Life as a Physicist

It was said that the LEP beam energy would change noticeably when the moon went overhead (think of tidal waves). I read the following in the accelerator report of its status this afternoon:

Evening Shift Friday: Store 5175 collided all shift. An increase in losses was observed and was attributed to an earthquake of magnitude 8.2 off the coast of the Kurii Islands, near Japan.

Wow. Someone must have had fun writing that. Can you imagine — that is what, 10,000 miles away or so? And it still shook the ground enough in Chicago to cause a noticeable number of protons to fall out of the accelerator!

I finished giving my SLAC seminar a few hours ago. A bunch of good questions including a suggestion on how to make the Matrix Element calculation more efficient. But one good question that I never felt like I was able to really answer well was how can you prove that the fact you model the single top discriminate at low values means you understand it at high values. In other words can you really say that the fact you model your background well in one regime means you model it in another as well?

That is a tough one. Peskin, who asked this question, pointed out that when looking at something simple like a jet pT you know enough about the matrix element that you can extrapolate it out to very high pT because you understand the matrix element. You can’t do that for one of our decision tree outputs or our matrix element outputs.

We are left with cross checks. This is all we can do. We don’t have a direct calculation between the matrix element that drives a particular process and a particular variable that we are looking at — and so it is impossible to gain an intuitive understanding from the matrix element as to the discriminates behavior.

It isn’t that the cross checks don’t satisfy. It is just that there isn’t an argument you can draw on from first principles. I fear we are in for a lot of this — analyses are moving towards using more and more multivariate techniques and I see this getting worse before it gets any better.

From a nice puff piece in the New York Times magazine yesterday (Sunday):

Energy and beauty are deeply linked in contemporary physics

I’m fascinated by the gorgeous pictures a particle physics detector can make. The article includes a series of stunning pictures. Unfortunately, the layout of the magazine (and the large pages) is really the best way to see these. Even if you can’t find an old Sunday magazine in your local Star Bucks, looking at the slide show is worth it.

Someone should put together a table-top photography book collecting images from science.

P.S. That is a picture of the CMS detector from the NYTimes article. They have some great pictures of the CMS pit — which is empty. CMS is going to construct the whole detector above ground and lower it in. WOW!

It is already the middle of January. Back in December I planned to have finished with some specific single top studies and have finished some work on b-tagging ATLAS. None of that has happened. Sure, I’ve worked on everything I planned to — but finished anything!? Not!

Where did the time go!? It is amazing how fast it speeds by sometimes! I think I’ll blame it on the fact that I’m teaching again this quarter. That should make me feel better, right?

My brother in-law and I had a great idea to help with people like me who are both frequent travelers and also leave things behind. In the future everything will be Radio Frequency Identified (RFID): clothing, books, electronic gadgets, computer power bricks, eye glasses, etc. These passive very small chips will identify themselves when queried by a central unit.

Here is how it would work: when done packing you’d put the RFID device in your suitcase and push the I’m about to leave button. It would scan every item close buy and make an item. If something key wasn’t close by — like your cell phone charger — it would complain. Then, when you are done packing at the hotel, you’d push the I’m returning button. It would complain if anything that was recorded when you left home wasn’t packed! This would definitely help me with those shirts I’ve left behind at hotel rooms because they fell down at the back of the closet!

Regular readers know I’m not one for spectator sports. Just never got into them — or video games. That part of my brain never developed. None-the-less, I got to see my first NFL game two weeks ago. I knew the Chicago Bears were in the playoffs then — even though they played so badly. So I thought I’d see how they were doing. Lo — they are playing the Seattle Seahawks tomorrow (Sunday)! Now I’m stuck! Who do I root for!? All the papers seem to be giving Chicago the best odds.

P.S. This is me procrastinating writing my seminar for Tuesday.

I waited a day before posting this to see if I would calm down a bit. Nope.

I ordered a camera the week ago Friday, and 2-day shipping so that it would get here before my trip to SLAC Monday. The camera is in Seattle. Has been for several days. But UPS still has it. Wasted that $15 bucks extra for shipping.

