I talked to, she usually got it.
Tim Koeth: Fermilab, there were half a dozen machine shops, and we had jobs going on each one of them. And I, I sort of quickly learned when you drop the block of copper off to be turned into a pipe, they’re like, yeah, we can do that and we’ll have that for you. I said, it’s urgent. It’s urgent. Okay. All right. We’ll have that for you in about a week. I said, it’s for Helen. Okay. Come back tomorrow morning.
Samia Bouzid: Helen also famously had no tolerance for bureaucracy. Paul remembers one time that she had to move a piece of an accelerator worth around $150,000 to another building. And by the book, the team needed to wait weeks for a travel case to be made, but instead of waiting Helen packed it into a trash can with a bunch of foam, climbed into the back of a van and held onto it with arms and legs, koala style, for a drive across campus.
But for all her intensity, Helen had a gentler side too.
Paul Czarapata: If you were having a bad day or there was something going on that was upsetting you, it seemed to bring out a side of her that was more gentle. She would help you through it and then tell you to get back to work.
Samia Bouzid: As much as she was immersed in her work, Helen never lost the forest for the trees. She was always fascinated by the world around her and she made sure others remembered to look up now and then too. Tim remembers one afternoon when he was in his office…
Tim Koeth: …and I hear dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, her very characteristic footprints coming down the hallway on this plywood floor. And all she said to me is, Why aren’t you outside with your camera right now?
I, uh, it’s Tuesday afternoon at 3 p. m. I have no clue. But I didn’t ask. I just as fast as I could physically move, I went outside. There was this beautiful red tailed hawk perched on the Tevatron sign, very handsomely posing. Snap, snap, snap. I took lots of photos.
Samia Bouzid: Over time, Helen and Tim became close friends, and Tim got to know Helen outside of work too. He used to spend time with her and her husband, Don, at home.
Tim Koeth: Their home, was set in a very rural wooded area, and Helen had carved out a nature path in it, and she’d say, Let’s walk the path, and she would tell me about this flower and this tree, and knew sounds of birds, and, her interests in nature far extended beyond physics, it was into just all of nature.
And it was not the same intensity at all of work. That just like ended at the site boundary. When we were at home, she was laid back. She’d enjoy the souvenirs that she’d pick up from around the world and all the travels. And I remember she would say, what do you think this is? And she would stump me with some kind of artifact.
Samia Bouzid: In 2010, after 40 years with Fermilab, Helen retired. She remained a scientist emerita at the lab, but she spent more time with her birds and her trees and her nature path. She also built herself her own wooden boat, because, why not? And then the following year, the lab asked her to come back to do one big task. After 28 years, federal funding had run out to extend operations, and the Department of Energy decided to shut down the Tevatron. For a lot of the staff, it was a crushing decision. Some of them attempted to make a case for keeping it open. They argued that the Tevatron could uncover a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, a holy grail of particle physics that had not yet been discovered back then.
But in the end, they just didn’t get the money to do it. So it was time to shut the Tevatron down, marking the end of a remarkable era.
Almost three decades since the first particles had collided in the Tevatron, the world of particle physics was in a different place, in large part thanks to the Tevatron and Helen’s leadership. The accelerator didn’t have all the answers to the ultimate question of what the universe is made of, and it wasn’t supposed to. But it helped physicists look for the missing pieces in the Standard Model and better understand how it all fit together. It pioneered the use of superconducting magnets and paved the way for future particle colliders, like the large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which have gone on to probe even more elusive aspects of the Standard Model.
But the world outside physics labs was changed too. The development of superconducting wire for the Tevatron’s magnets led the way to MRI technology, and today that’s a cornerstone of modern medicine, allowing doctors to diagnose different medical conditions, from tumors to certain heart problems. And the project also showed the value of doing science for the sake of science, the value of building a submarine and plunging into unknown waters without knowing exactly what you’ll find.
And now, as Fermilab got ready to close this chapter, they wanted Helen to have the honor of seeing the Tevatron off.
Todd Johnson was there that day.
Todd Johnson: I was very glad that Helen could be there to be the one to shut it off. She had led it and I think everyone agreed that was the only choice, the only person that we would need for that.
Pier Oddone: So, with the detector shutting down, it’s time to go back to the main control room to watch as the final beam is extracted from the Tevatron and as the accelerator magnets are ramped down. Bob, how are we doing over there?
Bob Mau: Um, thanks, Pier.
Samia Bouzid: A videographer captured the moment on September 30th, 2011, when Helen and a group of veteran scientists crowded into the control room at Fermilab, next to two buttons that would power down the Tevatron. They stood quietly as Bob Mau, the former head of the accelerator division’s operations department explained what was about to happen. Todd Johnson remembers the mood that day.
