Life as a Physicist

I think this one is attributed to Burt Richter: “You can only screw smart people once. So make sure it counts.”

This rumor is too good a gold mine. I guess gossip is fun!

Tony asked a question in my rumor blog posting — would we consider a particular theory as a source for the rumored bump — if we had the rumored bump. So, for this blog posting I need to assume that we are going to come out with an analysis with the bump. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that we have (or don’t have) a bump. As I said last time — this is something that D0 will answer in due course. But for the purpose of this blog post I need to pretend that something like the rumor is coming out.

The most interesting question to ask is — what caused that bump? Is it a standard model Higgs? Is it a SUSY Higgs? Is it something like the composite t-quark that Tony asked out? Or any of the other theories around.

While I agree that is the most interesting, it is probably not the right question. The first question should be: Does CDF see the same thing? If so — then we need to get on with the interesting question. If not — well, now we have to sit down and figure out if a) CDF hasn’t optimized their analysis in the same way or b) we have something very odd going on in our data (i.e. D0 made a mistake). The latter will be seriously embarrassing for D0, and probably cause all sorts of internal reviews and hang ringing. Remember how many times the top quark was discovered before it was actually discovered? Or the 4-jet bump from ALEPH?

At any rate, I wanted to get that out there because I do sometimes worry that the hype will get too far out in front of the science.

This is an old one. I just haven’t had time to post anything. I’ve been to a series of conferences over the last several months. One of them — the APS April meeting — I was mostly a spouse. Our students went as well to give 10 minutes talks and all did a great job.

The most surreal part of the conference was walking down the main hallway pushing Julia in a stroller. The organizers had famous people sanding in the hallway catching people walking buy and urging them to sign a joint letter to congress urging an increase in funding for basic science (all types of science). One fellow, about my age, walking towards me was asked and said no. As he walked by I heard him mutter under his breath “This is a meeting about science, politics doesn’t belong here!” I really wanted to ask him: what world is he living in!?

Another very cool thing happened — we ran into Dave Jackson. He is not a member of the Jackson 5. Though, among physicists he is probably more famous. He is author of the Electrodynamics text book for graduate students. It is famous for lines like “working out the derivation is left as an exercise for the student.” Some of those exercises were 12 pages long. The homework problems are hard. Really hard. Most of us learned to live in fear of that book. It definitely taught you — but you had to work for it.I would guess that more than half the physics professor offices in the US have some edition of his book on their shelf (he is the older guy in the picture; the others our our students who have all suffered at the hands of his book).

We went out to dinner with him. Very entertaining. Did you know that he and someone else (Peter Limon??) started the Fermilab Wine&Cheese?

More pictures from the APS meeting.

This is a picture of a a very very large and very very flat granite table in the basement of the UW physics building. It is about to be split into bits and carted out and thrown in the trash.

It was used as the construction platform for UW’s ATLAS forward muon chamber construction. In order to correctly reconstruct muons this granite table had to be ultra flat — the specs say to 0.000125 at 71 degrees F (measured May 17, 1999). For almost three years a glue robot traveled its surface putting together the muon chambers. That task finished more than a year ago, and the physics building needs the space back for some astrophysics experiments.

That granite table doesn’t fit through any doors. In fact, we had to knock out part of the wall of the room and the hallway in order to move it in (I wish I had some pictures from then). Sadly, since no one else is interested in it, we will be splitting it into bits instead of the wall. The week of June 11th a group will use a diamond saw to cit it into bits. Sadly, because of dust and mess, the whole section will be sealed off: it isn’t likely I’ll be able to get in to see the work in progress.

More recent pictures of the table, if you are interested, can be found here.

Just stop! The latest batch of rumors of a bump in a D0 analysis has gotten way out of hand. My original plan was not to say anything: I can’t participate in rumor mongering here: I’m a member of D0. So I have little to gain, and a lot to lose!

So, before I get to what pissed me off. If you want to read the rumors head over to Tommaso’s blog (here and here). He even left me a comment recently:

On a totally different matter, Godon: please leak something about the new evidence for weird bbbar production found by D0. Is it true it is a 5-sigma effect ? Is it at 180 GeV ? How about its width ?
Let us know!

I will now tell all. It is definitely true that there are people in D0 working on such an analysis. The people working on the analysis are some of D0’s best. And the review board for this analysis (a hot analysis long before any of these rumors started) has a number of very good people. The point is: D0 isn’t going to release anything officially until they are sure it is right. It is the same with every analysis we release. So, till then — rumor away (I’m keeping score) – but they are rumors.