They can’t leave it because the shipper required a signature, in person. I live in a condo, with a security door and then a locked postal closet. Two locks aren’t secure enough. I used their web site to try to re-direct the package to my work location. Apparently it wasn’t allowed — but the web site never told me that! Last resort is to drive out to the UPS location. Normally that is a 25 minute drive. I figured I’d call first to see if the UPS truck had returned yet so as not to waste a trip. Has anyone tried to call the UPS 1-800 number? If you don’t want to ship a package or get the information already on the web repeated you are totally out of luck. No human anywhere: amazingly frustrating. So I got in the car. Got very lost — took me over an hour to get down there. The people at the customer service center were very helpful. Guess what? The truck was still out!

They will try to deliver the camera again on Monday. But I’ll be on my way to the airport. I’ll have to drive out there again to get it on Thursday.

I do all sorts of very stressful things at work. Teaching a class on short notice. Writing talks at the last minute. Get myself involved in high profile analyses. But, yet, it feels like I aged more during this UPS interaction than any of the work related stress inducers.

Now, the post-office. At least here in Seattle, they have it down. They leave packages in locked mail-boxes or that locked closet. I usually try to ship via the post office when I can. Sadly, that isn’t an option for many of these online places. It should be.

GLAST – The Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope — is a high energy physics detector in space. Really! It has a calorimeter in it. It has a Silicon detector in it. It has a multi-level trigger in it. All of this has to work in outer space (which is very cool).

GLAST’s mission is multi-fold, but one of the big ones is gamma ray bursts which accompany (and often precede) some spectacular events like a star going super nova.

Toby Burnett, a professor I work with here at UW, has been working on GLAST for years now. Each year the launch gets delayed a bit. Now it is so close it makes no sense to delay it any longer. And check out this picture — the instrument has been put on the space craft! That means it is basically ready for launch. And it is just such a cool picture…

I was going to say they still had to wrap it in tin foil… but I guess not.

I don’t read the comics any more because real life is more entertaining.

My wife heard about this at the recent AAPT meeting here in Seattle. The link was sent along by her brother in Vancouver: the Federal Way school board has put a moratorium on showing Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, in the schools. This happened after Frosty Hardison, a parent, sent in a complaint.

“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher,” said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. “The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”

Burn up!? As Paula said, “you can’t make this stuff up!” David Larson, the member of the school board that proposed this, gave as his reason:

“Somebody could say you’re killing free speech, and my retort to them would be we’re encouraging free speech,” said Larson, a lawyer. “The beauty of our society is we allow debate.”

Again. I’m not making this stuff up!

School Board members adopted a three-point policy that says teachers who want to show the movie must ensure that a “credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented,” that they must get the OK of the principal and the superintendent, and that any teachers who have shown the film must now present an “opposing view.”

Apparently they haven’t gotten the memo from the US government: we are affecting the climate! Sheesh! You’ll find someone to disagree with just about everything taught in school (can anyone say American History?). That is why science is so cool. It tells you when it believes itself and when it doesn’t. And better, it usually will tell you how much weight to give to each side of the argument. Could it be that global warming doesn’t exist? Sure! The chances of that? Really really small. Certainly too small to be teaching it with equal weight in any self-respecting school.

This would be funny if it weren’t so serious (Federal Way is a fairly sizable city just south of Seattle). And now that I have a kid I find I care about this sort of thing a little bit more than I used it…

Also, under the topic of you can’t make this stuff up was seen the following leader paragraph in the NYTimes:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

No comment.

You guys are getting uppity and aren’t just believing everything I write. How dare you! Oh. Wait. This is Web 2.0 with user driven content. And I thought I was the user! Ha ha ha! No, seriously, I love the comments. Keep them coming.

A few days ago I talked about the potential effect of a continuing resolution that didn’t include, at the very least, inflation if not the normal funding level for science in the US budget. This was triggered by an article in the New York Times (sorry, I forgot to link to it before!) Sister of physics brothers responded. She had several points.

