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6 No.48 SEPTEMBER 27, 2018 CLOSE UP WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA By Mariia PROKOPENKO, photos by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day It is a coincidence that Dmytro and I are speaking on September 10, on the 10th anniversary of the launching of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest accelerator of elementary particles, which is particularly supposed to shed light on the nature of dark matter. In essence, this problem is being tackled, albeit by different methods, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, where PhD (Physics and Mathematics) Dmytro YAKUBOVSKYI has been working for two and a half years as postdoctoral fellow. At the same time, he remains a higher doctorate seeker at the Mykola Boholiubov Institute of Theoretical Physics in Kyiv and regularly comes to Kyiv to research dark matter and deliver lectures to both students and the public. We met during one of these visits. We discussed the current information about dark matter and approaches to scientific research in Denmark and Ukraine. We began with the “birthday boy,” i.e., the LHC. ● ON THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER “In essence, all detectors of the Large Hadron Collider probe different characteristics of various elementary particles, including the well-known ones and the Higgs boson which was first detected there. Small detectors ATLAS and CMS and the detector LHCb are used in this research, while ALICE is mostly used to explore the quark-gluon plasma [the so-called “liquid” form of matter which supposedly exists in a short period of time immediately after the Big Bang – Author]. “Almost all the LHC detectors are also searching for the traces of still unknown particles that may form dark matter. They have detected no new particles so far, which affords ground for developing alternative models, including the one I work with. If the LHC fails to find even one dark matter particle, it will be very probable that the model we are developing and watching now, as well as certain experimental consequences of it, is correct.” ● ON HIS OWN RESEARCH “Our group in Denmark explores the neutrino minimal extension of the Standard Model (often abbreviated as vMSM) of particle physics. The point is that the Standard Model has particles called neutrinos which differ from all the other by their properties. Moreover, these are in fact the only particles which the Standard Model does not explain fully. In particular, it does not explain a phenomenon discovered about 25 years ago, for the discovery of which the Nobel Prize in Physic was awarded in 2015 [to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald – Author]. It is neutrino oscillations. Imagine that one type of neutrino turns into another and vice versa just during the motion. This process can be explained, for example, by means of quantum mechanics, but, from the viewpoint of oscillation observations in particle physics, it is a very rare and unexpected phenomenon. Moreover, these phenomena of oscillation cannot be explained by the Standard Model which became the cornerstone of elementary particle physics when the Higgs boson was discovered [in 2012]. “Nobody doubts now that the Standard Model of particle physics excellently explains electromagnetic and strong interactions, i.e. how nucleons, individual particles in nuclei, interact with one another and why they keep together, as well as weak interaction which is responsible for beta-decay and thermonuclear fusion in the Sun – in fact the source of life. Even in outer space, we can see no serious deviations from the Standard Model, except for a few ones. “The aim of the model I work with is to describe the observed deviations, introducing as few additional entities as possible. It is like Occam’s razor – the principle that the simplest solution tends to be the right one. Some models introduce a lot of additional entities, such as supersymmetry. This is a good model. It was even glorified by Vakarchuk and others [the rock group Okean Elzy produced an album, Dark matter and where to look for it ‘Supersymmetry,’ in 2003 – Author], but the problem is that this model needs twice as many particles as we know at the present moment. We know dozens of elementary particles now, and each of them needs a ‘superpartner.’ But we can see none of them. If the Large Hadron Collider fails to find traces of supersymmetric particles, this will mean that the phenomena that occur outside the Standard Model, such as neutrino oscillations, need a different solution.” ● ON NON-STANDARDS IN THE STANDARD MODEL “The goal of elementary particle physics researchers is to construct a complete, closed, and self-consistent model. Ideally, it should describe all the phenomena we can see. All of its forecasts should be checked and all the new particles should be found. And this model should be free of internal contradictions. “It took the Standard Model of particle physics a long time to emerge – perhaps from the early 20th century, and this created a lot of problems, such as non-selfconsistency. As is known, the sum of probabilities should be equal to unity. But it turned out that the model, which described for the first time the interaction of neutrinos, beta-decay, and thermonuclear fusion in the Sun, stipulated that, oddly enough, the probability