So, when that analysis makes it out this blog will not be the place to see it first. I am not directly involved in it — or even in reviewing it (except as a collaboration member). The official D0 results page will have all the info you need. I’ll certainly put a pointer to it since there seems to be so much interest in it. When will it come out? Some of the speculation on release doesn’t seem unreasonable, but remember that the criteria here isn’t a conference deadline, but, rather, getting it right. I’ve seen a number of analyzers work very hard to make a conference deadline only to have their review board force them to spend an extra several weeks doing cross checks (and those analyses had no rumors associated with them).

Just remember, ladies and germs: Rumors are rumors, science is science.

So, two things set me off to writing this post. First, Tommaso did it in a minor way:

Will science magazines be willing to wait ? Hmmm. I bet there already are a few investigations ongoing (but I swear I personally have not been contacted by the press yet).

Dude! If you get called by the press to comment on this rumor – you will be making second hand comments on rumors! You have almost no position of authority to talk about this (at least last time you were a member of the collaboration releasing the result — and more importantly, it was public already). A minor misquote by a reporter and you’ll have all of DZERO yelling at the CDF spokes people about your behavior. The previous New Scientist article has already gotten quite a few people upset! Tread carefully here (just some friendly advice, eh…?).

But the thing that really got me angry was the Slate article.

The current rumor, which comes in time for the summer conference circuit, may be different. It claims an experiment at the Tevatron has found a peak twice as high as the previous rumors’ bumps. And unlike the other rumors, this one includes details: the new particle’s mass, for instance, which fits within theoretical bounds on the standard model Higgs. Some versions include a decay chain, which describes what the new particle turned into as the experiment progressed, and which may be consistent with the standard model’s predictions.

Wow. I’m a member of D0, I’ve read the note, and I still learned some new things from this article! But then it goes on to say:

So, if the rumor is true and the standard model Higgs has been found at the Tevatron, the LHC is in big trouble: Immediately, its “guaranteed” success—the final particle of the standard model, not to mention a couple of Nobel Prizes for European scientists—is gone.

….

The irony is that things look just as bleak for the LHC if the rumor is false, and the Europeans end up finding the standard model Higgs themselves.

WTF!???!? There are so many busted things about this. First off, simple discovery of a SM Higgs is not, at least to me, an obvious Nobel. Definitely worth something like that for effort! Isn’t a Nobel prize supposed to be for something that really changes people’s understanding of the world? A standard model Higgs won’t do that — it will confirm it. Perhaps a shared Nobel with Higgs himself? I suppose. Now, a non standard model Higgs. That is definitely worth a Nobel. No question there in my mind. So they give Nobel’s for guaranteed successes?

His second paragraph, of course, contradicts everything he says in his first paragraph — if the LHC did find the Higgs and get a bunch of Nobel prizes then hey — that would be pretty bleak. Riiight.

The point he is making, I think, is that he doesn’t think there is much chance of the LHC seeing anything beyond the Higgs:

Physicists have developed such a complete description of elementary particles that, once the final piece of the theory is in place, the chances that the LHC will find anything the standard model doesn’t predict are almost negligible.

In short. The LHC just isn’t worth it once the SM Higgs is found. Just shut it down! Spend the money on something else.

He is right in the sense that it is certainly possible we will see a Standard Model Higgs at the LHC and nothing more. From the point of view of moral and the future of particle accelerator based physics that will be awful. From the point of science it will be very interesting. The reason? Because what we know about the Standard Model suggests that something must be happening around the 1 TeV scale. If there is nothing — then there must be a mechanism to “fix” the Standard Model.

What does that mean? Well, if nature does the simplest thing then we would expect the LHC to see something beyond the Standard Model.

Finally, even if the Tevatron does find a Higgs there is no way we will make enough of them to know if it is a SM Higgs or something more interesting. No matter how you look at it, the LHC will be scientifically interesting.

Turns out the Slate author has a web site of his own, and a blog entry where he has a few more details about the rumors. I’m not familiar with him, sounds like he is an ex theorist from Harvard from the blog entry.

The end of the year is always busy at a university. Other than all the committees that suddenly realize the year is almost over and they had better get together and do something, many students and advisors pack in their defenses in the last several weeks.

I’ve been to several over the past month — all quite good. But three stick out in my mind. First was a physics one. Michael Endres was working with David Kaplan and gave a great defense. Usually, when the advisor introduces the student giving the talk, they will give one or two anecdotes about the student. David was no different. He started out with “And, Michael has been exceptionally good at killing all of my good ideas…” The problem was the way he said it: it took a while to figure out that he wasn’t holding a grudge.

Later the same day I saw the general exam for Can Kozcaz (Can is pronounced John). On topological string theory. Ouch. His advisor is Amer Iqbal, from the math department. A colleague of Amer’s from the math department came along as well - Charles Doran. After Can would answer a question (usually quite well), Amer would add some detail. Then Charles would kick in something. Quickly the two of them would be lost in a detailed discussion of some fact of string theory. Can and the rest of us would sit quietly and listen.

