Brookhaven National Laboratory scientist wins prestigious Breakthrough Prize in physics
Morse, of East Patchogue, will receive a share of a $3 million prize with dozens of other scientists. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
A Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist received one of science’s most prestigious honors Saturday for groundbreaking research by a team studying an obscure subatomic particle and its effect on the universe.
William Morse of the Upton lab and three other scientists — Boston University physicist Bradley Lee Roberts, Chris Polly of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and David Hertzog of the University of Washington — were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics on Saturday during a ceremony in Santa Monica, California. The prize was created in 2012 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs including Sergey Brin of Alphabet and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta.
The ceremony, marketed as the "Oscars of Science," drew a number of high-profile celebrities, according to a Deadline report. The guests included Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Robert Downey Jr., Ben Affleck and Octavia Spencer, according to the Hollywood trade.
Morse, 78, of East Patchogue, will receive a share of a $3 million prize with dozens or possibly hundreds of other scientists involved in the research, Brookhaven lab officials said.
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND
Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist William Morse is part of a team of scientists honored Saturday night with a Breakthrough Prize, one of science's top honors.
- Morse and his fellow researchers were honored for their studies of an obscure subatomic particle known as a muon. Scientists believe the muon's unstable nature helps to explain cosmic anomalies such as Mercury's erratic orbit around the sun.
- The Breakthrough Prize comes with a $3 million award split among dozens of scientists involved in the research, officials said.
Morse and the others are credited with significant scientific advances in a quest begun in Europe six decades ago to fine-tune physicists’ understanding of the muon, an enigmatic particle whose wobbly motion helps to explain cosmic anomalies such as Mercury’s erratic orbit around the sun.
The research led Morse and the Brookhaven lab at one point to shut down William Floyd Parkway to carry a 17-ton superconducting magnet more than 3,000 miles by truck and barge to Illinois.
'The top of the top'
In a phone interview, Morse said it was "amazing" that he and his colleagues had been recognized. Though the Breakthrough Prize is relatively new, he said, the award "is the top of the top."
In a statement, BNL interim director John Hill said Morse's muon experiments were "a testament to the lab’s world-class accelerator facilities and to the expertise and teamwork of the more than 100 engineers, technicians and physicists who made it possible."
Hill added that muon research in Brookhaven and at other institutions has “inspired generations of physicists to explore the mysteries of our universe.”
The muon, pronounced "myu-ahn," was discovered in 1936 and helped scientists better understand why some objects, like Mercury, don't conform to established scientific principles such as gravity.
Experiments between 1959 and 1979 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Switzerland, advanced scientists' knowledge of the particles but left some questions unanswered.
Morse said he got involved in 1989, enticed by the challenge of making discoveries that can't be explained by traditional science — an endeavor known as "new physics."
“The mathematics is just beautiful," Morse said. “We’re trying to ... see if there is new physics out there.”
Working with Roberts, who goes by Lee, and the late Vernon Hughes of Yale University, Morse and a BNL team beamed muons into a magnetic ring to measure how much the rapidly spinning particles began to "precess," or wobble.
Even after publishing results of their findings in 2001, 2002 and 2004, Morse said his team still had questions. But the Fermi lab had a high-intensity muon beam they thought could help, he said.
Journey to the Midwest
Around midnight one day in summer 2013, state and Suffolk County police closed off the southbound William Floyd Parkway as Morse and his team carried the disassembled, $25 million electromagnet on trucks to the Smith Point Marina.
A barge carried the magnet from Smith Point to Mississippi, then hundreds more miles up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers to the Fermi lab, Morse said.
Closing the parkway was chosen after using a helicopter was ruled out, Morse said.
“I asked [the helicopter pilot], 'What happens if you have a problem?' and he said, 'We drop the load,' " Morse said. "We said, 'Thank you very much.'”
The truck-and-barge journey took about three months, Morse said, adding it took several years to reassemble the magnet in Illinois and resume experiments.
But it was worth it: Fermi's testing confirmed the results of Brookhaven's earlier experiments, but with even greater accuracy, Morse said.
And yet in spite of the award, more work remains, he added.
“The theorists say they need another two or three years of calculations,” he said.
Carl MacGowan is a Long Island native who covers Brookhaven Town after having previously covered Smithtown, Suffolk County courts and numerous spot news and feature stories over his 20-plus year career at Newsday.
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