of high-energy processes should exceed unity. It’s nice that it describes processes very well at low energies, shows good coincidences with the experiment, and gives less-than-unity probabilities, so let it go on working. But it must be replaced where it gives absurd answers. “Actually, why were Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow awarded the Nobel Prize [in 1979]? Because they were the first to formulate this model. It is a very complex construction. The researchers used Einstein’s idea that not only gravitation, but also other types of interaction can be connected with symmetries in a certain variety of space. This all was very well developed and resulted in the Standard Model. Now we can see that the Standard Models works almost flawlessly, but the question of neutrino oscillation, and not only this, still remains.” ● ON THE PROBLEMS OF DARK MATTER AND ANTIMATTER “There are more problems with the Standard Model in outer space. Firstly, it is the problem of dark matter. From the viewpoint of gravitational interaction or dynamics, one fourth of our Universe consists of dark matter and only 5 percent of conventional substance. There is much more dark matter. We don’t know what it is, and there is a hypothesis that it consists of particles. If so, it’s not the particles we know – not electrons, protons, photons, or even common neutrinos. And the problem is how to find these particles. “There are dozens of hypotheses about what dark matter may consist of. Researchers are seeking for the manifestations of these particles in very diverse experiments and not only – for example, in radiation from space objects. There are even special detectors that can allegedly find dark matter particles colliding with conventional substance underground. This means we won’t see dark matter but will detect this ‘kick.’ Accordingly, there are many competing models because we don’t know the truth. “Another problem is antimatter. For instance, you and I consist of matter, of particles, but it has been known since the 1930s that there are also antiparticles that very much resemble ‘ours.’ If you take a particle and an antiparticle and bring An interview with physicist Dmytro Yakubovskyi who conducts research in Denmark and Ukraine them closely together, they will annihilate each other and produce a lot of matter. In fact, according to the formula E = mc2, antiparticles are the most effective source of energy. There are very few antiparticles, for otherwise, in all likelihood, we would not exist – there would have only remained cosmic microwave background, i.e. photons that would have formed as a result of annihilation. But we see our world without any major traces of antimatter. Antimatter may exist in cosmic rays – one particle per hundred or thousand. This is good enough, but we can see neither clusters of antimatter, nor galaxies that consist of it. This poses a problem because the Standard Model envisions a very close quantity of matter and antimatter. “The model I explore allows explaining all these puzzles in theory within the framework of the Standard Model – in theory because we have seen so far only a probable signal of dark matter decay which can be explained by these very particles or, maybe, by many others. We still have a long way to go.” ● ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF DARK MATTER “It is known for sure that dark matter exists because there is a mass excess in the Universe. We observe an effect and know that it is impossible to explain all that we can see without it. “I go on speaking in the descending order of truth. Mass is measured in astronomy by the laws of gravitation. Therefore, you can always explain mass excess not by new particles but by your attempts to change the law of gravitation. This is possible hypothetically, and there are models that use it. For example, the Erik Verlinde model, or the model of modified Newtonian dynamics, describes very well the observation of certain objects or their classes, for example, galaxies. But if you look at the whole array of the gained data, you will see that these models describe, for example, clusters of galaxies not so well and need to be at least modified. Introducing a new substance – dark matter – will explain the observation better. “What is still less known, dark matter consists of particles outside the Standard ALMOST ALL DETECTORS OF THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER ARE SEARCHING FOR THE TRACES OF STILL UNKNOWN PARTICLES THAT MAY FORM DARK MATTER. THEY HAVE DETECTED NO NEW PARTICLES SO FAR, WHICH AFFORDS GROUND FOR DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVE MODELS Model – 95 percent or more of them are the particles we don’t know. Common neutrinos may account for not more than 5 percent of dark matter. It is a challenge for particle physics to search for these new particles. “What do we know about new particles? One of the main characteristics of a particle is mass, and the difference between the lightest and the heaviest dark matter candidate particle is about 10 in the 40th power. These hypothetical particles may be very large – they are called wimpzillas (a blend of WIMP – weakly interacting massive particles – and Godzilla – Author]. They may have a mass that corresponds to a rest energy of dozens of joules. It is very much from the viewpoint of elementary particles. The decay of these particles