Finally, I was the external representative for Ryan Torn in Atmospheric Sciences, who was advised by Gregory Hakim. Hakim and I met on some random university committee and both of us were looking for external representatives for students of ours. Every Ph.D. committee requires an external representative - this is to make sure there is nothing untoward going on and to give the student someone outside the department to talk to if need be (of the 5 or so I’ve been on, this has never been an issue). This defense was cool because of the topic. I know very little about climate modeling - and Ryan’s whole topic was on modeling various weather events and the stability of the modeling. It was very cool to see techniques we use in physics being used in other sciences as well — like ensemble testing. Ryan was also a great speaker — so it made it possible for me to understand most of what he was talking about. One thing I found out, btw, is that a great deal of the most accurate weather information that is input to these models comes from balloons. They are released, travel up until they pop — transmitting information all the way. Seems so old school… BTW, the anecdote that Greg told… straight from a Sinfeld episode — the doctors at a rental car agency — Ryan was the ass man, apparently. Ryan’s expression was priceless when he realized what anecdote Greg was going to tell to the room full of 50 of his colleagues and (if I remember correctly) mother.

I have a collection of DVD’s here at home — probably about 30 of them or so. I’m on sabbatical next year and so I’ll be in the South of France all year (whoo hoo!). I would like to take this DVD collection with me — but it is too bulky for a trip like this.

So my first idea was to rip the DVD’s, and then compress them into small files using some mpeg4-like algorithm. I don’t know how many of you have tried to do this before — but it is painful. There is no really easy set of programs that will automatically do this for you. You have to identify the proper streams inside the video, associate them with the audio, make sure there is no offset when you encode them, and then run the encoder. That last bit is usually a several hour operation — longer if you want a high quality version of your DVD.

But then I stumbled on this product. Half a terrabyte for 140 bucks!!! Heck, I could download a good chunk of the ATLAS AOD dataset on that thing and bring it home for analysis. Why even waste all my time trying to compress the movies when disk space is that cheap!? Just copy them onto that disk and bring them with me!

That is progress.

Remember I posted about all those textbooks I head to read? I just looked at that picture in that post. If only the stack of textbooks had remained that small! Well, we have finally figured out what textbook to use for our next year’s introductory course. That was a lot of work. The committee was 9 people (imagine having to coordinate that!). It came down to Young vs Tipler. Tipler had a slight edge in the end.

This is big money for the publishers. I think we run about 1000 students a quarter through the course. My guess is between 1000 and 2000 of those textbooks are purchased every year. I’ve been on this committee before - but some things happened this year that I’d not seen before. For example - I got gifts. A starbucks card and some weird-o little wire sculpture. A friend of mine, who was the chair of another textbook selection committee was offered a nice lunch (he declined). I’m not sure of the ethics involved here — but it feels like it is getting close to the line!

Now, the only thing left is to get rid of all these textbooks!

The UW has a video blog posting on innovation. The video is mostly puff, and I’m not sure it addresses innovation as I think of innovation. But whatever — the folks at UW are trying to reach out with short video blog messages. This one is from our provost.

It is interesting that she talks about innovation in two forms. First are the new technological breakthroughs that end up in companies outside UW. The second are new support services within the university that are helping it function better. I’d agree with the former, but not the latter — at least not as she has stated it. Wireless around campus, for example. I’d call that a basic service that helps foster innovation, though not innovative in-and-of-itself. If we were one of the first campuses to widely install it ourselves, perhaps (we are one of the last major research universities)… if we invented it, perhaps. The other thing is all the innovations she mentions are break through’s that ended up as companies. There is also a considerable amount that is basic science — like the science done in our department. Neutrinos having mass? That is pretty innovative!

Which brings one to the next logical question: how do you make it happen? Since you can’t actually program innovation, I think you can guess at what you need. First, people. Good ones. I’m thinking of graduate & undergraduate students, post-docs, and professors. Next, the ability to collaborate. This is especially important as collaborations are becoming geographically widespread. Third I’d say were resources to do the hard work needed to turn that spark of an idea into something real (computing farms, machine shops, lab space and equipment). But I guess this paragraph is mostly motherhood.

I tend to watch these things because I blog already; so I’m always curious about how others are approaching the same thing. Normally I watch the videos (about 5 minutes) and quickly forget them. I only mention it because they used some 5 year old footage from a lecture of mine (I think they filmed my lecture because they were doing some sort of minority student project - it is a long story). That got me started writing this posting, and then I realized I was a bit annoyed with the content…