Todd Johnson: It was a wake. There was a lot of sadness, but, a lot of holy crap, we pulled it off. We can be proud of this. But, when the moment came…
Bob Mau: I’d like to ask Helen if you would please push the beam and terminate the Tevatron beam.
Todd Johnson: Something actually did go a little wrong with the buttons. When the moment came, there was that delay.
Bob Mau: Well, the light worked.
Todd Johnson: The ramp didn’t go off right away. And that horrible shot of adrenaline when it looked like it wasn’t working probably is what kept me from bursting into tears.
Bob Mau: There it goes. It didn’t want to give up so easy.
Samia Bouzid: And just like that, an era was over.
Bob Mau: The line has gone to zero,
Samia Bouzid: An era that Helen had played a huge part in ushering in.
Bob Mau: So there is no longer any colliding beams or protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron.
Samia Bouzid: Even after shutting down the Tevatron and officially retiring, Helen spent time at Fermilab working on other projects until a few years later, she fell sick with cancer.
By June of 2016, she had very little time left. Tim Koeth, Helen’s former grad student, dropped everything and rushed to the medical facility to see her.
Tim Koeth: she put on a big smile for me. And, uh, I got the opportunity to tell her how important she was. Uh, she was tired. I knew she was struggling to put on a good face there for me, and I just went over and I gave her a big hug and she gave me a big hug back. And, the next morning I got a phone call from Don that she had gone home that night and passed away.
Samia Bouzid: By the end of her career, Helen was widely beloved in the world of accelerator physics. She had been awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for her work on the Tevatron in 1989. And despite having gone against the odds to get into her field at all — and still being one of very few women — she was known and revered well beyond Fermi lab.
Tim Koeth: If there’s a singular thing I could have people take away from Helen, is just be curious. And have a drive to innovate and discover. Observe the world around you and appreciate it. And don’t waste time doing it.
Samia Bouzid: For Helen, leading the construction of a superconducting accelerator was just one way of doing that.
Today, there’s some skepticism in the scientific community and the general public about the value of building increasingly ambitious colliders, machines that are continuing the legacy of the Tevatron. But Tim sees it differently. In his worldview, which has been shaped so profoundly by Helen, we live in a remarkable moment in the history of the universe. A moment when we have a chance to understand it.
Tim Koeth: When you get to these high energies, it’s the equivalent of going back to just the first few microseconds of the universe’s evolution in the Big Bang, where this pure energy of some unbelievable magnitude exploded,a big firecracker, unfolded through 14 billion years or so.
We have now galaxies and inside those galaxies, we have these solar systems and we have our solar system with the Sun at the center and planets in orbit around the Sun.
And over tens of thousands of years, humans have evolved. We’ve always had curiosity. We’ve developed tools…
Samia Bouzid: And now, billions of years since the Big Bang set all of this evolution in motion…
Tim Koeth: We can build machines to recreate those very early conditions of the Big Bang.
And in some way, humans and their curiosity and these machines that we can build are a way to actually understand the universe itself.
And when you think about it in those terms it’s just so obvious that, yeah, you have to build these machines. How can you not be gripped and mesmerized by finding these answers out?
Samia Bouzid: And that sense of wonder, and that drive to find answers, is as much a part of Helen’s legacy as the extraordinary accelerator she helped develop.
Katie Hafner: This episode was hosted by me, Katie Hafner.
Samia Bouzid: And me, Samia Bouzid.
Katie Hafner: Samia wrote, produced and sound designed this episode with help from our senior producer, Laura Isensee. Lizzie Younan composes all of our music, and we had fact-checking help from Lexi Atiya.
Samia Bouzid: In addition to the people you heard from in this episode, I want to thank Don Edwards and Jamie Santucci, who also shared their memories of Helen. And thank you to Fermilab, for their archival footage that we used in this episode.
Katie Hafner: Thanks also to Jeff Delviscio at our publishing partner, Scientific American. And to my co-executive producer Amy Scharf, as well as our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger. The episode art was created by Keren Mevorach. Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX.
Samia Bouzid: You can get show notes and an episode transcript at lostwomenofscience.org
Katie Hafner: And while you’re there, don’t forget to hit that all-important donate button. See you next time!
HOSTS:
Katie Hafner
Samia Bouzid
PRODUCER: Samia Bouzid
SENIOR PRODUCER: Laura Isensee
GUESTS:
Paul Czarapata, Retired Division Director, Fermilab
Todd Johnson, Special Projects Specialist, Fermilab
Tim Koeth, Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland
FURTHER READING:
“Helen Edwards: Pioneer of Fermilab’s Tevatron,” by Anita Chandran, in Physics World; July 2022
“Down to the Wire,” by Judy Jackson, in Beam Line, Vol. 23, No. 1; Spring 1993