can form cosmic rays that have the energy of tens of joules. It is approximately like throwing half a brick with the speed of 10 meters a second – this is the highest energy of a cosmic body detected on Earth, which is billions of times as high as the energy of the particles the LHC can produce. Or it may be so light particles that their de Broglie wave should be the size of the smallest galaxies.” ● ON DARK ENERGY “There is also dark energy of which we know almost nothing [hypothetically, it accounts for three fourths of the Universe – Author]. We only know that it ‘behaves’ like antigravitation. Roughly speaking, people saw that our Universe is not simply expanding but expanding with acceleration. If you toss up an apple or a stone, it will be moving away from Earth and slowing down. Conversely, the Universe expands as a whole, accelerating instead of slowing down. The interactions we know cannot explain this. “If the well-known equation of state of dark energy is anything to go by, the Universe will, unfortunately, be expanding eternally, and galaxies, their components, and maybe even atoms will fly away.” ● THE WAY RESEARCH IS CONDUCTED “Everything depends on the model, but use is usually made of both theoretical calculation, including a computer-assisted analysis, and the analysis of a very large number of observation data. For example, the LHC generates hundreds of petabytes of data in a year (one petabyte = 2 in the 50th power bytes – Author]. It is very much even at present, but it was unprecedentedly much 10 years ago. For this reason, a system of ramified calculations was specially invented because not a single, even the largest, computer cluster cannot process these data in real time. “The LHC is not important for our group, as far as searching for dark matter is concerned, but we need to examine X-ray spectrums of the galaxies observed by space telescopes – it is a couple of terabytes of data on the whole. Although these telescopes cost hundreds of millions of dollars, most of their observation data are available free of charge to anybody who wishes to process them. Of particular interest for us are, above all, observations of the Andromeda Galaxy or our galaxy. There is a lot of dark matter there because a galaxy needs it in order to form. We know the way dark matter is distributed across the sky, examine various areas, estimate how much dark matter should be there, compare observations, and check whether there are interesting signals. “One of the signals we are looking for is the so-called emission line. In 2014 our team, concurrently with a US group, detected for the first time a signal from this emission line with the energy of 3.5 kiloelectronvolts, which may be an explanation of dark matter decay. A corresponding particle of dark matter should be approximately 70 times lighter than an electron and thousands of times heavier than a common neutrino – it is called sterile or right-handed neutrino, or heavy neutral lepton, depending on the field you work in. “As our research requires huge groups, we hope we will be the best-shooting battalion. It is a maxim that battles are won by best-shooting, not best-manned, battalions.” Read more on our website
WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA CULT URE No.48 SEPTEMBER 27, 2018 7 By Dmytro PLAKHTA, Lviv William Kurelek’s first and last name would have been Vasyl Kurylyk in Ukraine, the land of his forefathers, but he was born in Canada, where he was destined to become a distinguished Ukrainian-Canadian artist. His works are displayed in Canadian and US public art galleries and held in private collections, including those of Queen Elizabeth II and former Canadian prime ministers. He died at the age of 50, having constantly struggled with his mental illness, leaving behind 10,000 paintings and prints. There are 36 books written by him and about him in Canada, including 400,000 copies of his A Prairie Boy’s Winter (1973) and A Prairie Boy’s Summer (1975), translated into 18 languages. He treasured his ethnic Ukrainian identity, although few people in Ukraine, apart from art critics, know about him. Fortunately, the first publication dedicated to his The Passion of Christ According to St. Matthew series (1975) appeared in print recently. Kurelek was the first artist to illustrate all of St. Matthew’s Gospel: 160 works described by critics as masterpieces of religious art. In his last will and testament he wrote that he wanted The Passion of Christ to become known in Ukraine. Khrystyna BEREHOVSKA, the author of the art catalogue, is studying the Kurelek Phenomenon in world art, the topic of her doctorate at the Lviv National Academy of Art. She is determined to compile at least part of his creative legacy and promote it in Ukraine. Ms. Berehovska kindly agreed to an interview. We spoke about Kurelek’s eventful life and decided to focus on the educational aspect of his legacy, as well as on what related to his Ukrainian parentage, so the following is her story. ● PEDAGOGICAL LOGIC BASED ON ART William Kurelek was born near Whitford, Alberta, in 1927. He spent his youth in Manitoba. His father came from Bukovyna in western Ukraine. His mother’s family was among the first Ukrainian immigrants in Canada. His relationship with his father left much to be desired, as his father refused to understand his elder son’s creative inclinations. The artist wrote later