No offense, but this is not a disaster. A disaster is Katrina or Darfur.

Yes. This is an impossible argument to win on the face of it, actually. Those are clearly humanitarian disasters and people are dying because of them. If you had to choose where to spend your dollars: fixing Darfur or funding a particle accelerator — you’d have trouble sleeping at night if you funded particle physics (well, I would). But I would like to point out this is a false choice. This is not the choice we have nor the one our government makes. The US budget is ginormous. Science funding is a drop in the overall size: a few billion. There are lots and lots of choices that are made. We, as a nation, need to decide what to spend our money on and what is important. Science is one of 100’s of choices. Where should it rank? Higher than it does now, I would say. Heck, if we could absorb pork and put it into funding for peer-reviewed science proposals from the NSF and the Office of Science that would, well, heck. I’m sure we could figure out how to spend all that cash.

All of us have had to belt tighten and more than 3-4%.

Whether you agree with it or not, there is a war going on.

I’m happy to belt tighten 3-4%. But not every single year for the majority of the last 10 years when the US budget was increasing. Look back at that article. Funding for health sciences went from being on par with physical sciences to being more than x2 larger. That is fantastic. There is plenty of room in the budget for that to happen to physical sciences. The article puts physical science funding at 5 billion bucks. 5 billion! IN 2004 the total budget was 2318 billion — science funding is 0.2%!!! I’m tired of watching good proposals turned down because of this (N.B. I’m sure some of the numbers I’m quoting are off here and there; I am far from an expert in the size of the US budget, but the general size of the numbers is going to be born out - that 5 billion from the NYTimes article seems a bit low to me, but it comes from a fairly trustworthy source).

We have so many other priorities and I think that science has gotten too far from everyday life of people into some very strange details that no one can relate to.

I disagree with your thesis (Sister goes on to say, as you’ll see below, that we also have a PR problem which would change the tenor of this statement). I think everyone can relate to the chemical processes that surround chip building (chemistry), or understanding binding sites in Silicon lattices (condensed matter physics; chip development), or be as puzzled as we are at how the universe started or even what it is made up up. Heck, there could be 1000’s of dark matter particles streaming through you right now! But we don’t know; we’ve not completed the research. And we’ll never know if we cut the science budgets enough. Or maybe we will know; but it just won’t be America that participates in the discovery.

Perhaps part of the problem is that there is no direct effect. The pure research that is funded by the government doesn’t produce a product. We aren’t trying to develop something. Sure, we pour lots of money into the local economy. We often drive leading edge technology for our specialized equipment (that will then hopefully be cheap enough for someone to mass produce). Accelerators are just starting to appear in hospitals for cancer care. It was a long long time ago those things got invented as a tool to investigate fundamental science questions. When will the answers to those questions be used in a product? No idea. And that is part of the point: there are a bunch of questions that we have no idea what the answer will be — and we won’t know if they are useful at all until we know the answers. But we have to find out. So cutting the budgets does have an effect — it just takes a long time to be felt. By the same token if you doubled the budget today you wouldn’t expect new results that had direct impact on what people do the next year.

Finally, Sister says:

People understand and see the devastation of cancer and Parkinson’s.
Health groups have had effective PR campaigns going on to raise awareness through funds from corporations, etc.

Time to make alliances with corporations to start telling Americans why we need science.

That I agree with. We are not effective communicators. I think we are getting better, but we aren’t there yet. Corporations already do collaborate and fund research that is directly in line with their business needs. But pure research doesn’t align so well with corporations; we will always need government funding for that.

Whew. Long post. Sorry. I just get twisted in knots when talking about this. So, finally. I do call this a disaster. Is it one American science will never recover from? Heck no. Most of us (here in America) believe in science and doing science here that we aren’t all going to go overseas. But some will. We’ll loose them. And getting them back by increasing the funding next year will be harder than just keeping them here in the first place by making sure they are well funded. Another case of nickel-and-dime.