that his father treated him ruthlessly and would chase him out of the house in winter, leaving him without a coat and hat when the temperature was down to 30 o C; that he would often tell him that his younger brother was much smarter. This inevitably led to various complexes and phobias. Kurelek later said he was a fatherless son, even though he had a father. This would determine his main creative trend: the contrast between hatred and love, God and atheism, complete with angels and monsters. Parents and children were a frequent theme of his works. Pedagogical logic is based on his creative legacy and it is quite popular in Canada. Children often figure in his works. He had a difficult childhood and that was his way of making up for it, by portraying children, focusing on their inner world rather than their image. He was a loner from childhood and eventually became an introvert. His peers considered him peculiar, primarily because of the language he used. He spoke only Ukrainian until seven years of age. During his childhood, the future artist was both amused and depressed by his environment. For him, that environment was packed with contrasts. After he made his name as an artist, he decided to relive that experience in his works, depicting children of that time – so that his posterity would know as much about the way all those immigrant kids grew up in the Canadian prairies, what they looked like, how they spoke, as they would about the Inuits. He vividly displayed that Irish kids were different from their French peers, and that all this was part of Canadian multiculturalism. He was probably the only Canadian artist to illustrate this multiculturalism and his pioneer series won him the reputation of Manitoba-born Brueghel, Canadian Bosch, or Prairie van Gogh. He loved the way Breughel portrayed many people in one place and there are many children captured in motion in his pictures. They aren’t static, they are dynamic, full of life, and they look intelligent – something the artist always emphasized. ● KURELEK, AN EXAMPLE According to Ms. Oksana Wynnyckyj- Yusypovych, Canadian Consul in Lviv, William Kurelek was an example her generation wanted to emulate, and that many children are of the same opinion. She specified that she was referring to Ukrainian- Canadian children who attended Ukrainian language schools; William Kurelek painted pictures and added captions explaining what a given picture was all about. He would paint children in the Canadian prairies and explain that they had to go to school and do household chores, including THE UKRAINIAN PIONEERS (1972), PART OF THE MURALS; MIXED MEDIA (152.5x729 CM; 152.5x121.5 CM), NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (PHOTO TAKEN BY KHRYSTYNA BEREHOVSKA ON THE PREMISES OF THE GOVERNOR- GENERAL OF CANADA IN OTTAWA) The Ukrainian-Canadian Brueghel Art critic Khrystyna BEREHOVSKA says William Kurelek lived each day in a different world WILLIAM KURELEK, OCTOBER 1961 (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE KURELEKS’ PRIVATE ARCHIVES) collecting hay, herding cows, and so on. Most children, born in today’s big cities with their high-rise condominiums and skyscrapers, don’t have the slightest idea about how to milk a cow or the difference between a goose and a hen, but they can see it in Kurelek’s pictures. He canonized the immigrant’s daily manual labor and his rural way of life. Mother and child were, of course, uppermost on his mind. He painted series of pictures, not just portraits, like the ones with a mother and daughter cooking jam, with a woman using her ax, chopping firewood, and her daughter collecting the logs, or with her teaching her daughter to make the sign of the cross in front of an icon. He placed special emphasis on team work and education. There is a picture in which a child is about to get into a basin with hot water and his mother is pointing a forbidding finger. He painted a lot of such pictures and they can be used as teaching aids for children, showing the way they should behave at home. ● GUIDED BY GOD Almost each picture he created was a quest. He would come up with five outwardly identical pictures for children, but warn that there were 10 differences between them that had to be found. Such pictures currently sell at 50 to 300 Canadian dollars. He believed that every child should be encouraged to start learning high culture from the earliest possible age. In fact, this education system, based on intellectual and professional skills, is still being practiced in Canada. William Kurelek flew to Brussels to see how Breughel depicted children. He also visited Amsterdam to see Vincent van Gogh’s works. And then he made a trip to India to study the contrast between the rich and the poor. He always took a special interest in the poor, even after he became a man of considerable means. While in India, he donated to various orphans’ funds. He would visit again to make sure his money had made their life easier. His art is still serving to educate children, although he never cared about his own children’s education, but he often portrayed them in his works. His 10-yearold daughter is depicted as an adult angel standing with other angels by the Holy Sepulcher in his picture The Passion of Christ. For him, it was more than a painting. He adored children and saw them as cherubs and seraphs. Interestingly, he never referred to himself as a typical artist. He said he was a craftsman. Why? Because, he said, he had only the tools to make what God wanted him to make. He was, actually, a true believer and his Faith was probably the most important part of his life. ● DIFFICULTIES OVERCOME THROUGH ART With all his creative accomplishments, a story about William Kurelek would be incomplete without mentioning his major affliction, I mean his mental disorder [although he died of cancer in the end – Ed.]. School bullying caused him to become an introvert. This and frequent family conflicts resulted in long periods of deep depression with which he would struggle for the rest of his life (few if any prefer to comment on this part of his biography). He started drawing and painting at an early age. Later, he received professional collegelevel training in Canada and Mexico… He coped with his physical/mental problems by painting – his doctors at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in London thought it was the best treatment and he believed them. He was provided with paints, brushes, easels, the works. The result was spectacularly positive. Bethlem Royal Hospital has a museum where Kurelek’s pictures and sketches occupy a place of honor. Mental disorder had a tangible impact on his creativity. William Kurelek sustained a total of 14 electroshock therapies. I spoke to a psychiatrist and was told that the patient would never be his old self after this therapy. William Kurelek would meet the next day in a different world (in his mind). Interestingly, all photos show him as a cheerful, smiling individual. His relatives and other people who knew him insist that he was always sad. This complicated my task of putting the pieces of the puzzle of his personality in place. In fact, all who knew him told me different things about him. I had the impression that I was dealing with a split personality. ● TRUE TO UKRAINIAN DESCENT As an adult, William Kurelek would always emphasize his Ukrainian parentage. Among his works is the mural The Ukrainian Pioneer, currently on display on the premises of the Governor-General of Canada. Ukrainian themes are traditionally present in his works, including the images of Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Lesia Ukrainka that are found in his big multifunctional pictures. William Kurelek was always aware of his ethnic Ukrainian origin, although he couldn’t speak fluent Ukrainian and didn’t know Ukrainian grammar. His heart was with Ukraine. He was bullied in school because he spoke a language no one understood. He spoke Ukrainian to those who spoke English, but the bullying had its effect and he would find it hard to speak Ukrainian later. In fact, he hardly ever tried. But then, in 1970, he first flew to Soviet Ukraine to visit his father’s home village of Borivtsi in Chernivtsi oblast. His second cousin told me that he remained silent during the first day. The following day he went to the kitchen garden behind the house and started talking to himself in Ukrainian. Imagine the reaction of his relatives who happened to witness the scene. They all knew that he couldn’t speak Ukrainian. Another interesting detail. When I visited Borivtsi with his sister Nancy, she found herself lapsing into accented, stilted Ukrainian. She still remembered words and phrases she’d learned from her mother. William Kurelek always kept in touch with his relatives in faraway Ukraine. He would visit a local Ukrainian school and ask a teacher to translate into Ukrainian and write what he wanted to tell them. He never forgot about Ukraine, looking for the English versions of Ukrainian books, especially Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko. There were few sources at the time. ● WILLIAM KURELEK MUST BE KNOWN IN UKRAINE He visited the land of his forefathers twice, leaving several of his works whose value remains to be determined by experts. Canada is jealously guarding his creative legacy, stressing that he was a Canadian artist. The sad fact remains that few in Ukraine know about this gifted personality. The good news is that I’m not the only one who is dealing with his Ukrainian origin. There are Christine Curkowskyj in Canada and Roman Yatsiv. It is very important that William Kurelek’s legacy be promoted in Ukraine. He is an artist of international acclaim and deserves every credit in the land of his forefathers. In 1961, after his first exhibit, he said something he would write in Someone With Me: An Autobiography (1980), that in Canada his creativity was first discovered by Jewish women and then by the entire ethnic Jewish community; that it would be later appreciated by the ethnic French, Anglo- Saxon, and, lastly, by the ethnic Ukrainian community. How to promote William Kurelek in Ukraine? Organizing his art exhibits across Ukraine seems the best way – and my cherished dream is to see his Passion of Christ on display. Of course, I realize that this is easier said than done, that it is wishful thinking, most likely. New Ukrainian history textbooks are being written and I’m sure that each should have a chapter dedicated to the Ukrainian Diaspora boasting names like Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Hnizdovsky, and William Kurelek. LATE SUMMER, CENTRE ISLAND (1972), KHRYSTYNA BEREHOVSKA’S PHOTO OF PART OF THE PICTURE IN A PRIVATE COLLECTION, MIXED MEDIA (120x60 CM)
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